All posts by Dorothy Nixon

I am a Montreal based writer with a new book about the British Invasion of Suffragettes to Canada in 1912/13 Furies Cross the Mersey on Amazon Kindle.
England, genealogy

Revelations on the Moors

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Lately, I came into possession of a family heirloom, a book of poems, that allows me to see deep into the heart and mind of one of my great grandfathers, a rare gift for a genealogist.

I didn’t inherit this book from a relation: I got it off the Internet! And it took quite a few years for the book to find its way home.

Initially, I knew just two thing about the Reverend John Forster (1850-1926) my dad’s maternal grandfather. He was a Methodist minister and he developed dementia later in life. The story goes: one night he woke his wife of many years and asked, “Woman, what are you doing in my bed?” My grandmother, Dorothy Forster Nixon, told my mother the serio-comic story when she visited us in Montreal in 1967.

When I started researching John Forster’s life in 2017 (fifty years later!) for a story on this blog, it took me all of ten seconds to find out a lot more about him. The Primitive Methodists have a comprehensive website with bios of former Ministers.

According to John Forster’s bio there, he was the son of a Northumberland farmer; he joined the PM church in 1874 after attending a revival; he was very well read but never ‘paraded’ his knowledge; he married twice, my great grandmother Emma Cowan being his second wife; he had four children, a son by his first marriage and daughters, Agnes, Norah and Dorothy with his second wife.

Rev. John on the Primitive Methodist Website

Apparently, John worked the evangelical circuit for forty years, from Carlisle to Sunderland, two years here, two years there. My grandmother was born in 1895 in Middleton-on-Teesdale, County Durham.

John also wrote articles and poems for the P.M. Connexional Review and other venues and he had a book of poems, “Pictures of Life in Verse” published in 1923. Apparently, these poems contained ‘lyrics of extraordinary charm and grace.”

Boy, wouldn’t it be fun to read these poems.

I immediately contacted the website manager. Yes, they had a library but the book was lost.

I checked the Internet, no luck. (The book was available, however, at the British, Scottish and Welsh national libraries.)

So I wrote my two pieces about Reverend John without any samples of his poetry.

For some reason, just the other day, I tried again. This time, I found Pictures of Life in Verse on Abebooks at an antiquarian bookstore in the south of England.

According to the blurb there was an inscription in pencil on a front page. Could this inscription be by a family member, I wondered. Could this volume be a genuine family heirloom about to come home to me? I filled in my credit card info and pressed “purchase.”

When the little brown volume arrived, I immediately checked and, well, maybe the inscription was pencilled in by my great aunt Norah, but if she wrote this she spelled her name wrong.

(It is likely someone else wrote this, not Norah. She too got dementia. She was a concert pianist and school music mistress.)

Whatever, this volume of sacred and profane romantic poetry published over 100 years ago is a true family treasure.

That night I perused the twenty or so poems in the book and, yes, I liked them very, very much. They are, indeed, charming as well as thoughtful.

It seems that my great grandfather saw God in nature, not surprising for someone whose vocation brought him up and down the sun-dappled Dales and brooding Moors of Northern England.

A couple of snippets:

The bee makes love to all the flowers-

White and Yellow and Blue and Red –

He woos them all for hours and hours,

And kisses them all ere he goes to bed.

….

Seems Gillimoore village, with nothing to show

To mark it off from a hundred such,

Hardly distinguishable each from each.

Then, all in a flash, the purple sea

Of heathers before you so gloriously;

Acres and acres, and miles on miles,

Northword the August moorland smiles.

(Driving into Helmsley. We visited North Yorkshire in September 2024. Later, we drove to Whitby through the moors and they were, indeed, glorious.)

Rev. John was clearly an empathetic man, too, a good thing for a Minister.

Mother and Son (abridged)

My boy’s alive, but he’s dead to me;

Was it but yesterday that he

Sat on my lap and stood on my knee?

…

He talks to me of things afar,

Which unto him familiar are,

To me remote as any star.

…

He talks of politics and laws,

Of human rights and the people’s cause,

In a ready way, as one who knows.

Is this poem about John’s relationship with his Mom? She was a farmer’s wife and John left to join the Primitive Methodists who helped organize early labour unions in the UK. Even though many of their followers were illiterate, their ministers had to take probationary exams on many ‘abstruse’ subjects. (John’s adjective.)

Yes, John’s working class flock was made up of simple people, miners, farmers and factory workers, and some poems in the collection are about tradesmen. Here a postman performs his duties oblivious to the joys and heartbreak he brings to people on a daily basis.

The Postman (abridged)

In a coat of blue with facings red,

And a stiff-peaked cap upon his head;

Across his shoulders a canvas bag,

With parcels and letters all asag…

…A careless-hearted Mercury he

To carry the fiats of destiny

Down the street from side to side,

Whistling he goes with hasty stride.

Another romantic poem about the simple life is called The Stone-breaker (abridged).

He rises early to his toil,

He breathes the fragrant morning air,

Released by evening with a smile,

He goes to bed without a care.

Having the sun he needs no clock,

His carpet is the turf so green,

The passing shepherd and his flock,

To him are good as change of scene.

According to the UK Census, my father’s paternal grandfather, Robert Nixon was a delver in a quarry in Hemsley, North Yorkshire in 1911. Reverend John was posted in Helmsley from 1912 to 1914. Could this poem be about Robert? Robert’s son, also Robert, a footman turned Malayan planter, and John’s daughter, Dorothy, married in 1921. She moved to Malaya to be with her new husband. (Robert Sr. according to his 1933 obit was also a lay Methodist Minister and a forestry/mill superintendent during WWI.)

Here’s a poem where John Forster wonders if penning poems is a vanity exercise – or a therapy of sorts.

The Bard’s Dilemma (abridged) “with apologies to the Shade of WS:”

To write or not to write, that is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the bard to suffer

The stings and itches of his vanity,

Or to take a pen, and shed a sea of ink,

And by composing end them.

So, he is plagued with self-doubt but has a sense of humour about it.

In his poem The Inexpressible (abridged) John suggests that logic and intellect hinder true understanding.

“ Of give me a speech

To learn and to teach,

Not things that are wrought

In the smithy of thought.”

So, even more self-doubt, here. Is book-learning a waste of time?

The poem, Insomnia (abridged) seems personal:

I lay me down, I lie quite still,

Sleep surely will not stay;

But now the minx o’er yonder hill

Peeped, laughed, then ran away.

She is a maiden coy and shy,

Affrighted by a stare,

And so I close my eyes and try

To catch her unaware.

These days they understand there is a connection between lack of sleep and Alzheimer’s. As it happens, my father also succumbed to that disease and he, too, was an insomniac. (My mom said his insomnia was ‘because of the war.’)

Which brings me to my very own revelation on the Moors: As I reflect on these ‘romantic’ poems, written by my very down-to-earth North of England great grandfather, I realize that I am not merely looking into the mind of the Reverend John Forster, Victorian Age Primitive Methodist Minister. I am seeing deeper into the mind of my own father, Peter Nixon.

My father, born in 1922 (the year T.S. Eliot penned the prophetic The Wasteland, turning naturalism and romanticism on its ear, was an Oxford rugby star, RAF pilot and reluctant chartered accountant. But he was never more himself than when he was remarking on the shape of a flower or behavior of an insect on the many nature walks he took me on, and he did this in a child-like way I could relate to. He may not have resembled his maternal grandfather John Forster in physiognomy or frame, (physically he took after the rugged, sporty Nixon side) but he was most decidedly the Reverend John in character! He was a simple, gentle, thoughtful person who could not abide city living.

That I cannot deny as I read these old family poems. What a revelation, really. What a gift to me.

Five complete poems, three possibly autobiographical and one that proves my great-grandfather didn’t let Darwin’s theories get in the way of his faith.

The Road on the Hill

In a gray house, in a lone dale,

Beside a brawling burn,

Which babbled strange things to itself,

With many a leap and turn,

We lived, my brother Jim and I,

And many a summer’s day

We spent, beside the idle burn,

The idle hours in play.

And still two things we wondered at,

That always were in sight,

The turnpike winding round the hill

And the hill’s towering height.

We saw the people walk the road,

From hour to hour they sped,

We saw them vanish round the turn,

And knew not where it led.

We looked up at the towering height,

In childish wonder fond,

We knew so well the hither side,

But not the side beyond.

Jim’s feet have never trod that road,

Which once he wondering eyed,

But he has trod the mystic hill,

And seen the other side.

And I have trod the turnpike road

And turned the curving hill,

But the dark mountain’s farther side

Is secret to me still.

‘Tis I have seen beyond the bend,

And he the summit’s path,

For I have walked the road of life,

And he the road of death.

The Simple Life

The eldest is off on the train

The next one is singing within,

The youngest two skipping outside,

Oh hear you their quarrelsome din?

O happy the man with a wife,

Of happy the wife with the child,

And grandmother’s too can enjoy

The live that is lively and mild.

Of life that is simple, and free

From the cares that environ the great;

The health and the peace and the love,

The small but sufficient estate.

The joys that are natural and pure,

the Cares so eventless and calm,

The aims that are wisely defined,

Contentment that falls like a balm.

O think of the joys that are lost

In fretting for things we have not,

O think of the bliss we may find

Enjoying the things we have got.

