Prompt # 43 - Emigration

 Prompt # 43 - Emigration

I was born in Rivers, Manitoba, Canada and I have never lived in any other country. I love Canada, both where I was born and where I live now, in Hope, BC. This summer, I cannot visit the prairies where I grew up so I am reading prairie stories. I just finished Gabrielle Roy's The Road Past Altamont. Altamont is a town near where my brother lives. I just started reading Homesick, a novel by Saskatchewan writer Guy Vanderhaeghe, with a cover painting by Gathie Falk, a BC artist who came from Manitoba.

Twice in my life I have visited England, Scotland, and Ireland. I could live in any of these places if I win the lottery. Both my grandmothers were born in England. My mother's mother in Portsmouth, Hampshire with family origins in Essex and Norfolk. My father's mother in Somerset. They both emigrated to Canada shortly before WW I. One came alone, to Kaslo, BC and the other came with her mother and two siblings to join her father who had come on ahead. On my tour last summer, I visited towns and houses where they both lived before leaving England. I took pictures. This is the house in which my mother's mother lived with her mother, grandmother, and two aunts, from 1904 to 1913.

In 1978, through a long series of coincidences, I spent Christmas in a small town in Ireland. I knew nothing about Ireland other than “the Troubles” in the North as reported in the news. I absolutely loved the country—the pubs, Dublin, Connemara, castles, monasteries, ruins, people. I felt very at home. Several years later, at least 30, I learned that my grandmother's grandfather had been stationed in Dublin with the Royal Navy when he died. Then, slowly, over the next 8 years, I learned that he had actually been born there, in Cork, where his father was also a doctor who taught at Cork University, and that he and several generations before him had all been born in Ireland. Later still, the more I Googled the family name on my mother's side, the more astonished I became. There is a bay. There were landowners around Kinsale. One of them was married to a Butler of Kilkenny Castle, which I had never heard of before the bus stopped there last year. There were graves with the family name a mere four miles from sites I had visited on my first magic trip to the emerald isle. I also stumbled upon a marriage between a man with my father's name and a woman with my mother's family name (although in Canada these families lived half a continent apart and knew nothing of each other.) Then, pursuing the matrilineal name with Kinsale, I came up with the final coincidence (so far). That a woman with my patriarchal name and my first name lived in Kinsale in the 1820s where she started a service group called The Sisters of Mercy. If you know how much I love Leonard Cohen, you will understand what this means to me. I think the word is gobsmacked.

I still continue my genealogy research. I have yet to make the link between Norfolk and Kinsale. It seems several archives were lost during the fight for independence. But I'm one of those genealogists more inclined towards “family history” and “blood memory” than I am towards “the paper trail” and “hard evidence,” so I'm enjoying the journey and the mystery.

PS  My mother's father's family moved from New Brunswick, Canada to Red River and then to British Columbia in 1891. My father's family came from Cornwall. His grandfather homesteaded in Manitoba in the 1891 after retiring from the Royal Navy.