I find great comfort in looking backwards at times like this when everything seems so scary. History is already written, so it is a safe place to spend some time; there could be surprises or new discoveries, but they have already happened and are, therefore, sterile, clean, orderly.

As a diversion from the overwhelming pandemic news, I spent time this morning nosing around for family news on UPEI’s digital newspaper archive, which has expanded in recent months. My ancestors were pretty humble people, mostly fishers and farmers, not the type of people who usually ended up in newspapers except maybe when they died. A couple of distant relatives were politicians – a great-great uncle was an MLA and my father’s first cousin was a Member of Parliament and later a Senator – but most appear only as entries in census records.

It was lovely, then, to find new items about long gone great-greats in the Examiner archives. I do not have any family stories about these people, so until today they have existed only as names and dates in a database. This evening I feel as though I have pulled them in a bit closer to me, that they are with me somehow, and that is soothing.