We will build a neat house for ourselves,

On the slope of the sun-fronting hill;

In the winter with books on our shelves,

In summer a garden to till.


And, then, when the evenings are sweet,

In the long, lingering, sad Autumn time,

If the old mood romantic comes back,

Perhaps we may jingle a rhyme.

And there let us live, let us die,

Satisfied with the things of our lot,

On earth, if remembered on high,

Content to be quickly forgot.

(Me: Not so quickly, after all!)

The Worm Track

How very curious as I sit,

And scratch my name upon a stone,

That I by accident should hit,

Upon the work of one long gone;

A worm, who wriggled, blind and prone,

In the wet sand with motion slow,

And left his track so plainly shown,

Long, long ago! Long, long ago!

That sand is stone, and now when split,

Revealing what is marked thereon,

I see Time’s long procession flit

Past me me in many a vague aeon;

And think, “Time has been long begun

When that work made his markings so,

And earth even then had ancient grown,”

Long, long ago! Long, long ago!

Of their descent, more than a bit,

Men boast in supercilious tone;

Behold a worm’s, compared with it,

What have they got to boast upon?

His proof of long descent is drawn

Upon the rock without a flaw;

His ancestry goes back, you’ll own,

Long, long ago. Long, long ago.

My Wife and I

My wife and I have but one mind;

Like vessels filled from each other’s o’erflow,

All our thoughts pass too and fro,

For we’ve everything in common you know.

The bits of gossip, but nothing unkind,

‘Tis so nice, when I get home at night;

Feet on fender in the firelight,

To tell her them all; all the odds and ends

Of news picked up among my friends;

What one has said and another done,

And the last good tale that made such fun,
And all the happenings of the day.

To my wife alone be sure to tell,

The secret I was to guard so well;

For we’ve but one mind between us you see,

She is I and I is she.

When I get home, where we go to bed,

I’ll tell her this, to myself I say–

For I forget—alas, she is dead.

John’s first wife, Mary Chaytor appears to have died in childbirth. The Primitive Methodists supported women’s equality, suffrage etc and they allowed women to preach! It is likely John’s second wife, Emma Cowen, helped him out, perhaps even taking over the pulpit when he was indisposed. Farming wives, of course, have always worked alongside their husbands. The children too for that matter.

The Worker of the Future

He sings as he toils to the joyful tune

Which life beats out in his heart and brain,

He sings as he toils as the lark soars in June,

For his soul exults in the fight and strain.


He sings as he toils, for toil is sweet

When the sense is keen and the soul is free;

When strength has winged the hands and the feet,

And health in the veins is melody.

He sings as he toils for the fruit is his own,
The artist’s joy and the maker’s pride

Are his are the products shaped and grown,

And he walks the earth with the freeman’s stride.

He sings as he toils; his song of praise

To the Maker of all good things is paid;

Who made Man his helper, His good to upraise,

And perfect the world Himself has made.

(The Primitive Methodists worked to improve working conditions for the average man and woman.)

Afterward: I have written stories about my grandmother Dorothy Nixon here on GE. A Terrible Beautiful Life and The Jungle Librarian.

John’s poems, showing she was a middle child with a much older male half-sibling, also help to explain her character and that I’ll tackle in a future essay.

Quebec

11th Grade Math Class

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These days, when I need to employ some math to figure out a household problem, such as how many pesos to take to Cancun or what is more economical, using Keurig pods or canned coffee, I rely on Google.

That’s because much like my handwriting, my math skills have atrophied over the years.

But, was I ever good at math? That I really can’t tell you.

During my childhood, I used to help my mother double and triple her recipes for our hungry family. A precocious learner with a terrific memory, my mom had skipped two grades at her convent school, she said, so she missed out on a key component of her math education, fractions. Her cakes always turned turned out scrumptious proving, I think, my early math ability.

My own math implosion happened in the 10th grade. I was in advanced math in grade 10 with all of my friends from the ‘enriched’ stream and I did so poorly on the final exam I plummeted the next year into remedial math, totally skipping general math. My parents’ divorce that year likely had something to do with it.

Still, a friend of mine who went on to major in genetics in university, claimed she too ‘hit the wall’ in the 10th grade. Her father, an engineer, helped her through it, she said.

Ironically, my father, a chartered accountant, majored in math at Oxford around WWII. While I was still in the single digits age-wise, he often gave me math puzzles in the hope I would prove to be some kind of math genius: If a bath fills at this rate and empties at that rate how much water is left after 10 minutes? I’m not joking. My father, apparently, had never heard of scaffolding.

My 10th grade math teacher, judging from Facebook posts upon his death, was a terrific teacher. He just didn’t put much store in my abilities. Maybe he was put off by my loudmouth ‘women’s lib’ lecturing. Let’s face it, in those days, they expected girls to fumble in math at around 16 years of age. Hormones and all.

I recall how achingly awful it was to be in this 11th grade remedial math class not only because I didn’t know anybody but because the teacher treated the students as if they were so stupid -and I wasn’t used to that. I remember the man entering the classroom room once with a styrofoam coffee cup over his face, snorting like a pig.

I don’t recall my final matriculation mark in math. I do recall the SATS, those aptitude tests you took at the end of school. I remember approaching the desk set up outside the gym oh-so- timidly to learn my score. The desk attendant handed it to me on a little piece of paper: a 92 percentile for language and 75 percentile for math.

The girl beside me with much lower numbers announced that ‘lower is better” and with such confidence I half-believed her. Then Jay, one of the smartest and coolest kids in our grade sauntered up to the desk, his glistening head of golden hair catching the morning light. The desk attendant handed him his score. The boy gave a hint of a shrug then (rather snootily) waved the paper in my face. 99th and 99th percentile. But of course.

So on these Scholastic Aptitude Tests I got the same math score as my friend Wayne, a funny hard working boy with a penchant for public speaking who was in advanced math. He once told a teacher who was polling another class that he did two full hours of homework a night when the rest of us admitted with misguided pride to doing around ten minutes or even five minutes or even none at all. This boy went on to become a much celebrated scientist and he now gives talks around the world. Surprise!

I got a much better math score than my gal-pal, Tessa, from an artsy family, who told me she could read by age three which may have been ‘a creative exaggeration’ (she was prone to them) and who already had a short story published in an American teen magazine. (This I can verify.)Tessa often showed me the portfolio of photographs and poems she had ready to submit to a prestigious college film program. On the SATS, Tessa got a high high 90’s score for language and a low low 20 percentile score for the math. And she had been in the general math class!

My 75th percentile high school score in mathematics isn’t Bill Gates territory, but it’s OK. I do recall that I loved solving long division in elementary school and quadratic equations in grade 9, before the divorce.

Anyway, it evened out because being in the enriched English stream I could spit on a page and get an A. That being said, Mrs. B. my 11th grade teacher, did not appreciate me choosing “the rock star” Bob Dylan as a poet for an end-of-term project so she gave me an A-.

I had been inspired by my 10th grade teacher who let us kids listen to Jesus Christ Superstar in class instead of deconstructing some dull Dickens novel. For this 11th grade Dylan project, I listened to my older brother’s Best Of Bob long play album over and over to transcribe the lyrics, my index finger recklessly jiggering the stylus on the turntable of his beloved brand new stereo system. I didn’t get all of the words. For My Back Pages, I transcribed “half racked refrigerators” instead of “half wracked prejudice.” Maybe that was why I lost the marks. Doubt it, though.

Still, in hindsight, who was right about Bob Dylan, my teacher Mrs. B or me? Nobel Prize, eh? Today, I regularly listen to both Bob Dylan and Murray Head on Spotify, my musical sensibilities firmly entrenched in that time period.

Back then, in the early 1970’s Jay, the cool and the clever, wasn’t afraid of ever getting less than an A in any subject. I recall him blithely waltzing into grade eleven English class on the very last day, his arms piled high with long overdue essays that, apparently, he had tossed off the night before. And then, performing for the class, he casually let go of them one-by-one onto the teacher’s desk. What style he had! What panache! I should have married him.

Asia, Black Sea Germans, genealogy, Germany, Greece

I Wanna Believe!

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40 plus degrees in Athens, 2010. Do I look as if I belong? On the same trip, in Plomari, Lesvos, Greece, an old Romani woman tried to sell me some lace. I turned her away. Little did I know she might have been a relation. Now, I wish I had bought the lace.

The Truth is Out There. Or Is It?

A short time ago, I wrote a story here about my unknown bio-father’s origins or, at least, his possible origins. He was probably half Black Sea German and Half Pontic Greek. That was my best guess, anyway. My paternal grandparents were likely a mixed German and Pontic Greek couple, I thought, maybe from Odessa, maybe from the Crimea, maybe from Dobrudja in Romania. (Yes, I had done my homework.)1

I was leaning heavily on Ancestry’s ethnicity estimate for this highly unscientific theory – my latest ethnicity estimate says that my DNA signature is 16 plus percent Germanic (North Western Germany and Southern Germanic) and 18 percent Anatolia and the Caucasus. Then I have bits and pieces of other places from Denmark (7%) to Mongolia. I get no journeys for the paternal side.

To put this into perspective, I use my mother’s ethnicity estimate. She is a dyed-in-the-wool (sic) back-to-the-boat French Canadian. Ancestry gives her side 37 percent Quebec, 3 percent France, 2 percent Norway, 6 percent Cornwall (Brittany?) 2 percent Northwestern Europe/Southeastern England, and a touch of Indigenous. My one journey is spot on, a swatch of land north of Montreal, the Lachenaie Seigneury.

