Tag Archives: Family History

My great-grandfather Thomas nearly dies on Malpeque Bay

This story I found last month was a tale lost to my branch of the Phillips family.

My great-grandfather, Thomas Henry Phillips (1851-1924), was a farmer in Ellerslie, PEI. He and his wife Agnes had nine children, who all lived well into their adulthoods with the exception of my grandfather Alvin (1890-1936), who died of appendicitis. Alvin took over his father’s farm and the other four sons left Ellerslie, one to become a merchant in Summerside and three to the O’Leary area to farm and, it seems in the case of Forrest, to eventually enter provincial politics.

The names of the other characters in this tale of 19th century perilous winter travel are still common names in our area with the exception of Price. I found a Jesse Strang Price (born Bedeque, PEI, 1831 – died Green Forest, Carroll County, Arkansas, 1916), married to Mary Ann, who had a son John born 1864, the eldest of his five children, all of whom were born in Ellerslie between 1864 and 1874

It appears that Price family moved to the US, perhaps to escape the dangerous winter weather, who knows. One genealogy website I found said John Price drowned in the Arkansas River on June 5, 1916, aged 52, and it seems Jesse died later that month on June 28 at age 84, which would be a rather heartbreaking coincidence as they both risked dying together on a frozen Canadian bay so many years earlier.

The columnist, Frank MacArthur, was a prolific contributor to the Guardian in the mid part of the 20th century and later published a book about PEI legends.

Pioneer Days In P. E. I. by F. H. MacArthur

Charlottetown Guardian, April 12, 1950

Tales of ice travel are always thrilling and the adventure which befell a party of Ellerslie and Tyne Valley folk almost one hundred years ago is one of the most exciting. It is still told from Ellerslie to Richmond Bay and no matter how often it is retold, it still grips and holds the listener.

Jesse Price and his son John, William Ford, Thomas Burleigh and Thomas Phillips of Ellerslie, with William Ellis and son, and “Billy the Duke” of Tyne Valley, and a couple of teen-aged youngsters, had loaded their sleds with timber gleaned from the surrounding forests. Their destination was Malpeque. The timber was for the shipyards. Ellerslie folk supplied a good deal of the lumber used at Malpeque, Darnley and Princetown. In return for the lumber the settlers got flour, groceries, fodder, and their spring seed – the old trade and barter system was then in use.

Our story opens on a certain day in the month of March. Their journey, a distance of twenty miles, had to be traversed by ice. The little party set out before daylight with the expectation of being back home early that same night. The party reached Malpeque without mishap, unloaded their lumber and secured a good supply of provisions for themselves and their livestock. This occupied considerable time and when they reached the ice field for their return trip one of the men, Thomas Phillips, father of F. W. Phillips, speaker of the House, had failed to join the others. After waiting on the shore for nearly an hour they decided he must have gone on to Summerside to spend the night at the home of a friend.

Already the sun had sunk to rest behind a great cloud bank, and a strong gale was sweeping across the country. There was every indication of a big storm. Now the farmers pointed to the sky, spoke of the wind, and the dangerous spring-holes that lay along their route of travel. On more than one occasion these spring-holes, often too wide for the horses to jump, had to be bridged with the bottom of their sleds or anything they come by. More than one unlucky traveller had plunged into the cold waters, and more than one valuable horse had perished in this manner during the height of a storm. Before half the distance had been covered the blizzard burst upon them in a maddening rush that promised to scatter them like Autumn leaves. “Better rope the sleds together,” advised Price, “then we can let the horses have a free rein and trust to luck.”

The animals were used to crossing the ice and their owners had the feeling that, left to themselves, they would be able to keep the trail. But they had not reckoned on such a storm, and after bravely facing it for a time, even the faithful horses became hopelessly confused, lost their way and went around in aimless circles. Not a man among them could tell one direction from another. Finally, they decided to camp where they were.

It would be sure folly to risk their lives as well as the lives of the horses on such a night. So all hands got busy. The loads were placed in such a position as to form a circle and chained together to prevent their being blown apart. Now the animals were taken from the sleds and led into the circle.

