Cecelia Ellen Lawson was born on May 5, 1867, in Canada West—a name that would vanish only months later with the birth of the Canadian Confederation in 1867. Her birthplace, Peel Township in Wellington County, lay in the heart of southern Ontario’s agricultural frontier, a region carved out by pioneer hands and home to a small but vital Black farming community. She entered the world in the shadow of survival, born into a generation of children whose parents and grandparents had carried the memory—if not the scars—of slavery.