As most of you know, I’ve been researching my family’s history for over 15 years now. This treasure hunt for ancestors has brought me many hours of joy and insight and yes, tedium and frustration too… because in this game of genealogy, you don’t always find the treasure you’ve been seeking.
This past month I did find a treasure! I finally uncovered the European origins of my Eckhardt line – a quest I’ve coined as “Finding Frederick”, who is my great-great grandfather and the first to settle in Canada. More on the specifics of that find in another post, but meanwhile, as I’ve fleshed out another branch on the family tree, I’ve been thinking about my place there, and the role of what seems like random good luck in my life.
Which leads me to this month’s poem. It, like my hunt for Frederick, has been a long time coming. I took the photo in the spring of 2017, knowing I would use it to reflect on family when the time was right. The idea for what I’ve now written actually came to me in about 2004, when I was researching my Granger line. Over the years, I’ve made several attempts to write this idea, in essay and short story form. It took the right photo, plus the right amount of time doing the research, before I had the perspective to put the idea into the right words. Sometimes that’s how it works. 🙂
As we settle into the shorter days of November, I hope you find a treasure, however you define that! Meanwhile, here’s Sunny Side.
Where I live, in the historical village of Richmond, Ontario, we are so lucky to have the Quiet Garden, which sits behind St. John the Baptist Anglican Church. The Quiet Garden was a community project undertaken to mark the new millenium; it’s a lovely area set beside a creek, with flower and shrub beds, a vegetable garden, lawns, and two labyrinths. It’s a place I can go in any season, to step out of routine and “busy-ness,” to take time to just breathe.
Do you have such a place? I think you do: it can be as close as a chair in your back yard or on your balcony. As easy as closing your eyes.
This month, I hope you take some time to find some quiet in a place that can restore calm for you. Meanwhile, please stop the “busy-ness” for a moment and have a look at Contemplation.
Here in Ontario, summer continues to dominate with heat and spectacular storms. It’s too hot to work outside. It’s so humid we rival Texas most days. So the perennials in my gardens are on their own, left to thrive or perish.
Luckily, most of the late summer bloomers are very showy and do quite fine in weather extremes.
Bring on the heat!
Under this carnival of colour, though (and discovered when I took a slow meander through the yard) are a few plants quietly doing what they do in a more subdued way. Like the deep black seed pods of Baptisia australis: shake them and they rattle like little maracas.
Shake it, baby!
Or the high-gloss finish on the leaves of native Pacysandra.
Getting her shine on!
One plant in particular got me thinking about strengths and abilities, and inspired this month’s poem.
Maybe you’ll consider making a point of meandering slowly one summer day – it’s surprising what you can find when you take time to look a little closer!
My favourite kind of summer day has always been one that starts with rain and then clears completely. There’s an exaggerated brightness to that kind of day. The kind of day when the sky flattens to a slate of blue, all the clouds erased. The sun’s rays bounce off puddles, which soon sizzle and vanish… and briefly, the grass holds sparkly water droplets.
I remember one such washed-clean day when a troop of kids from my neighbourhood in Niagara Falls headed off to the Municipal Pool. Municipal Pool was on Valley Way, a good twelve or so blocks from home: down Scott Street to Portage Road, left on Portage, first right, then all the way down to the end, walking parallel to Morrison Street where St. Mary’s School sat, empty and powerless. A gaggle of kids in a straggly line, we wore flip-flops and bathing suits. Colourful towels draped our shoulders, weighted in the corners by nickels tied securely, for popsicles after the swim. Of course, little sisters dragged their towels and got dirt and grass all over them. And every block or so, a couple of the older kids would suddenly surge forward on the wings of their towel-capes. Suddenly – a rainbow! A miracle of nature above the line of giant chestnut trees on Portage Road.
This month’s poem, “What’s Under the Surface,” was inspired by a summer afternoon along the Ottawa River. It celebrates slowing down in this all-too-brief season. May you have the opportunity to do just that!
It’s Canada Day in my part of the world, and that brings me to thoughts about home: what is a home, what home means to me, and also the places I call home.
Do you ever think about that? I wonder how you’d define “home” for yourself.
To me, home is family, and I’m blessed to have a close one: my husband and our boys; my siblings and I; all our children – a.k.a. “The Cousins” – and now the next generation, for whom we’ll have a celebration this month, which has been dubbed the “Dozens of CousinsFest.”