The wind meanwhile, tried to demolish them root and stem. The snow came down in great white blinding masses that fairly sucked the breath from the men’s lips and bullied the two twelve-year-old children till they cried loudly.

In spite of the barricade the party spent a hectic night of it. In order to keep the children from freezing a considerable quantity of hay was twisted into long thick ropes and put to the torch. The twisting was to keep it from burning too fast.

At last the dawn broke. Over fifteen inches of snow covered the landscape. The wind had not abated and the air was thick with its white madness. Not till noon did they get their bearings. The land which poked its head above a mound of snow they recognized as Low Point.

Towards noon the wind suddenly ceased its wild play, and the little group of adventurers were able to reach their homes in safety, though twenty-four hours late.

Thomas Phillips had not gone to Summerside as his neighbors thought. He was delayed in getting his load which happened to be seed grain, so when he came to the shore and found the others had pushed on he decided to do the same thing. Into the teeth of the storm he ventured but finally he too was obliged to give up. He decided to take refuge on one of the small islands in Richmond Bay. But unlike the others he had no shelter and after tramping around in the deep snow for a couple of hours – it was too cold to remain long in one spot – he hitched up his shivering steed and again pushed forward. Lady Luck was with him and he reached home safe and sound. But when the women-folk of the tiny settlement saw his ghost-like form approaching through the drifts their hearts skipped some beats. And no wonder, for they thought the others had perished.

This story was sent in by Sanford Phillips of O’Leary who informed your correspondent that the last survivor of that ice episode, Mr. Thomas Burleigh, passed away quite recently in his late 90’s.

Miami Beach, February 1964

60 years ago tonight, Cassius Clay beat world heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston at a match in Miami Beach. Soon after that fight, Clay would take the name Cassius X and then Muhammad Ali.

A few days earlier, the Beatles returned to England after a successful short tour of the US, the start of Beatlemania on this continent. They appeared three times on The Ed Sullivan Show, the biggest variety program on American television, watched by tens of millions each week. Their second appearance was broadcast live from Miami Beach on February 16.

It just so happened that my parents, Harold and Vivian, took their first vacation to Florida in February 1964 and were in Miami Beach on February 16. They were both 41 and had been married for 19 years. They had worked hard to build up their general store business, so were overdue some fun and relaxation. They travelled with my mother’s cousin and her husband. By all accounts, they all had a marvellous time soaking up the sun and seeing the sights of Miami and Daytona.

Harold and Vivian Phillips, Miami Beach, February 1964. They obviously had a snazzy TV in their room, but my mother doesn’t remember if they watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan on February 16. With few stations on the TV, my guess is they did, but she was more a Perry Como fan and never really got the Beatles.

Bill for nine nights at the Golden Nugget motel, Miami Beach, February 1964.

My father lugged his 8mm Kodak film camera with him, taking plenty of shots of palm trees, orange groves, alligators and swimming pools. He took some footage of BOAC and KLM airplanes outside a terminal somewhere along their Summerside>Moncton>Montreal>NYC>Miami route.

Their handwritten tickets listed their NY airport as IDL for Idlewild, except Idlewild had been renamed JFK in December 1963 just after the assassination of the US president, but obviously the change had been recent enough that no one was used to it.

Moncton to Miami $132.99 return via Tran-Canada and Eastern airlines.

YSU (Summerside) to YQM (Moncton) $14.00 return

One day, the four travellers hopped in their rented convertible and drove around the Miami area, my father aiming his camera at the passing buildings and advertising banner towing planes. When we watched this reel when I was a child, this short sequence would just slip by, but when I had the film digitized, I was able to pause it and have a better look, and quickly fell down a rabbit hole of early 1960s popular culture.

Miami Beach, February 1964, showing advertising banner towing planes, Sonny Liston’s training headquarters at Surfside, Florida, and Hotel Deauville with Mitzi Gaynor on the marquee.