I have 25, 000 cousin matches on my mother’s side, the closest being related to my mother’s grandmother, Melina Gagnon, at 200 centimorgans.

I have a mere 2,000 matches on the paternal side. Only a handful are ‘closer’ cousins, 30-60 centimorgans. These closer matches live in Turkiye and have Turkish names or live in Germany and have German names. To muddle things up, quite a few of my Turk matches now live in Germany.

Some of my German matches have extensive trees, many that lead to 1860 Besserabia, specifically the Odessa Region, more specifically Hoffungstal and Kassel villages. These are classic Black Sea Germans. One triangulated group with a common ancestor is from Galicia, near L’viv.

None of my Turkish matches have good family trees, but almost all (with one notable exception, my closest match at 3rd cousin)5 have the Pontic Greek journey. I reached out to some of them and they seem very confused about their ‘Greek’ heritage.

This is the sum total of my evidence. It’s all I have to go on. Hence, my half-and-half theory. It makes good sense, I think, until you factor in all of those pesky Romani Gypsies.

Those Mysterious Gypsies

Yes, I have many, many Romani cousin matches, all distant, 15-30 centimorgans. Indeed, the vast majority of my paternal cousins are from the ‘Traveller’ community.

These Romani hail from virtually every corner of Europe.

Yet, my ethnicity estimate on Ancestry gives me only one or two percent Romani – and that took years to show up. Why so many Romani matches with so little Romani DNA?”6

Call Mulder and Scully?

From the very beginning in 2017, I perceived something bizarre on My Heritage. I had a large group of matches, many closely related to each other, all sharing a slim slice of chromosome 17 with me. And, weirdly, these matches lived all over the place in Romania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Albania, North Macedonia, Cyprus, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Turkiye, Greece, Finland, Sweden, Poland, Ukraine, Austria, Switzerland, the UK and, yes, Germany.

I was flummoxed. I created a database to make sense of these crazy matches. I joked to my son, “I need to call in Mulder and Scully because the truth is out there and it’s likely very strange.”

But, then, in 2018 Ancestry updated its ethnicity estimate to give me that bit of Romani DNA. Eureka! And, get this, they gave me the Romani journey, too, the only journey on my bio-father’s side. (Alas, they have since removed it.)

Genealogical Mish-mash

Soon after, My Heritage added their ‘communities’ function based on tree evidence and I could see that these chromosome 17 ‘aliens’ were branches of a Romani Gypsy community reaching from Russia to the UK, with the bulk derived from ‘Vojvodina Serbia/Hungary’ as well as ‘Greece/Turkiye/North Macedonia/ and Albania. 2

I looked up Vojvodina. Four subgroups of Romani live in Serbia, apparently: a Romanian or ‘Wallachian’ one; a “white” or Hungarian one; a Bosnian one; and a Turkish one. That didn’t help.

It was a mind-boggling genealogical mish-mash.

It Wasn’t About the Bomb

I’m no scientist, obviously, despite that early effort with a database. When in the mood, I turn to colourful doodles – and meditation – to open my mind to the elusive TRUTH.

Over the years I’ve filled many notebooks with genealogy doodles, trying to open my mind. Years ago, apparently, I wrote “Gypsies are Key.”

(No luck yet.)

Still, it is clear I am not the product of some kind of alien intervention, or genetic remodelling caused by the massive thermo-nuclear bomb the Americans set off at the Bikini Atoll in March, 1954, when I was conceived. The fallout reached Quebec, apparently. (Wouldn’t that make a good plot for the new X-Files show?)

The truth of my origins is much more down-to-earth. I am a (very small?) part of an ancient and storied community, one that has long been misunderstood and much maligned. Even the word Gypsy has pejorative undertones. They were called Gypsies because it was believed they came out of Egypt when they actually came of out India.

The Problem with the Half-and Half Theory

In those early days, eight long years ago, on My Heritage I had around 40 Romani matches. Today, I have hundreds and hundreds on both the Ancestry and My Heritage platforms, some 50-100 percent Romani, others with lesser amounts. Every day, I get a couple of new Gypsy-related matches, attached to Europeans and Anatolians. (Today’s match, for instance, gets 11% Romani and 75% Ukrainian.) These days, it seems, these Chromosome 17 Romani are essentially the ONLY matches I get on my bio father’s side.5

Here’s my problem: If my bio-father’s Turkish side has chromosome 17 Romani (Albanian names like Gashi and Krasniqi and Berisaj prevail) and his Germanic side has chromosome 17 Romani (often Hungarians with Horvath, Varga, Toth surnames) and these people are all related, how can my bio-dad be ‘half-and-half,’ say with a mom attached to Baden-Wurrtemberg and a dad to Trabzon?

Maybe my bio father was some kind of mish-mash himself and not strictly half Germanic and half Pontic Greek. Maybe the bit of Romani ancestry I have is key to knowing from whence this man came, as I mused on paper many moons ago.

Whatever, I have to assume that the online algorithms (iffy embryonic science or mere infotainment to begin with) are missing something essential…

The Discovery

As it happens I may have discovered a possible explanation for my bio-father’s wacky heritage. It involves an intriguing new theory – not mine.

A while back I got a ‘Romani’ match on My Heritage who had a huge hidden tree (very unusual) and who also matched with me on two chromosomes, 17 as well as 9 (not unusual.)

I messaged the man and he replied that he is a genetic genealogist managing the profiles of a large group of Gypsies from all over the place. (But, I already knew all about that.)

Months later, I contacted the scientist again because, frankly, I had no other avenue to explore with respect to my unknown bio-father.

This time the man, Dr. Douglas Schar, pointed me to his website.

I learned he is a trained scientist (PhD in Botany) of German/Swiss Jewish and Romani extraction. His current area of exploration is Crypto-Jewry and, right now, he is tracing a huge group of Romani people (my group, his group) that he postulates is made up of Crypto Jews.

Gypsy/Jewish Woman?

Now, I can’t pretend to understand the science behind this man’s work but, if I understand his blog posts, he suspects this particular group of Romani (not necessarily ALL Romani) are descended from Yemeni Jews who went to India and then joined a group of Jewish traders, the Rhadanites, on the Silk Road.

This theory is a work in progress, he told me by email. More and more ‘pure’ Romani (members of the Traveller community from all over Europe) are being added to the online databases every day – and finding Jewish heritage. This scientist does not think he is revising the old Out-of- India theory; he says he is just ‘filling in the blanks.’

Yes, he postulates on his blog, the Romani Gypsies came out of India but they were Jewish Indians. They followed the Silk Road, back and forth, from Asia to England, mixing with both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews along the way.3

YourDNAPORTAL OUT OF INDIA Lakania map for my genes. This map sure makes the Silk Road Theory look good.

I Still Wanna Believe

I admit, I like the theory: MDLP algorithm gives me high levels of Romanian Jew and Uzbek Jew. And I get big time Iraqi Jew and Yemeni Jew on the Ancient Near East Algorithm. (Dr. Schar is using the Dodecad algorithm on Gedmatch so as ‘to compare apples and apples.’)

MDLP 22. I suspect the bio-guy was a Ukrainian or Greek, not from any online info, but from my family situation in 1954.

Could this genetic genealogist’s theory explain my unknown bio-father’s wonky, opaque ancestry that perplexes all the online algorithms?

Could it be, that from this perspective, I am much more than one measly percent Romani Gypsy, even if my bio father, whoever he was back in 1954 Montreal, identified as Ukrainian, or German, or Swiss, or Greek or Hungarian or Romanian Jew, or English or French Canadian or WHATEVER. Could it be that, on my bio-father’s side, I derive from a group of people as yet not widely understood?

Good grief. I doubt I will ever know the Truth, even if it is ‘out there’ and, perhaps, not so otherworldly at all.

END

Dr. Schar’s website:

https://gypsyandjewish.com

Dr. Schar’s papers are available on Academia.edu

  1. I did enough research to start on three fictional origin stories about a meet up between a Pontic Greek and a German: Reading Ovid in Dobrudja, Reading Gogol in Odessa and Reading Euripides in Crimea. Each of those authors, all favorites of mine in college by happenstance, have ties with those specific countries.
  2. Two surnames comes up in more than one Romani tree: Gashi and Krasniqi, both the names of Albanian tribes. The Gashi tribe went to Serbia and North Macedonia, which fits. Mustafa too is a common surname. Other Romani communities my matches have include “Serbia/Germany/ Turkiye/France” and “Serbia/Bosnia/Bulgaria/Romania” and “Romani in Russia/Germany/Poland/Czech/Latvia/Lithuania.” See, a real mish-mash.
  3. To further amend the “Out of India” narrative, Dr. Schar says he also believes “this migration was not just east to west, rather that people went east to west and west to east several times in a lifetime. They were most likely traders who travelled the Silk Road, to and fro. “
  4. The other day I watched a show on YouTube about the Middle Ages Guilds in England and learned the top two guilds, in wealth, were textile and spices. (Silk Road items for the wealthiest in England.)
  5. My closest Turkish match on Ancestry (whom I presumed was Pontic Greek) also has 1 percent Romani on her Ancestry ethnicity estimate. (We share 60 centimorgans or third cousin.)Unlike me, she still gets the Romani journey along with the Slovak/Hungary Border journey. (The two appear to go together here.) Oddly, she does not get the Pontic Greek journey. How can that be? (I messaged the lady immediately. She seemed totally perplexed about her Anatolian, Greek Islands, Romanian, Ukrainian, Romani ethnicity results. Soon, she went radio silent on me. That always happens with my Turkish matches, friendly at first until they realize they are not what they think they are.) I have related matches on Tinos in the Cyclades and some platforms give me Andros Island next door. Very specific!
  6. Endogamy is the logical answer. The Romani community is highly endogamous so a 25 centimorgan match ( or even a thousand plus 25 centimorgan matches on the same chromosome) might not mean anything much. In fact, you can say the same for my French Canadian ancestors :)Unless there’s a tree match don’t trust the centimorgan count.

