Reunion, the software I use to keep track of my family tree, has a handy feature that allows me to see dates of family events in Apple Calendar. I’ve added one for birthdays and one for death anniversaries, and I appreciate being reminded of those still alive, and those long gone but still part of my story.
Today I was reminded that my maternal great-grandmother, Barbara Ann Williams, died on this date in 1908. She married Patterson Hutchinson in January 1900, in what is said to have been the first wedding at St. John’s Anglican in Ellerslie, a beautiful little country church built by Barbara’s brother, the renowned “Fox House” and church builder “Little” Harry Williams.
They had three children: my grandmother, Thelma, born in 1901, her brother Stanley, born in 1903, and a second boy, George, who died at birth in 1904. In 1905, Patterson died, aged 37.
Barbara remarried eight months later to John Newcombe from Northam, just outside Tyne Valley. As far as I know, it was his first and only marriage. Barbara and John had three children: Lillian, John and George. John died at birth in 1906, and George died in August 1908, three months after his mother, who quite possibly died giving birth to him. Lillian seems to have married a Roderick MacLean from Lot 16 in 1926 and died in 1957. Lillian may also have really been Patterson’s daughter and adopted by John Newcombe, but I can’t yet confirm that.
According to 1911 census records, John Newcombe and daughter Lillian had moved back with his parents. His step-children, Thelma and Stanley, were listed in that census as living with their uncle Little Harry and his family in Poplar Grove. I have no idea if my grandmother, Thelma, kept in touch with the Newcombe family, but she died in 1927 aged 25 and, in a sad echo of her mother’s life, left behind two children under the age of 4: my mother, Vivian, and her brother, Edgar.
Genealogy is generally pretty straightforward: I had parents, who had parents, who had parents, back and back to the cave or the savannah (or the Garden of Eden, if you are so inclined). But drop down in the middle of some of these stories, and witness the happenstance that kept people alive just long enough to give birth to a child that is key to your existence, and life seems even more miraculous. All of our ancestors successfully bobbed and weaved just long enough, and here we are.
