Many regions of early Canada, and I assume the US, didn't have resident clergy yet. They depended on cirucit ministers who got to their area perhaps only a few times a year and with their arrival, marriages of a number of couples and baptisms, sometimes of a whole family, were performed. It wouldn't be unheard of for a family to travel to another area to have their child/children baptized rather than risk no baptism at all in a era when survival was uncertain.