I am so blessed. I putz around to a great degree these days…sorting, tossing, accumulating and sorting again. As my readers know, I feel like it’s important to work on my family research and the archives on such research can become pretty extensive at times. I enjoy sharing my findings with my parents when I come upon something new. Today ‘the new’ came in the form of a message from Anne in Kansas, sharing that I had attached an incorrect photograph to my Agnes Mary (Mae) Haddow South on our ancestry.ca site and I had! But what was wonderful about that was that this was a distant cousin who was sharing this news with me. Undoubtedly, we will remain friends now, as it seems that Anne is the keeper of family history to the south of the border, while definitely I am doing the same to the north. She and I will most definitely become pen pals.
I liked that all of this today sparked a memory for my father…a drive that he shared with my grandfather John Moors, between 1967 and 1968. Grampa had made a visit with us in North Bay, Ontario and he insisted that my father head out with him, on a drive to Powassan, to meet the Souths. This is what my father wrote of this memory.
“I knew all about this Agnes Haddow — Her husband (Elkanah Alfred South) had one of the first saw mills in Powassan. Don’t know if he was the guy but some guy named South took the first team of oxen up north (to Powassan) and is buried in a grave way out in the middle of the bush about 3 miles from Powassan. I could not believe it when Dad directed me right to it. He was on the trip that took the oxen up there as a young boy (don’t remember how old). Dad even knew where the old house was and all that was left of it was parts of a stone basement walls.Then Dad looked up some lady named South living in Powassan that day-I did not go in the house but it must have been a living relative.”
Thank you, Anne, for putting us in touch with a memory. Here are photos of Grace Rebecca, my Grandfather’s sister, as a young girl. She would have been a wee girl when she lost her father, John Moors, on May 19, 1918 in an enemy bombing in Etaples.
I am also an ancestry explorer, although an infrequent one. I arrived at a certain point in my family tree and couldn’t go on any further so I didn’t renew my subscription for this year. I tell myself that I will return and solve the mysteries and fill in the holes but, like this blogging the research can become time consuming and, for me, very confusing. Like you I connected with distant relatives and this was the exciting part – the confusing part was trying to sort out all of the complex relationships – it made my head spin. The whole thing requires an analytical approach and I’m not very good at that. It’s like a detective story – fascinating to some but frustrating to others, including me. Happy you are into it though and now I know who to contact if I ever get back into climbing the Tree and meet obstacles…