I didn’t grow up in one of those homes where relatives came and sat and talked over tea in the kitchen about distant cousins and remembered stories of my great-grandparents.  Relatives seldom came to our house when I was young, and we seldom went to theirs.  Oh, I have the odd memory of visiting my aunt Gayle at a second-story flat late at night for some crisis or other, and of going to see my mother’s parents and playing chess with my grandfather.  I suppose I saw my Uncle Bruce’s family the most often, and there was the occasional funeral of course, where I was introduced to other family members, never to see them again after that day had passed.  There were a few trips to New York and Florida, where we stayed for a day or two with Cousin Ruthie or Aunt Gayle and Uncle Del, who had left the New England area where my parents lived.  But there was not a lot of discussion on those visits about family members – at least not within my hearing, anyway, and I listened pretty closely whenever I could.

Beyond knowing of my mother’s siblings and their children, I knew my grandmother had three sisters.  I had met my great-Aunt Ruth a few times – as a child, we had traveled to Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia where she lived and worked as an artist.  Not only did we have a few things she had painted in our home, but she once gave me a ring with a very pale pinkish round stone that she told me was a ruby, and which I promptly lost when one of the four prongs of the solitaire setting broke off and the stone fell out.  I knew that Sarah’s mother was Annie Dougan, that her mother was Isabella Wellwood, and that Isabella’s father was named Moses.  I also knew that Isabella had a brother also named Moses who was a missionary in Africa for five years before returning home to marry his childhood sweetheart, which as a young girl I found terribly romantic.  That was basically it, until I started researching in the late 1970’s.

When I finally got around to asking my mother about her mother’s ancestry, I discovered there were a few family journals detailing certain events that had been copied out for family members.  One of these was titled “I Remember Father” and was written by Annie Dougan, my great-grandmother.  It detailed her memories of her early years in Ontario, Canada and of her mother, her mother’s siblings, and her grandparents, but most especially her memories of her father.  The gift of this thin journal had such an impact on me – I felt almost delirious with joy to discover there was some record of my ancestry!  And that emotion shaped my life from that moment on.  I began to understand that records existed that documented events, and I began to crave discovery of those that related to my ancestors, and to have access to the information they contained.  I was hooked.

© Deborah Ray and archivecookie.com, 2010.