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View of the waterfront square from a small resto around the corner from my older brother’s holiday home in Plomari, Lesvos, Greece. Delicious Dolmades. Best I’ve ever had – and I worked in Park Extension, Montreal in the 1980’s. Displaced Greeks from Pontus, Turkiye were sent to Lesvos in 1923. I recall an old Romani woman pestered me at a resto to buy her lace. I declined. She mumbled something that I took to be unpleasant. I thought, “Don’t be mean. I’m as witchy as you are.” Little did I know she may have been a distant cousin. I now wish I had bought the lace!

Ancestry’s Southern Romania: “Some of the ethnicities modern Romanians belong or can trace their roots back to are Hungarian-speaking Székelys, Saxon Germans, Jews, Roma, and Greeks, to name a few, and this mix of cultures is reflected in the foods, architecture, and music of Romania.“

England, genealogy

The Prettiest Village in North Yorkshire

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Here I am carrying our haul from the craft fair. This is one of the most photographed houses in the UK apparently. Its image is found on cookie tins, etc.

During my childhood in the 1960’s, my father, Peter, often promised to take me to England where his parents were born and where he spent all of his school years. On one occasion the ticket and passport were in my hungry little hands. But, somehow the trips always fell through. “Business,” he said, but I knew it had to be more than that.

My father’s ties to England were strained. He actually was born in Malaya to British expats, Robert Nixon and Dorothy Forster from the north of England. As was the tradition, he and his younger sister, Denise, were sent back to England at a very tender age to attend school – and to live with random relations during the summer months.

Being a child of Empire, he had no clannish ties to England, and, yes, many sad associations with the country, abandonment for one. This likely accounted for his ambivalence about going back ‘home.’

(I read somewhere that upper class British parents were cruel to their children just for this reason, to discourage attachments that would keep their children close to home when the Empire needed them. My father’s people definitely were not upper class, not nearly, but it amounted to the same thing.)

It wasn’t until the mid 1990’s that my father finally decided to cross the pond – on his own this time. He stayed with his sister Denise in Hampshire and took drives north, one time to see ‘an old auntie’ – or so he said.

My father had passed away before I ever got to England. That was in 2006. I, too, stayed in Hampshire with my Aunt Denise. I had a lovely time. My aunt was a most loving and gracious host.

Only twice before had I met my Aunt Denise, the first time when she surprised us in Montreal in 1978 (I had just graduated from university) and then in 2005, when she travelled to Canada to see my father in his final days.

Arriving at her Hampshire home, I noticed something rather touching on the side-board in her living room: a framed photograph taken of us at the summit of Mount Royal back in 1978.

The photo on the side-table. Whether she had put it there 30 years before or whether she had just put it there for my visit, it was a nice gesture.

After visiting Denise, I stayed in quaint Harrow-on-the-Hill because my cousin Peter, a former England rugby star, was a teacher at Harrow School. He took me to eat in the prof’s dining hall in that storied institution.

Just recently, in September of 2024, inspired by some YouTube videos, I took my second trip to England, a genealogy trip to Helmsley, North Yorkshire where my grandfather, Robert, a lowly footman at Duncombe Park in 1911, was born.

I had long wanted to visit Helmsley but my husband isn’t keen on driving in England. My son has no such qualms however so we went took the trip together.

After settling into our comfy air bnb cottage in the center of town, we took the nearby path, part of the famous coast-to-coast Cleveland Way, six miles back and forth to Rievaulx village where my father’s great grandmother Ann Nesfield lived most of her life – and where his grandmother, Mary-Ellen Richardson was born.

The Fairy Staircase (Emily Carr’d-up). Going down was almost as hard as going up, the stairs were so unevenly spaced.

As I staggered up-and-down the daunting Fairy Staircase between Helmsley and the small village of Rievaulx, I mused to myself about all the ancestors who likely trod on the same steep, uneven steps. No doubt trysts and assignations happened on these stairs, tucked away as they are in the woods between the two places.

That long six mile walk did me in, though, so the next day I did not feel like visiting York, our planned destination. Instead, we drove to a nearby village Thornton-le-Dale. The YouTube video claimed it was the prettiest village in North Yorkshire, so why not?

We walked around the picturesque place, bought some gifts at a crafts fair in the Town Hall, visited the duck pond as well as a thatched cottage that is famous in the UK, and then ate chili at a place called Baldersons Welcome Cafe in the center of town. There was a very classy gift shop attached – so we browsed.

Then we embarked on a shorter one mile hike on a very narrow path past gurgling streams and through fields of grazing sheep to an odd little place, Ellerburn, that consists of two or three delightful thatched cottages and one (rather smelly) church, St. Hilda’s, founded in the early Saxon era. Then we drove back to Helmsley, things getting a little tense in the town of Pickering because of a U-turn that got us trapped on a very narrow, very steep street.

We took a photo of this resto’s sign, not realizing it is a family business and has been so for a century.

Helmsley has long been the market town in the area. Today, it is a pretty touristy kind of place with fancy hotels and even a Micheline starred resto. My father’s ancestors, I have learned, were farmers, labourers and preachers. I imagine boiled mutton and oatcakes were their mainstays, not “herb fed chicken with liver parfait” and the likes served up today in the local eateries.

My son and I had a great trip, despite the many rainfalls, first to Edinburgh, then to Helmsley and then on to Whitby on the coast whence came the Nesfields who, of course, were mostly fisherman and sailors.

Ellerburn, “where time stands still,” a place so small the Google car didn’t get there- but you can have a meal in the “Tea Cozy” tea room.

But, the oddest of coincidences: Two weeks after I had returned home to Canada, my Ancestry app sent me a ‘photo hint’ for someone in my tree and I recognized the restaurant my son and I had just visited in Thornton-le-Dale, Baldersons Welcome Cafe! (Had it shown up before our trip, it would have meant nothing to me.)

It seems Ethel Nixon, my great aunt, who I had hidden away in my Ancestry family tree, married a local man, PB Balderson in 1925, a fact I had forgotten. It took me only a few minutes of Internet research to discover that the restaurant I had visited by chance was a 100 year old family business!

I contacted the resto on Facebook and Ethel’s great granddaughter replied. She told there’s a picture of the family on a wall inside the restaurant. Too bad! We had dined in the outside garden area.


What a missed opportunity!

Driving into Helmsley on good roads (thank goodness). Was the rainbow for me – or are rainbows frequent because of the highly variable North Yorkshire weather? (Precise weather forecasts are useless in these parts, we learned.)

So, my great aunt Ethel Nixon, unlike her older brother Robert, the footman turned Malayan planter, stayed close to home marrying a local man in the bakery business. They moved around a bit, but eventually started up bakery/cafe in oh-so-pretty Thornton-le-Dale. Perhaps Ethel was the ‘old auntie’ whom my father saw during his England trip. She died in 1996.

The cafe (now also a bakery and gift shop) stayed in the family and has been managed down the decades by Ethel’s children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. All this is a town considered, then and now, to be one of the prettiest places in the North of England.

Lucky Edith. Lucky descendants.

Cool, wet Whitby. Whitby Castle at the top. Anne Nesfield my dad’s great grandmother was born in suburban Sleights. Hence his middle name : Nesfield. Whitby and Pickering in Ontario are named after these towns. The original surveyor was apparently from North Yorkshire.
YES IT DOES!

The ‘old auntie’ apparently explained that his father, Robert Nixon, humble servant, of Hemsley, North Yorkshire went to Malaya in 1912 because he got ‘the daughter of the local Earl’ pregnant. A close relation who contacted me on this blog claimed he was always told that Robert got a servant pregnant. No biggie there.

So either Robert was sent away by an angry and rich father or he REALLY didn’t want to marry a poor girl like himself and decided to get as far away as possible. How awful!

(I haven’t yet found an unknown relation on Ancestry.) It cost money to travel to Malaya, though – and the opportunity to go out there and possibly get rich was usually given to the sons of wealthy men.

genealogy, Quebec

I am Born

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Chapter 2 of Diary of a Confirmed Spinster a story based on family letters from the 1900 era from Montreal and Richmond, Quebec. The story in pdf form is archived online at National Library of Canada. (See below)

Edith, Herb and Marion Nicholson circa 1890

But, first, let’s go back to the beginning. (But which beginning? The beginning beginning. The I AM BORN beginning, to once again invoke David Copperfield, that despite appearances is not my favourite novel. Middlemarch is.)

Easy enough. I am born in January 1884 in a green clapboard rental house in Melbourne, Quebec, 10 months after my parents’ marriage.