I knew who Mitzi Gaynor was from her movie roles and appearances on television variety shows when I was a child. I looked up the Hotel Deauville and learned it was where the Beatles had stayed in Miami and where their second Ed Sullivan appearance had been recorded, a show that also included Gaynor. Then I read about Sonny Liston’s training camp in Surfside, just north of Miami Beach, and of him appearing on the Ed Sullivan show the same night as the Beatles, and the Beatles also meeting Cassius Clay and posing for a famous photo, and the February 25 boxing match. So much was going on!

The Beatles meeting Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali at the 5th St. Gym, Miami

I’ve done a few presentations about my father’s film footage to local groups and have used this little clip to encourage people to look at their own photos and videos and to save, document and share what they have. It might take many years before something becomes important or interesting, but if you haven’t saved it, you’ll never know.

What my father filmed isn’t as important as footage of the Beatles or Liston or Ali or even Mitzi Gaynor would be, certainly, but he did capture a few seconds of a time in US history when the country was still trying to come to terms with the assassination of their president only three months earlier, square old Ed Sullivan was kicking off Beatlemania using the huge influence of his television program, and Clay/Ali was on his way to becoming an important sports star as well as a towering figure in the black power, civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements.

What do you have in that cardboard box in your attic or closet? Nothing much? Look again.

“Wash your hands clear of it ere you embark”

I am descended from people who came to Prince Edward Island from England and Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of my recent ancestry is from Devon and Dorset in the south-west of England, many coming to work in shipbuilding using the plentiful lumber old-growth forest that had stood here untouched forever. My most recent British-born ancestor, GGG grandfather Robert Phillips, came to PEI from Barnstaple, Devon, in 1832 to work as a brass fitter in one the many shipyards.

My family stories extend back only a couple of generations, so I have no accounts of what those ocean crossings were like, what their first impression was of PEI, how they felt about leaving family, friends and country behind, but I have often thought about what that experience would have been like for them.

I recently did a week-long trial membership on N ewspapers.com. While it seems an excellent site and probably well worth the subscription price, I didn’t sign up as I was afraid I would do nothing else but read old newspapers for the rest of my life!

During that trial, I searched Devon newspapers from the early 1830s to see if there was any record of Robert’s departure for PEI. That search came up empty, as I had expected, but I did find a wonderful piece in the June 23, 1831 edition of The North Devon Journal and General Advertiser that gave advice to those who were thinking about moving to North America. I wonder if Robert used this article to help him plan his move, or convinced him that such an adventure could be a possibility for their family. Maybe he cut it out and carried around in his pocket.

The author wasn’t named, but they gave very specific and sound guidance, especially about the British North American climate, information that would still be pretty accurate today.

After listing practical supplies needed for the journey and setting up a new home, the author suggested the final item a young man needed to procure was “an active young wife.” As he already had a wife and five children, including two-year old twins, Robert was fine on that account!

The author outlined a plan on how to survive the ocean crossing and insisted that “by attending to these observations, I will insure you landing in good health, and better looking than when you embarked.” The idea that someone in the 1830s would be better looking after their weeks at sea than when they boarded is amusing, as it is certainly more than hinted at in the article that the living quarters on ship left much to be desired. I’m sure it was a miserable, dangerous crossing.

Young men were advised to leave their “party feeling” behind to ensure they didn’t jeopardize their chances of advancing in their new home because they had clung to old political allegiances. Knowing how party politics is deeply ingrained in the DNA of many Islanders – some families here have voted for the same party for generations – I suspect these newcomers might have left the Whigs and Tories behind, but retained the deep need to find a political home in their new country.

I visited Barnstaple 30 years ago. One evening, I walked to the River Taw and stood on a dock looking west. I thought about Robert and Mary Ann arriving with their small children, all under the age of seven, ready to board a ship into the unknown. This article goes some way in filling in the blanks in my family’s story, adding texture and depth to sterile names and dates. They are still out of reach, but I can see them over the horizon.

Emigration.

The following from the pen of a gentleman holding an official situation, has been published in the Irish Paper. As there are many individuals who contemplate emigration in this part of the kingdom, these directions will be found highly useful to those who may carry it into effect.

If you have no fixed place in view, or friends before you, if labour and farming be your object, and you have a family, bend your course to the Canadas; for there you will find the widest field for your exertions, and the greatest demand for labour.

