What captured my imagination was a small notebook that belonged to my granddad. In it was addresses of people to contact for work and housing once they arrived in Canada, various 'to do' lists and, most interesting to me, a list of the possessions they had brought with them.
The list was so detailed and so short: various cooking pots, some dishes, 4 pairs of wool socks, some shirts, some coats and a baby cot. Essentially, not very much at all.
It made me wonder. Why would two people put themselves, three of their children (my mom was born in Canada) and a few bundles of possessions on a boat, in cattle class, to a different part of the world? Was it a push from or a pull to? Both? I've since learned a lot more about their likely motivations but my curiosity about my ancestry has not dwindled.
On my dad's side, when I first started my research, all anyone knew about his mom, my grandma, was that she was a Newfoundlander, born in St John's, Newfoundland and the names of her father and mother. Nothing else! She had died by the time I got interested in genealogy and because of Newfoundland's very unusual history, according to inquiries I made with their Vital Stats office, she didn't even exist!
Just a tree; visual appeal. ;-) I had long since accepted that that branch of my family tree would be one big question mark. Where did my grandma's ancestors come from? Ireland? Scotland? England? Portugal? The Basque Country? Were they First Nations? All possible based on Newfoundland's history and my dad's 'look' (he could pass as First Nations). But then, a few days ago, I had a major breakthrough! I plunked my grandma's name into the Ancestry.ca site, like I do every now and then, and voila! I found her name on someone else's family tree and kinda creepily her progeny; of them, my dad and his children, especially lovely is the youngest daughter, ;-) though anonymously (living female).
I haven't verified the information from this other person's family tree yet (I'm a stickler for proper research), but if it does turn out to be accurate, my great, great, great, great grandfather arrived in Newfoundland, from a village in Dorset, England, in about 1750! You can't really get more Newfoundlander than that! Incredible!
Doing a brief search about the area they settled in, I found out that it is also the area of Newfoundland where The Shipping News and a Canadian mini-series called 'Random Passage' (which, to me, sounds more like a title of a cottaging flic, lol) were filmed. And even cooler, there is a site - a re-creation of what life was like in the early 1800's. It was used as the set for the mini-series and it's now a park or site or something. The website's not too clear: Random Passage Site.
And neither was the weather in this youtube video I found of it! But it has its charm.
I feel compelled to go for a screeching. Someday soon...
So much research to do now!