I know this because I have been told and also because the proof resides in shaky ink strokes in my father’s Store Book for 1884.

His household accounts that he kept from 1882, before his marriage to 1921, the year he passed away.

Fifty years of family accounts, kept in little black books.

It could be claimed that the entire story of our family is told in these pocket-size volumes, the practical side at least. The down-to-earth work-a-day side.

I was born in early January 1884 because the store book has an entry on the 7th, inserting baby’s birth 25 cents. I have survived my first challenge.

Under that breast pump 75 cents. Breast shield 25 cents. Along with one quart of milk 5 cents, a loaf of bread 10 cents, a gallon of coal oil, 25 cents. Two cords of wood 8 dollars and 35 cents. 11 pounds of oatmeal 38 cents. One dozen herring 20 cents. 1 ½ pounds of steak 15 cents. And rent 25 dollars a month. The staples of bodily existence then and today: shelter, heat, light and daily bread.

On February 19th a baby cradle is purchased 3 dollars. And some flannel and some cotton for baby. And on April 28, baby’s picture 25 cents. I have officially arrived. I have survived the precarious early days. I am safe to be sketched in silver bromide.

On June 27, 1 baby carriage 6.37. October 1884, one crib. 2.75. Some wool for baby 2.60.

A year later, baby’s first shoes, 1.20. I am now officially a financial burden on my parents. They would spend a great deal on shoes and boots – and the mending of same – for me and my three siblings in the following decades.

In June 1886, a child’s broom is purchased. 15 cents and I begin to pay for my keep. In those days they began teaching girls the womanly arts very early.

Also purchased that month: baby’s first book. We are Scots after all, who value education above all else. “An education is something they cannot take away from you,” my mother always says.

Still, it’s something of a mixed message I am being sent, as a 2 and ½ year old. But I might as well get used to it. Being a female, I will be showered with mixed messages for most of my life.

Then, the narrative in numbers continues: 1890 to 1895 school fees 25 cents a month. The occasional slate 5 cents. Bottles and bottles of cough medicine 25 cents each. (Cough medicine had kick in those days.) Later scribblers 5 -7 cents. Skating rink 10 cents. Soda at Sutherland’s drugstore 5 cents. (Soda had kick in those days, too.)

Also pocket money for Edith 5 cents. I guess I was doing a lot more than sweeping by then. Oddly, my younger brother Herb received ‘wages’ for his household chores.

And then I grow up. St. Francis Academy 50 cents a month. Latin text 1.25. Euclid’s geometry 1.00, the Jamaica Catechism, 80 cents, etc.(Students must purchase their textbooks, many published by the Renouf Company of Montreal, who, in turn, cash city teachers’ paycheques for them, as women don’t have bank accounts.) And I get stockings and gloves at Christmas, just like Mother.

We are living in our own house by 1896, built at a cost of 2,718 dollars, not including landscaping. My father is by now a well-to-do hemlock bark dealer. Hemlock is plentiful in the E.T. and used in the leather tanning process. Father sells his bark to tanneries in Montreal, New Hampshire and Maine.

The mortgage on our house is 30 dollars a month, similar to what we paid on the rental house, but “Tighsolas” or House of Light in Gaelic is ours. And it is a fine house, a brick-encased Queen-Anne Revival in the good part of Richmond, not far from St. Francis Academy on College Street. (The kind of house seen often in Ontario but fairly rare in Quebec.) Building this house my father inspected every plank, brick and tile himself, tossing aside more than he used.

By now, as I said, I have three siblings, a younger brother, Herb and two younger sisters, Marion and Flora, born 1885, 1887, and 1892.

Edith and Herb circa 1910 in front of home in elegant part of Richmond.

By 1901 I am ‘fully out’ : corset for Edith 2.35. I start wearing my hair tied up around then, but only at dances. Combs for Edith: 20 cents.

I graduate from St. Francis Academy II in 1903 and a little later take a stenography course there. Stenography is an up-and-coming profession for women. 13.50 for the course. 1.28 for a shorthand book. 5 cents for a reporter’s notebook.

I pass the course with 100 words a minute in shorthand and 45 words a minute in typing, good enough to get a job, but my parents don’t want me going to the city to work. Life in the city for young working women is a dreary business, at least according to a cousin, Jessie Beacon, in a letter to Mother.

Jessie laments that she works until six at her insurance office, goes home to her boarding house for a “lousy hash complete with garnish of housefly” and then dresses for a predictably boring evening.

My parents are intent on saving me from such a degrading existence and seek a job for me in Richmond, but jobs for young people in country towns are few and far between.

Money is plentiful at home despite the fact my father has had to change lines of work. He now sells pulpwood instead of the bark. At Christmas, over and above the usual stockings and gloves, there are gifts of watches, rings and perfume.

In 1905 my younger sister, Marion, leaves for McGill Normal School and adventures in the Big City. My determined little sister has managed to convince my wary parents that the City is safe, as long as she rooms at the YWCA on Dorchester.

And, as Herb works in Montreal, at the E.T. Bank, she is not alone, so my parents permit her to go despite the great cost: 16.50 a month.

Everything in life is timing!

And I am left alone at home with my little sister, born nine years after me. My parents shower me with ‘pity gifts’ at Easter: 5.00 for a plaid “Montreal” dress. (Plaid voile is all the rage this year, I read it in the Delineator.) 2.35 for a ticket to see the Madame Albani concert in Sherbrooke. Opera singer Emma Lajeunesse, now in her middle age, is a ‘local’ girl from Chambly made good. She is world-famous, a long-time favourite at London’s Covent Garden. So, this is a huge event. All of the. E. T. seems to want to attend.

At 22, I feel like a debutante about to make her grand appearance under the patronage of a local legend. But nothing comes of it. No eligible young men come out to the home-coming concert.

But late 1906 the pulp contracts dry up. To add fuel to this fire, we are disinherited by a wealthy Maiden Aunt on her deathbed.

My brother takes this especially hard.

“Well, now that my house is being given to someone else, I will have to give up all hope of being rich and look at it as a fortune lost,” he writes in a letter home.

“My house? MY house?” exclaims Marion at Christmas. She is now working at Sherbrooke High School and boarding at a Mrs. Wyatt’s who has a daughter, Ruth, Marion’s age. “What has Father been telling him?”

I don’t tell my sister that Herb believes we were disinherited because Old Aunt Maggie did not approve of ‘working women.’

In June 1907 my father is desperate for work with a meagre 33 dollars left in his bank account. He applies to our local Member of Parliament, E.W. Tobin, to work as inspector on the crew building the Canadian Transcontinental Railway.

He receives a polite letter from the TCR offices in Ottawa. They say they have their full complement of inspectors. They acknowledge that Tobin has been in to see them on his behalf.

Then in August a great bridge, half built, collapses, the Quebec Bridge. It was to be the world’s longest suspension bridge. 78 men die, mostly Mohawks from Cawgnawaga near Montreal.

The bridge was a component of the TCR. Magically, there is a need for inspectors at end of steel and father gets the call to La Tuque, to be Timber Inspector at 100 dollars a month.

My parents take out a 1,000 dollar insurance policy on my father’s life. It is well known that jobs on the railway are dangerous.

My mother exchanges one worry for another.

“What is a timber inspector? Is it safe? It doesn’t sound safe.”

And I am still at home, no income, no prospects.

Then arrives a letter from Reverend J. R. McLeod, my mother’s cousin living in a town half way between Montreal and Quebec City.

Three Rivers, Sept. 1907

My dear Friend,

I have but a few minutes to write as prayer meeting is starting. I was asked yesterday by the Manager of Works in a village 15 miles from here if I could find a suitable girl to teach a small school, about 10 children. My thoughts went to you. They will take you without a diploma. They offer $20.00 a month. I know you are fit for the position.

Edith as a school marm, likely 1911-1914 ish in a classic working girl shirtwaist blouse. Neckties were often worn with them.

Regards, Reverend J. R. Macleod

“Should I accept now, I mean that Father is away?” I ask my mother.

“It is your decision to make,” my mother replies. She does not seem surprised at all by the letter from her cousin.

Mother hands me another letter, just arrived in the mail, from a young friend of the family’s, Mary Carlyle. The correspondent omits the obligatory opening pleasantries and gets straight to the irksome point:

“Dear Maggie,

I am writing you with such good news. I am to be married! He is a George White and he is from Kingsey. He is a sweet, kind man, with a good position and very good looking, in my opinion. It is such a relief. I was worried I was destined to be a burden on Father.”

“Kingsey. So, that’s where all the perfect men are,” I say to Mother in a tired voice but my mind is suddenly made up. I climb the stairs to my room to scratch off a note to J.R. McLeod saying I will take the job as offered.

END

(This is Chapter 2 of a novellette I wrote, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, part of School Marms and Suffragettes that can be found at the National Archives of Canada. The story is based on the letters and other memorabilia of the Nicholson family of Richmond, Quebec).

Click to access schoolmarmsandsuffragettes_nixon.pdf

At National Library of Canada. Online collection.