In almost every part of the Middle States of America, you are subject to fever and ague, as also in some parts of Upper Canada. Lower Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are exempt in this respect.

I would particularly recommend the months of April and May for going out, as you may then expect a favorable passage; on no account go in July or August, as, from the prevalence of the south-west winds, you will have a tedious passage. Make your bargain for the passage with the owner of the ship, or some well known respectable broker, or ship-master: avoid, by all means, those crimps that are generally found about the docks and quays, near where ships are taking in passengers. Be sure that the ship is going to the port you contract for, as much deception has been practised in this respect. It is important to select a well known captain, and a fast sailing ship, even at a higher rate.

When you arrive at the port you sail for, proceed immediately in the prosecution of your objects, and do not loiter about, or suffer yourself to be advised by designing people, who too often give their opinion unsolicited. If you want advice, and there is no official person at the port you may land at, go to some respectable person or Chief Magistrate, and be guided by his advice.

Let your baggage be put up in as small a compass as possible; get a strong deal chest of convenient size, let it be in the shape of a sailor’s box, broader at bottom than top, so that it will be more steady on board ship; good strong linen or sacking bags will be found very useful. Pack your oatmeal, or flour in a strong barrel, or flax-seed cask, (which you can purchase cheap in the spring of the year.) I would advise, in addition to the usual wood hoops, two iron ones on each cask, with a strong lid and good hinge, and a padlock, &c. Baskets or sacks are better adapted for potatoes than casks.

The following will be found a sufficient supply for a family of five persons for a voyage to North America, viz.— 48 stone of potatoes (if in season, say not after the Isl. of June,) 2cwt. and a-half of oatmeal† or flour, ½ cwt. biscuits; 20lbs. butter in a keg; 1 gallon of spirits; — a little vinegar; — When you contract with the captain for your passage, do not forget to insure a sufficient supply of good water. An adult will require 5 pints per day — children in proportion.

The foregoing will be found a sufficient supply for an emigrant family of five persons, for 60 or 70 days, and will cost about £5 in Ireland or Scotland; in England about 6 or £7; if the emigrant has the means, let him purchase about 11lbs. of tea, and 16lbs. of sugar for his wife.

The preceding statement contains the principle articles of food required, which may be varied as the taste and circumstances of the emigrant may best suit. In parting with your household furniture, &c. reserve a pot, a tea-kettle, frying-pan, feather-bed, (the Irish peasantry possess a feather-bed,) as much coarse linen as you can, and strong woollen stockings — all these will be found very useful on board ship, and at your settlement, and are not difficult to carry. Take your spade and reaping-hook with you, and as many mechanical tools as you can such as augurs, plaines, hammers, chissels, &c., thread, pins, needles, and a strong pair of shoes for winter. — In summer in Canada, very little clothing is required, for six months — only a coarse shirt and linen trowsers, and you will get cheap moccasins (Indian shoes;) you will also get cheap straw hats in the Canadas, which are better for summer than wool hats, and in winter you will require a fur or Scotch woollen cap. Take a little purgative medicine with you, and if you have young children a little suitable medicine for them. Keep your self clean on board ship, eat such food as you have been generally accustomed to, (but in moderation) keep no dirty clothes about your births, or filth of any kind. Keep on deck, and air your bedding daily, when the weather will permit; get up at five o’clock, and retire at eight; take a mug of salt water occasionally in the morning. — By attending to these observations, I will insure you landing in good health, and better looking than when you embarked.

From the great disparity of male over female population in the Canadas, I would advise every young farmer or labourer going out, (who can pay for the passage of two) to take an active young wife with him.

In Lower Canada, and New Brunswick, winter begins about the end of November, and the snow is seldom clear from the ground till the beginning of April. In Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward’s Island, from their insulated situation the winters are milder than in New Brunswick or Lower Canada, and in Upper Canada they are pretty similar to the back part of the State of New York.

The risk of a bad harvest or hay time is rarely felt in Lower Canada, and consequently farming is not attended with so much anxiety or labour as in the United Kingdom. The winters are cold but dry and bracing. I have seen men in the woods, in winter felling trees with their coats off, and otherwise light clothed. The summers are extremely hot, particularly July and August.