Home to me means sanctuary. It’s the place where I create my definition of beauty: gardens and plants, warm colours inside and out, plus all the special items collected over time and generations.
Baptisia in my back garden
I’ve realized recently that there are three places I call home:
Canada. I’m so grateful to my ancestors who chose this magnificent country! I’m currently on a mission to visit the northern, southern, eastern and western-most points in Canada. Two down, two to go!
Richmond and Ottawa, Ontario. My village of Richmond is officially part of Ottawa, yet retains its separate identity and is actually older than the capital. I’ve been out in the village photographing and writing, and the inspiration I’m finding makes this Richmond 200 project so much fun! And recently, Geoff and I enjoyed a “staycation” in Ottawa, taking in the Jazzfest and other activities usually reserved for tourists. We barely got started on the list of things to do and see!
Ottawa’s Rideau Canal
Muskoka. The Smith family cottage is a magnet for all family members and many friends too. Ten people and 3 dogs are there this weekend, in the middle of a heatwave and a power outage. Still, as my sister is fond of saying, “a bad day at the cottage is better than a good day at home!”
Three Mile Lake, Muskoka
All of this is my long-winded introduction to this month’s photo and poem, called “Where is Home?” Originally inspired by a scene near our cottage, it’s a poem that has had quite a bit of exposure. It was first published in the May 11 issue of the Glebe Report‘s Poetry Corner (page 30); their theme was “home.” You can also see it in the Richmond Hub newspaper, where I paired it with a scene along the Jock River in Richmond, which was no less inspiring to me! I hope you click to take a look at that scene.
Happy Canada Day, everyone! May your thoughts of home be as satisfying as mine.
Two hundred and forty-seven years ago, on June 11, 1771, my six-times great-grandparents were accosted by a band of armed locals who assaulted them, threatened their lives, and then ran them off their land. Donald and Mary McIntyre were forced to flee several miles south with their three young children and six neighbouring families, caught in a jurisdictional dispute between New York and New Hampshire.
The McIntyres had just recently arrived to their 200 acre piece of the colony of New York (along the North River in Albany County) and had begun the onerous process of clearing and improving the land for farming. Donald had been granted this land by the British King after discharge from fighting in the Seven Years War. But on that day in June, the family found out that New Hampshire also claimed their land. Not only that, a group calling themselves the “Green Mountain Boys” had taken up arms to roust the “New Yorkers,” then tear down the log houses they had built, pile them in heaps and burn them.
McIntyre and the others tried to return later, but were again expelled. Without a crop, they were left completely without means to support and feed themselves.
From where they had fled in New Perth (now Salem, New York) they petitioned the Governor, asking what he would have them do. Should they give up the lands, or defend them with force? Or maybe there was some course of law by which the Governor could deal with the situation?
Petition of displaced Loyalist settlers, 1771. Note Donald McIntyre’s signature
The Governor dealt with it by ordering the Justices of the Peace in Albany to investigate this “riot.” Three months later, in November, one of the Justices responded. Here’s part of what he wrote:
On the very Eve of a long hard winter it is very Schocking to see so many poor familys reduced to so great Distress and if they had not been hospitably entertained by the Rev’d Mr Clark & his people their Straits must have been exceeding great.
The Governor then issued a warrant for the arrest of the Green Mountain Boys and their leader, who were determined to be responsible. The leader, Ethan Allan, remained at large and I do not know if the fourteen Boys who assaulted the settlers were ever captured.
In any case, after seven years of war, instead of beginning their new lives in the American Colony and reaping the first crops on land granted to them for loyalty to the King, for five months my six-times great grandparents had to live on the charitable gifts of friends and the congregation of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in New Perth.
There is more to the story of these ancestors, which I’ll write about in Part 2. Meanwhile, I’m reflecting on the nature of hardship, imagining the conversations among those seven displaced families while they decided what next steps to take, and looking around at my own privileged circumstances this day in June, 247 years later.
My heartfelt thanks goes out to Jim Issak and John Blythe Dobson, whose diligent research unearthed this previously unpublished petition of our ancestor, Donald/Daniel McIntyre. Jim recently shared with me their excellent article, “Daniel McIntyre, United Empire Loyalist, of The Town of Argyle, Albany County, New York, and Grimsby Township, Lincoln County, Upper Canada,” published in the July 2017 issue of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record.