1883 store book: setting up house a year before Edith arrives. Table mats, a clock, flat irons and 45 dollars for furniture!!!
genealogy, Greece

My Grandpapa and the Greeks

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Pages from the WWI era scrapbook my Aunt Flo kept. (I threw out the cover as it was shedding).Link to Furies Cross the Mersey, my novelette about Montreal politics in 1910. https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/Home/Preservica?IdNumber=1586881464&pId=6e933a87-07e9-4cee-ac89-3b2ca1877b42&app=laccat&resource=folderlist

My mom liked to tell me that her father, Jules Crepeau, started work at eight years old in the 1880’s sweeping the floors at Montreal City Hall and that by the Roarin’ Twenties he had risen to be the highest paid civil servant in the city.

This family myth spoke volumes to me: my grandfather was a self-made man and a man of the very highest calibre.

By 1921, when my mother was born, Jules was Director of City Services responsible for just about everything that came down in the city, from the Prince of Wales’ official visits to damage control during typhoid epidemics to the handing out of liquor licenses in the Prohibition Era

All seven city departments were under his control, including and most significantly, the Police Department. My mother said that my grandfather occasionally brought her to work at City Hall. This must have made quite a huge impression on her.

My aunts Alice and Flo and my mom, circa 1922.

My grandfather’s City Hall file reveals that he started out young as an intern in the city Health Department in 1888 and by 1901 he had worked his way up to the position of Second Assistant City Clerk, * aka the person who sees all the paperwork that passes though City Hall.

Jules had complete recall so this was a useful learning experience. In 1921, he landed that plum post of Director of City Services, a new position set up specifically to ensure an even distribution of municipal assets across the wards. Before the post was created, community groups from across the spectrum were invited to give their input on the subject.

I have since learned that Montreal’s burgeoning Greek community most probably had a hand in his promotion.1

A few years after my mom died in 2009, I took a closer look at a disintegrating family scrapbook my Aunt Flo had kept. It contained yellowed news clippings from 1928 and 1930. In 1928, my grandfather was being applauded for his 40 years of stellar service at City Hall. In 1930, he was being forced out by new Mayor Camillien Houde.

I noticed that the dilapidated black volume had originally been a minute book for The Crethan Company, a confectionery/food distribution company run out of Clarke Street by a handful of Greek men as well as my grandfather.

1917 minutes. Crethan Company. The company distributed food, olive oil, fruits, confections. Likely supplying Greek restaurants.
oops. Someone didn’t pay their bills

The President was Harry Pulos aka Harambolous Koutsogiannapoulos, the defacto leader of the early Greek Community in Montreal.2 How interesting.

You see, by that time, I had researched my genealogy and discovered that my mom’s Uncle Isadore Crepeau had been VP of United Amusements, a movie distribution titan founded in the 1910’s by Laconian immigrant George Ganetakos. Ernest Cousins, an Anglo businessman was President..

So, I checked to see if these two men, Harry Pulos and George Ganetakos, were related: the answer is very likely.3

My mother had never mentioned her father’s Greek connections, not once, but she did talk about working in the Montreal movie biz before she was married.

In 1941, right out of Marguerite Bourgeoys secretarial school, my mom got a job at RKO Movie Distribution, a United Amusements affiliate.4 Both companies were located on Monkland Avenue in Notre Dame de Grace, near her family home at the corner of Oxford and Monkland. (LINK to story I Remember Maman)

Taking an even closer look at the Minute/Scrap Book I suddenly noticed the significance of the dates. The Crethan Company was started in 1916 and ran until (at least) 1922 when the minutes end.

Honored by council in 1928, thrown out in 1930.

Grandpapa Jules seems to have aligned himself at just the right time with these ambitious men from Laconia. They probably helped him land his prize post and, in turn, he helped them with motion picture and restaurant licenses. 4 I can’t prove it, but Jules almost certainly got his brother Isadore, an insurance salesman, his gig as VP of United Amusements.

How did this get in there? A weird letter, likely my Aunt’s with spelling mistakes.
Dear Ray. How happy I was to receive your news and to hear your voice by telephone. .you can’t imagine how nice it is when a friend extends his hands when you are ‘dans la peigre.” Does she mean piege as in trap.Pegre as in underworld. If she meant Pegre, is she using a metaphor for ‘being grounded’ or does she truly mean ‘in the underworld?

In 1927 came the fatal Laurier Palace Motion Picture House Fire, where 78 children perished in a crush to the door. It was a real game changer in Quebec, and my grandfather got caught smack in the middle. He was blamed for looking the other way when citations were given to movie houses for letting in children unaccompanied by an adult.

George Ganetakos, using the name George Nicolas, immediately set up a fund for the victims. During the inquest my grandfather brought in Earnest Cousins to plead for continued Sunday showings. Isadore also spoke. Sunday showings for adults were allowed to continue.

As it happens, two years before in late 1924 during an inquest into organized crime, corrupt policemen and Montreal’s sex industry, a cop-on-the-take took the stand and accused the Greeks of “corralling” children into movie houses and warned, “one day there’s going to be a fire and no one will be able to get out.” He wasn’t even being asked about movie houses: He brought this up out of the blue. I suspect this cop was a go-between and he was sending a coded message to my grandfather.

My grandfather certainly thought so. He had that same policeman fired the very next day.

Top: 1929 annual report United Amusements. Isadore would ‘fall’ out of his 7th story office window in 1933. Bottom: movie houses owned by UA. The list of these movie palaces would grow. My Great Uncle Isadore was shown on a talkie film at the opening of the Monkland Theatre. Isadore’s glass company would make a mural to adorn the Rivoli. It’s still there today. (Mcgill digital archives.) N.L. Nathanson, an American was in Toronto, head of Famous Players. The two companies were associated.

My grandfather, in turn, was ousted in 1930 by the new Houde administration, but not before negotiating a huge life pension, likely in exchange for his silence. In 1937, during the Depression his hefty pension was rescinded by City Hall as an emergency measure – and just two weeks later my grandfather got run over by a plain clothes policeman, an LP Coulson, near his home in NDG. Hmm. He spent three months in hospital (for a broken leg?) and died the next year of complications at the age of 59.

My opinion only: Obviously my grandfather had nothing to do with the fatal fire, but his enemies may have had a hand in it.

The Laurier Palace was owned by Syrians, a group that was often conflated with Greeks back in those days.

Funny, whenever I’d ask my mom why I couldn’t go to the movies as a child she would tell me the story of ‘all the little babies who died in the Laurier Palace Fire’ and she’d pretend to rock an infant in her arms.

She didn’t know the real story.

The End

  1. L.O. David, the patrician head City Clerk, was a scholar who preferred working on his history books over the bureaucracy of City Hall. My eager-beaver grandfather got to do all the work! Montreal had universal male suffrage, but in the century earlier Montreal was an English majority city and the Mayors had to have 10,000 dollars in the bank just to run and the aldermen had to have 2,000 dollars and be fluent in speech and writing. They abolished these rules in and around 1910 as the city grew, absorbing the suburbs. The city became majority French. They also abolished the rule that an English Mayor must follow a French Mayor. Populist mayors, petit bourgeois, were now elected instead of the well-educated professionals of the Victorian Age. It must also be noted that the post of Mayor became less and less powerful, almost a figurehead in the 1920’s with the Executive Committee having all the sway. 1910 saw an immigration boom, so there were important votes to be had among these newcomers.
  1. To Build the Dream, Sophia Florakas Petsalis. 2000 explains that Koutsagiannopoulos was a pre-turn of the twentieth century arrival who had a fruit store across from where Eaton’s would be built, a highbrow location. Phillip’s Square was so ritzy, it was one of the few areas female students from Royal Victoria College up on Sherbrooke, were permitted to venture. According to the book, Pulos made sure to take care of his fellow Laconians, finding them jobs upon landing, etc. Other names on the board: Pappas, Antoniou; Economides; Crethan, Pappadakis, Karalambos and at one point a Forget.
  2. Drouin (Greek EvangelizmosChurch Montreal) reveals that in 1907 a Zarafonity from Dourali Laconia married a Koutsgiannopoulos- a marriage witnessed by Ganetakos, also from Dourali. He likely had a Zarafonitis mother. Koutsogiannopoulos also was godfather to John Zarafonity son. Later..I found the obit for Marguerite Tzanetakos 1939, born Zarafonitis Dourali Greece, married to Nicholas Tzanetakos, who owned resto at Phillip’s Square *University and St. Catherine, aunt to George Nicholas (ie. George Ganetakos)..Hmm.
  3. Lovell’s Directory reveals this fact. She lived on Monkland and Oxford with her Mom and brother and sisters. Her dad died in 1938.

Greek men (mostly from Laconia, many related),were involved in all aspects of the movie distribution industry in Montreal back in the day. Ganetakos was only the most prominent of these movie men. The Syrians who were conflated with Greeks in the newspapers might have been Pontic Greeks from Turkey. or not (added May 2026) Looking up the arrival of a Zarafonitis, I found a ship manifest that had his name, with Greek written and crossed out for his nationality and Syrian written over that. Other men had the same thing. Hmm. Curiouser and Curiouser.

These new Canadians often started out working in the food industry, often pushing carts through the streets, then starting up stalls and then expanding into stores, cafes and restaurants.

The story goes that Ganetakos’s uncle, Demetre Zarafonitis, started playing ‘flickers’ at his fancy uptown café, the Cosy Parlour near Phillips Square, and that George noticed these early movies were more popular than the ice cream.So he started up his own motion picture house, the Moulin Rouge in 1908.