The new settler must consult the seasons in all his undertakings and leave nothing to chance, or to be done of another day. The farmers of Lower Canada are worthy of remark in these respects.

In conclusion, I beseech you, if you have any party feeling at home, if you wish to promote your own prosperity, or that of your family, wash your hands clear of it ere you embark. Such characters are looked upon with suspicion in the Colonies; and you could not possibly take with you a worse recommendation.

Prices of living, house rent, labour, &c. in the principal towns of Canada, with the expense of travelling on the great leading routes — In Quebec and Montreal, excellent board and lodging in the principle hotels and boarding houses, 20s. to 30s. per week. Second-rate ditto from 15s. to 20s. per week. Board and lodging for a mechanic or labourer 7s. to 9s. 6d. per week, for which he will get tea, coffee, with meat for breakfast, a good dinner, and supper at night.

• If potatoes are out of season for keeping, increase the quantity of oatmeal.

If the Emigrant has any oatmeal to spare, it will sell for more than prime cost.

From The North Devon Journal and General Advertiser – Thursday, June 23, 1831

The Saints

Peter captured so beautifully the rollercoaster that November is for me. I always find this time of year a bit unsettling: the shorter days, the cold north wind after the tease of a warm day, the chores I should be doing and can’t get to, the looooong lead up to Christmas, the passing of another year.

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone who has read along with this blog that I am often thinking of times past, but lately the people who are long gone are gathering around me in ways I’ve not felt before. Most days I drive by the houses where generations of my family have lived and I picture them inside, or working in the barn, or standing by the road chatting with a neighbour. These houses are empty, uninhabited, so available for my imagination to fill them again. It is comforting but strange, as if something happened on All Saints’ Day this year that released them back into the world. I’m not going mad, but perhaps there are things I need to learn from these people.

Freeland 1935. My grandfather has stooks of grain in his field at the top of the photo, and my mother is living with her grandparents at the farm in the bottom, on the corner of the Barlow and Murray roads.

January 25, 1922

My mother’s parents were married 100 years ago today. I know almost nothing about that event as my grandmother, Thelma, died so long ago in 1927, and my grandfather, Wilbur, later remarried and died the year after I was born. My mother says that her father rarely talked about her mother, so she doesn’t know where they met or what their short life together was like. There is no one left from that time, of course, so it is a mystery that will never be solved. All we have is their marriage certificate, and a photo taken after their wedding.

Some of my family’s history is so clear to me, even events that occurred long before I was born, because I heard the stories over and over. I can hear the sleigh bells as Wilbur and his brothers head up through the Foxley River woods to cross over the ice to Cascumpec and on to Alberton, where they sold firewood in the 1930s. I can smell the tar and oil and half rotten fish of the wharves where most of my mother’s uncles spent much of their lives. I can see my great-grandmother, Eva, who fell and broke her hip while feeding her hens on the Sandhills in the 1940s, being carried by her sons on an old door to a dory, then rowed to the mainland where a truck was waiting at Brooks Wharf to take her to the doctor. All the tales carefully polished, shining, sharp, and each story helping me to find my place in my family, starting first as just a listener, and now as a keeper and recorder of the lore.

But Thelma and Wilbur are always in soft focus in my mind, just as they are in their wedding photo, and I have had to make up my own version of their story over the years from the bits and pieces I have gathered. The story ends sadly, with Thelma dying from tuberculosis, leaving Wilbur and her two small children, but this photo from the beginning – Wilbur confident and casual, hand stuffed in his jacket pocket, and Thelma next to him, finally with someone to care for her after losing both her parents by the time she was seven – this photo reminds me that the story really didn’t end sadly, for my mother is still here, I am here, my cousins are here. We are here, we were there.

Marie

Alice Marie Bramfitt was born on this day in 1886 in China, where her English parents were working as Christian missionaries. The family had returned to England by the 1891 census.

