Tag Archives: Thelma Hutchinson

Goodness and light and being 100

Last night as I was heading to bed well past my normal bedtime, I noticed the orange crescent moon climbing up the red pine tree to the east of our house. I went closer to the window to see it better and a shooting star dashed past. I noted Jupiter and Saturn marching across the sky, and suddenly another star fell straight down, grazing the moon. I felt sucked into the night sky, away from here and now.

I imagined my grandmother, Thelma, also awake late on August 19th but in 1922, looking out her window only a couple of miles from mine, waiting for her first child to be born the next day, my own mother, Vivian. Thelma had been orphaned as a tiny girl and married my grandfather Wilbur at an age we would think young now. After one more long night, she would have a family again.

We had an open house party today at the old school in Freeland, again only a mile from where my mother was born, to mark her 100th birthday. About 150 people attended, people who have known my mother from as far back as the early 1940s and some who met her only last month. Cousins brought tiny babies, passing them from one loving set of arms to the other, held them up next to my mother to take a photo on this milestone day (“You once met a lady born in 1922, she held your hand, here’s the proof!”). I watched as people from different parts of our lives made the connection that they both knew my mother. Planets colliding, stars streaking past.

Today my mother was able to receive the good wishes and love of others, and what an overwhelming and humbling experience that was for her and me. How often have we wished that we had told someone how much they mean to us, but it is too late. Everyone had their chance today, and they arrived with full hearts and words of respect and love.

Perhaps all the unnatural separation we have endured over the course of this pandemic needed to burst today, people wanting to connect again, to have community, to love and be loved.

There were so many people at the party I couldn’t possibly talk to them all, but those who I did speak with (all the time still wearing my mask, because this party was not without risk, something I weighed over and over as I considered planning a get together during a still-active pandemic) spoke of my mother’s inherent kindness, faithfulness, goodness, industriousness. The love for her nearly lifted the roof off the old building, the vibrations of family and community connection humming and dancing through the walls and back up to the sky.

When I returned to PEI 20 years ago, someone remarked I had big shoes to fill, but I know I will never be her, never come close to having her impact, though as her only child, I have certainly tried to model my own way of being in the world on how she has lived her life. She has taught me to think of others first, and to always stay true to what I believe in. To be welcoming, warm hearted, cheerful, helpful and kind. I try to work hard and see the good in others. If I have the choice to do more or do less, I do more. Seize the day, move forward, and laugh.

My mother was tired after all the intense attention when we returned home at 4, but by late evening, reading through some of the cards she received, she remarked that it had been a good day, and she only felt 25, that we must have been wrong about the date. That, dear readers, is how you get to 100.

Vivian (Hardy) Phillips, born August 20, 1922

Barbara Ann

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.

Barbara Ann Williams Hutchinson Newcombe, Saint James Anglican Church Cemetery, Port Hill, PEI
Two little boys gone too soon.

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.

Thelma and Wilbur Hardy, 1922