Two decades later, George Ganetakos was working out of his palatial office on Monkland Avenue, distributing Hollywood films for Famous Players and RKO, building architectural masterpieces like the Rialto Theatre on Park Avenue, and getting lots of press in the Hollywood trade journals. (My grandfather got a fair bit of press there as well.)

It seems that George Ganetakos was as much of a self-made man than my grandfather. However, I had contact with a descendant of the Zarafonitis’ and she was told her ancestors got the bum deal.

Greeks were referred to as Syrians in the press and they faced obstacles to their success by established merchants. People complained the cart pushers yelled too much on the street. At one point, the city wanted to tax stall merchants 200 a year as they did regular stores. An alderman, one loyal to my grandfather, spoke up for them saying this would force them out of business.

  1. During the Coderre Inquiry into Police Malfeasance in 1924, a policeman on the stand said that Jules personally forced policeman to look the other way when it came to underage clients of movie houses. He also said Greeks ‘corralled’ young children into the movie houses. He brought this up out of context. No one cared about children and movie houses. In those days, across North America, Sunday showings were often an all- kid affair. (The parents got an afternoon off). And besides, the streets at that time were dangerous with horses and autos running amok with no street rules. The Inquiry was about illegal booze and, mostly, the sex trade. In Juge Coderre’s final report in 1925, published in the Gazette and other places and rehashed for a 1926 US Senate hearing into Prohibition, the testimony getting into a two page spread in the New York Times, Coderre imperiously asked, “Who is this man Jules Crepeau who tells the Chief of Police what to do?”

A strange bit from a May 20,, 1916 Motion Picture World with the guestlist for a bash in honor of a Pathe movie star in town written by a Gazette reporter. Seems to show my Grandfather J. Crepeau with Ernest Cousins of “Independent Amusement”. Is this a typo, supposed to be I for Isadore? Either way a mystery. Did my grandfather dip his toe into the movie business as well as the food business in 1916? Or did Isadore have the movie gig as early as 1916? George Nicholas at top is likely George Ganetakos. (I have to delve deeper. I believe Indepent Amusement became United Amusements.) And is the T Wells my husband’s grandfather? See all the Greek names? Sperdakos, Lerakos etc. and M. Ouimet of the legendary Ouimetoscope.

Added June, 2026. The Vlassos book on the Greeks in Canada, on archive.org has a bit for Harry Pulos, spelled Poulos here.

Poulos is described as the Grand Old Man of the Greek community in Vlassos book, available on archive. Also claims he was instrumental in starting up the Crethan Company and at the time of the printing he owned a cinema. So, he was into cinema too. Peter Crethan is not in the book. I’ve had little luck tracking him down. It seems his family sent a boy to Lower Canada College (who later became head of the Old Boys’ Association) and the sons also participated in WWII and headed the Optimist’s Club of Montreal. However, there are no genealogy records for him or his family online as far as I can see.

Dec, 1921.

I could find no LP Coulson in Montreal on Lovell’s or in the Census. Nor any Coulson police officers.

genealogy, Greece

Greek Tragedy

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Syrian girl with her wares. (National Geographic, November, 1925. Article cited below. This magazine is in the public domain according to Library of Congress. Gervaise Courtellemont. Lumiere company.


Prologue: In my last post I explained how I recently learned, through DNA, that my biological father was likely Pontic Greek on the father’s side. Pontic Greeks are Orthodox Christian Turks who believed they are descended from ancient Greeks, who once lived on the southern coast of the Black Sea in cites like Samsun and Trabzon and who speak either a unique form of Greek or Turkish. In that post, I also wrote about the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. Here, I elaborate.

In 2010, I visited my older brother who lives in Denmark at his holiday home in Plomari, Lesbos, Greece. The large island of Lesbos is off the northwest coast of Turkey. On a good day you can see Turkey from the capital city of Mytilini. It’s only 17 miles away.

Back in 2010, before I explored my DNA, I naturally assumed I was half French Canadian and half Yorkshire British, just like my older brother, but I also knew, deep down in my heart of hearts, that I resembled the Greek locals, both in looks and in temperament.

Plomari village from the back window of my brother’s place.
The harbour is two streets down.

Today, I understand that I am very likely related to some of those local Greek citizens on Lesbos, perhaps even closely related. I know this because of a photograph I recently discovered in an article from the November, 1925 National Geographic magazine.

Greek refugees arriving in Mytilini. 1923

There is no shortage of online information on the 1923 Greek/Turk ‘population exchange’ that came on the heels of a horrific event referred to back then as ‘The Smyrna Holocaust,’ but I had high hopes that this story entitled History’s Greatest Trek. Tragedy stalks through the near east as Greece and Turkey exchange 2,000,000 of their people, written in real time by a world class journalist in a world class magazine, would shed some light on the path my Pontic bio-father (or grandfather) may have taken to reach Montreal, Canada in 1954.

I have tree matches in Samsun, a port on the Black Sea in northern Turkey. My mother, who lived and worked in the Notre Dame de Grace area of the city, likely knew Greek men whose grandparents fled Smyrna (now Izmir) in 1922, on the west coast of Anatolia on the Mediterranean Sea. Could I connect the two places?

I was not disappointed. Right at the beginning of the sixty page article there’s a picture of a young Greek man from Samsun. The caption reads: A Refugee from Samsun. He took part in the first trek of 100,000 refugees from the Anatolian interior.

According to online sources, post WWI, most elite Greeks in Samsun were killed off and all other able-bodied men sent into the interior to join the Turkish army.

Clearly, some of these Pontic Greek men and women escaped the Turkish hinterland to make it to the Mediterranean coast and Smyrna in 1922, in the hope of catching a ride to safety.

This 60 page article from 1925 is a classic piece of National Geographic reporting. It is workman-like in its execution with a prose style on the flowery side. The article offers readers a succinct historical and political perspective on the infamous 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The reporting is objective: The Muslim story is discussed with as much respect as the Christian story. And, of course, the article contains many, many photographs, about one hundred of them. Oddly, the prettiest colour ones all depict quiet Turkish life.

There’s a fascination here with exotic dress, from what I can see.


Still, the author, Melville Chater, pulls no punches as he uses his gift with words to capture the true horror of the situation in the port of Smyrna during the late summer of 1922: the hope, despair, death and disease and, eventually, the chaos, the total breakdown of civilized life.

Chater and his companion were in that coastal city when the Greek military lines collapsed in August, 1922, effectively ending the three year old Greco-Turkish war. They were in Smyrna in September to witness the Greek soldiers flee home on their military barques, leaving only ‘neutral’ observer boats in the habour.

Immediately thereafter, they saw the victorious Turkish cavalry enter the city, the riders’ left palms outstretched in a peace gesture, and a few days hence they witnessed the great fire of Smyrna that forced local citizens to flee in chaos to the quay and mix with the tens of thousands of refugees from further afield amassed there. By this time “the city had become a gigantic blast furnace… Affrighted faces mingled with wild-eyed animals, and human cries with the neigh of horses, the scream of camels, and, last, the squeaking of rats, as they scuttled by in droves from the underworld of a lost Smyrna.”

The beginning, late August, 1922.

“Refugees from anywhere within 150 miles inland herded seaward into Smyrna. At first they came in orderly trainloads or in carts, with rug-wrapped bedding, some little household equipment, and perhaps even a few animals, But as the distant military momentum speeded up, the influx became a wild rabble of ten, then twenty, then thirty thousand a day. Their increasingly scanty possessions betokened a mad and yet madder stampede from the scene of sword and fire, until September 7 saw utterly destitute multitudes staggering in, the women wailing over the first blows of family tragedy, whereby mothers with no food for their babies had been forced to abandon their older children in wayside villages….

….By now Smyrna’s broad quay swarmed with perhaps 150,000 exiles who camped and slept there, daily stretching their rugs as makeshift shelters against the sun, whose furnace-like heat was the mere forerunner to a terrible epic of fire.”

The Greek Army flees,the Turkish cavalry arrives.

On September 23rd, a fire breaks out in the Armenian quarter. The Turks give permission for women and children and old men to leave. People are dispatched to Athens to organize a flotilla of rescue boats. The Turks then give the rescuers one week to evacuate the refugees or they will be forced into the interior. Further chaos ensues.

“Uncounted hundreds were crushed to death or pushed over the quayside to drown, on that first day, when eight ships, convoyed by American destroyers left with 43,000 souls aboard. For those left behind there remained but six more chances—a chance a day—then the black despair of deportation into the interior.

These men were not allowed to leave Smyrna after the fire with their families. “Everyone from peasants to bankers” is how these Anatolian Greek refugees are described in the article. Also as “human derelicts” and descendants of ‘those adventurous spirits who had followed Alexander the Great into Asia.” Some men apparently escaped at Smyrna, swimming to rescue boats under the cover of night. Some wealthier men bought their way onto boats. 300,000 thousand people were evacuated in two weeks, including 100, 000 ‘cellar-hiders’ in Smyrna, uncovered by the Turks in a house-to-house search.

The aftermath:

A notification is posted permitting (well, forcing) all non-Muslims to leave Asia Minor before November, 30, 1922. Hoardes of Anatolian Greeks, former prisoners of war, men, women and children, head to the Black Sea coast.

“With ship-deserted quays, as at Smyrna, and with the Black Sea ports glutted with sidewalk-sleeping, disease breeding paupers, who had been thrifty cottagers a few weeks before, the gap was finally bridged by the arrival of Greek ships flying the Stars and Stripes and convoyed by American destroyers….