Marie served in England as a nurse in the First World War, met and married a Canadian soldier, and travelled with him back to his home province of Prince Edward Island in September, 1919. They settled with his parents in Harmony, a community a couple of miles from Tyne Valley.

Marie never celebrated her birthday with her new PEI relatives as she died on January 7, 1920. The official cause of death was suicide, but her husband, Thomas Corbett Ellis, was later tried for her murder. He was found not guilty.

I learned about this story last summer when I noticed the name of Dr. John Stewart in an article about the Ellis trial on the front page of the June 21, 1920 issue of The Charlottetown Guardian. I collect articles mentioning Dr. Stewart as part of my interest in the history of the Tyne Valley hospital that was named in his memory, so it was he who led me to this sad tale.

It was probably the family connection that drew me in further as I worked out that Thomas Corbett Ellis would have been my maternal great-grandmother Eva Hardy’s second cousin. Eva probably knew him, and certainly would have known about Marie’s death, but my mother hadn’t heard this story before, and she was raised by Eva and often talks about Eva’s talent for storytelling and sharp comments about others. This would have been both a compelling story to tell and pass judgement on, but because my mother, who was born in 1922, would have been so young when this story was ripe, other current events might have knocked this gruesome story off Eva’s setlist as the 1920s passed. Or it could have been just too terrible and shameful a tale to retell.

As soon as I read about Marie last June, I was compelled to go to the Presbyterian cemetery in Tyne Valley to visit her grave and pay my respects. I walked up and down the rows of headstones, saying hello to lots of my long-gone ancestors as I went, but her grave seems to be unmarked (a fact I confirmed with a friend who is working on a history of Tyne Valley and also knew Marie’s tale). I was disappointed, but not surprised, as I’m sure the Ellis family wanted both the memory of Marie and this story to disappear, just as they themselves did to other parts of PEI and the United States not long after Marie’s death.

There’s a lot more to this tragedy, but today I’m only thinking of Marie, married late in life for the era and probably looking forward to a great adventure in Canada. What she found instead seems to have been a sad existence living with Thomas’s parents and sisters in the back woods of PEI, cut off from all she knew. My heart aches for her.

I have lit a candle tonight for Marie.

I’m not the only one who thinks there is more to this story. From the RCMP case file via Guy Bramfitt.

Wash Day

I have had to wash my “barn” jacket after I put an egg in the pocket and then managed to squish it before I got it into the basket. I know better, but it was going to be there just for a second. A handful of slimy egg and broken shell is an unpleasant discovery, and it was -12C at the time, so it started to freeze on my hand. Yuck.

I told my mother what I had done, and said my first thought was what her grandmother, Eva, would have said if she had witnessed my folly. My mother said I would have been scolded, for an egg in February was a rare thing. Eggs were preserved in a solution called water glass in the fall, and were only used for baking over the winter. I don’t remember people preserving eggs, as by the time I was born in the mid-60s, most people had electricity and refrigerators, and mostly bought their eggs from a store.

I once visited a Second World War exhibition at a museum in Ipswich, England, and they had a section on food on the home front. Unfortunately, the egg preservation experiment hadn’t worked properly and we arrived just after they made that discovery, and the smell of rotten eggs was certainly evocative of another time.

I asked my mother if gathering the eggs was one of her chores as a child, and she said it wasn’t. The hens were Eva’s domain and she probably didn’t trust my mother to not drop the basket. Stuffing eggs in your pocket would have been bad form.

My mother said her chores were looking after her own bedroom, keeping her little brother out of trouble, and sometimes doing the dishes. On the day when The Family Herald arrived, Eva would read all afternoon so that when my mother came home from school, the dishes from the noon meal (called dinner, never lunch – lunch was a meal before bedtime!) would still be on the table waiting for her to wash them.

And how did you wash dishes in rural PEI in the 1920s? In an enamel dishpan at the kitchen table. You took the dishpan off a nail in the pantry, took it to the woodstove, and decanted hot water from the tank on the side of the stove. You would swish a bar of homemade soap in the water to make suds, wash and dry the dishes, and put most of the dishes back on the table for the next meal. The dirty dishwater would be poured down the sink in the pantry in winter, or perhaps out the back door onto a plant at other times. Nothing wasted, ever. Water was pumped by hand from a hand-dug well, so it was precious.

Homemade lye soap, made by my great-uncle Elmer Hardy in the very kitchen in which my mother used to do dishes. Hard on your hands, but cleans like the dickens!

Those water conservation methods have passed down to me through my mother. I don’t use a dishpan every day, but have used a dishpan during very dry summers and poured the dishwater on flower beds. I will throw water from washing floors on the front porch to clean it off, or onto a flowerbed. I don’t have a dishwasher, so when running water to do dishes, I usually collect the cold water that comes first in a watering can for plants, a kettle, or in a jug.

And I moved from using liquid dish detergent back to swishing a bar of soap in the water a few years ago. I don’t see much difference, except for the lack of bubbles, which I have read come from chemicals added to make you feel like the cleaning part of the soap is working. I use a vegetable glycerine soap from Bulk Barn that has no wrapping and almost no scent, and my dishes seem clean enough. I sometimes add slivers of soap from the shower or sink to the glycerine soap in soap shaker I have.

All this rambling from a broken egg.

Modern soap shaker/swisher. You can just hold a bar of soap in your hands, of course, but this makes more bubbles and has a nice rattle.

1960+60

My parents were married in Summerside on September 7, 1944 . No big celebration, not even one photo of the day, just my parents, their two witnesses, and the minister for a simple service in the church office. A couple of days later, my parents, who were both still serving in the RCAF, went back to their wartime posts.

Their 16th wedding anniversary in 1960 would have been on a Wednesday, the day when all country general stores like theirs, and many stores in the bigger communities on PEI, closed in the afternoon. Why Wednesday? Who knows, but it was a different time, a slower time, and everyone agreed Wednesday afternoons and Sundays were not for commerce.

September 7, 1960 would have been an exception to that Wednesday closure rule because a huge forest fire was tearing through western PEI, burning thousands of acres of forest and destroying homes and businesses. My father probably spent the day evacuating neighbours with his one-ton flatbed propane delivery truck, and my mother would have kept their store open the entire day, even as they were running out of basic supplies.

10 years ago, I published the digital version of a scrapbook of newspaper articles my mother saved during the 1960 West Prince Forest Fire. If anyone has looked at my website, it has probably been to look at this resource, and I’ve heard from hundreds of people who wanted to share their memories of that time.

I was born in 1966, but heard so many stories about The Fire for my entire life that it seems impossible that I wasn’t actually there! The physical marks of the fire were all around me when I was a child, burned stumps and tales of lost buildings.

I took a walk around our property yesterday looking for the remnants of that fire, and there are very few left. If I didn’t know what I was looking for, I wouldn’t have given the few things I found any special meaning, for they don’t look important in any way.

Here’s a bit of burned tree stump that has yet to be totally absorbed into the spongy forest floor. Most of our land had been in grain or hay in the dry summer of 1960, but some trees stood along the riverbank, and many of those were lost. When I was a child in the 1970s, there were dozens of stumps like this in our woods, but today I only found this one tiny bit.

Here is the firebreak created by an unknown bulldozer operator to try to save the house that belonged to our neighbour, Ida Skerry. It’s difficult to see this little mound of dirt in a photo, so I doffed my rubber boots to give some perspective! Ida’s house was saved, but her small outbuildings were lost, and bits of melted glass and metal are all that remain of those little sheds. Those fragments of history emerge from the soil every so often, but each year’s cascade of dead spruce needles and birch leaves is burying them a bit deeper, and soon they will stay hidden.

Here are burn marks on our log cabin, a tinderbox that survived only because a bucket brigade hauled water from the river after the electricity poles burned, killing the water pump that had just been installed the previous year when electricity had finally arrived in our community.

When I’m gone, the history of the enormous fire that raged over this small plot of land will will be erased, absorbed into the ground to moulder and disappear, but yesterday we remembered. My mother and I talked about her wedding day 76 years ago when she had just turned 22, and the fire 16 years later that threatened everyone she knew and everything she and my father had worked so hard to build. We felt grateful to be together.

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