….”By January, 1923, Athens had slammed its official doors protesting against further expulsions.”

With a big nudge from the US, Britain and the League of Nations, Athens agreed to accept hundreds of thousands more Christian Greek refugees in an exchange for Muslims living in Greece.

The exchange would begin in May, 1923 and be carried out in various ways. Most Greek refugees are funnelled to the Athens region as well as to Thessonaliki in the northern part of Greece and to some Aegean Islands like Lesbos.

They live in refugee camps rife with disease and death. There is little usable land left in Greece due to past wars.

Greece, then a country of 6 million souls, would take in almost a million and a quarter refugees within a year of the Smyrna disaster, increasing its population by 25 percent.

“There is no adequate parallel whereby to convey even remotely a picture of Greece’s plight in 1923,” Chater summarizes.

Pretty heavy stuff – and yet the 1925 magazine article somehow manages to maintain the feel of a breezy travelogue.

Greek refugee camp Macedonia

Epilogue:

In the style of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway, I imagine a comfortably middle class lady, back in the mid 1920’s, perhaps my husband’s grandmother in her favourite club chair in her cottage in Westmount, flipping through this very issue of the National Geographic, cup of tea in one hand. The inky new pages crackle as she turns them with her free hand. “How awful,” she whispers under her breath when she gets to the bit about the Greek women holding their still-born babies at their breasts because they had no place to bury them. And, then, “How pretty,” as she eyes the flowing costumes on the Turkish women, the colourful mosques and the charming minurats. And, then, as she comes to the full-page advertisement for Campbell’s Soup at the end of the article, she perhaps thinks, “Yes, tomato soup for the children, for tomorrow’s lunch.”

Here’s the archive.org link.

https://archive.org/details/nationalgeographic19251101/page/550/mode/2up?q=mosques

Black Sea Germans, Pontic Greeks, Tatars

Genealogy Rabbit Hole

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Kataryna, Serf. Taras Shevchenko. (Taras Shevchenko Museum) World History .ORG Creative Commons
Yes, the street in Lasalle is named after this celebrated Ukrainian painter/poet!

Exploring your genealogy is something of a luxury. You need the knowledge to do it, the time to do it, sometimes the money to do it. And you need the ancestors to do it, that is to say ancestors who came from relatively stable, peaceful places; countries where good records were kept.

People in North America and Western Europe sometimes have this luxury, the rest of the world, well, not so much.

My ‘official’ family tree is half French Canadian and half North of England, so easy to put together. My biological tree is half French Canadian and, let’s say, something not Western European, something very, very complicated and sometimes hopelessly obscure.

On Ancestry, the record makes clear that most of my mother’s people hail from the Lachenaie seigneury, north of Montreal. That’s a very small area. There are hundreds of cousin trees to prove this.

My unknown bio-father’s side is from all around the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. That’s the crux of it, anyway.

My Ancestry Ancestral regions. Not an exact science by any stretch but getting better. The Green is “French”, my Mom. 46% She has a touch British and Norway. My bio-father, a colourful mix of Germanic Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and Southern Italy and Eastern Mediterranean, with touches of Balkan, Greece and Albania, Eastern Europe, Persia, Romani, Mongolia, China. Some Crimean Tatars online who have done their DNA have similar mixes without German.

We’re talking an enormous area that for centuries was home to myriad populations, myriad cultures that for economic and/or political reasons moved around a lot.

On Ancestry, my mother’s side has 28,000 matches, none of them that close, but that doesn’t matter because I know who my mother is.

My bio-father’s side has but 1,800 matches, only one match at 60 centimorgans, likely a third cousin, and the rest at 20 centimorgans and below. 1

Still, using Ancestry’s various tools to analyze my paternal side’s origins, my best guess is that my bio father was half Protestant Black Sea German (maternal side) and half Pontic Greek (paternal side.)2

YourDNAPortal’s 1000 year old ethnicity estimate is bang on for my French Canadian side and it gives me 11-20 percent Crimean Tatar from the bio-father’s side!

Incredibly, it has taken me a full seven years to figure this out. I must have the equivalent of a Master’s degree in Black Sea Studies. 🙂

I won’t make fun of you if you don’t know what a “Black Sea German” is, although some of the descendants of these people now live in the Dakotas in the United States and in Western Canada.3

They were people from Baden-Wurrtemburg and Alsace (many winemakers) who took their horse drawn wagon trains to Southern Russia (sometimes by way of Galicia, that is the Poland/Ukraine border or Swabia, the Hungary/Romania border) in the late 18th century at the invitation of Catherine the Great who offered them free land, no taxes, and no conscription in order to re-populate areas formerly held by Turks. Catherine didn’t want those nasty Turks coming back. Later, Alexander I opened up Bessarabia (today’s Moldova) to Germans, offering similar incentives.

It was a difficult life (if you survived the journey) but many of these disciplined, hard-working farmers prospered – until they didn’t. Many ‘extra’ sons or cast-outs were constantly on the move looking for a benevolent, fertile piece of land to call home. Young unmarried women sometimes moved away for work.

Some Black Sea Germans, Protestant and Catholic, moved on from Southern Russia/ Bessarabia to settle in the Crimea on land once held by Tatars.4 In later years, Bessarabian German settlers spread out southward to Dobrucha in today’s Romania at the invitation of the Turks who were still in charge there. Ironically, this is where the displaced Crimean Tatars were now living.

The North American descendants of these Black Sea Germans have done a remarkable job chronicling their ancestors’ migrations and daily lives on various websites and databases. This information includes village censuses.

The most intriguing documents, I think, are the anecdotal “village histories” written down by a leading citizen and/or self-styled local historian. Apparently, there was lots of praying as these people were pious; also lots of drunken brawling, as most every town had a tavern; and lots of hardship, too, death from disease and famine, earthquakes and plagues of all kinds. Meeting your end at the bottom of a well was quite common. Hmm.

Initially, there were a handful of ‘orderly’ villages, 25 to 100 and that number grew to around two to three thousand. Although overwhelmingly populated with Germans in extended family clusters, many Besserabian villages also harboured a few Turks, Bulgarians, Romanians and Jews.

Ancestry’s Beresen and Leibmental enclaves of Black Sea Germans, covering Ukraine mostly.(Some ventured to Caucasus because they felt Mount Ararat to be the site of the Second Coming of Christ.)

Black Sea German citizens were so mobile they often named the last village in which they lived as their ‘homeland.’

Since the borders in Austria-Hungary changed so often, even an officially listed nationality like Polish or Austrian means little.

Nationality back then was very fluid.

That’s why delving into the ‘Germanic’ side of my unknown bio-father’s genealogy, although illuminating in one sense, usually sends me down a dizzying rabbit hole.5

Empire of Trebizond, Wikipedia Creative Commons. “A remote and isolated splinter of the Byzantine Empire.”10
This map goes a long way towards explaining my wonky heritage.

The Pontic Greek side is even more obscure. Pontic Greeks are people who believe they are descendants of the original Greek settlers on the Black Sea in the Classical period. 6

They practised Eastern Orthodox Christianity brought in from Byzantium at a later date, lived in vibrant port cities like Samsun and Trabzon in North Eastern Anatolia, and spoke either a form of Greek or sometimes even Turkish. They mixed up their genes with Armenians. Some dressed like Tatars. Many converted to Islam.

Post WWI, these Christian Greeks were forced by the Turks to leave the Pontus, as it is called, in a series of expulsions and death marches, mostly pushed to the Anatolian interior or towards the Caucasus. (This coincided with the Armenian genocide.)

In 1923, Greeks in Turkiye (mostly Pontic) were exchanged for Muslims in Greece. These Greeks primarily went to Thessaloniki in Northern Greece.7

I know I am derived from Pontic Greeks because I have over fifty matches on Ancestry with that particular “journey.”8 Some of these matches live in Turkiye and have Turkish names and when I contact them they seem very upset to discover they are even a small part Greek. Others are merely perplexed.

Many of my Pontic cousin matches have the tell-tale suffix IDIS at the end of their surnames and identify as Greek. They live in the United States and their immediate ancestors hail from Thessaloniki or southern Russia. 6

A handful have Russian surnames.13

Southern Russia! I have a theory. My male Pontic Greek ancestor from Samsun in Northern Anatolia (where I almost certainly have antecedents) took a boat across roiling Black Sea waters to the Crimea, maybe by way of Sochi, where I have a tree match, and met up with my female Black Sea German ancestor. The mountains of southern Crimea had a climate good for growing grapes. I have many sure-fire ancestors in the village of Huffnungstal, near Odessa. Some of these Hoffs, Bollingers, Lutz’s, and Berreths went on to Crimea.

This is more than a stab in the dark. Call it an ‘educated guess.’

The essential point is this: Because of the complex history of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea area, my bio father back in 195412 Montreal may have identified as a Ukrainian (most likely) or a German or a Greek or maybe even a Turk or a Tatar. Or perhaps a Pole or a Hungarian, or even a Romanian Jew14. Or just a Canadian. His ancestors might have been Steppe nomads, serfs or slaves, farmers, vintners, blacksmiths, soldiers,sailors, shopkeepers, shipping magnates, Romani gypsies, noblemen – or all of the above.

Yes, researching genealogy is challenging for most people but next to impossible for people in my situation, with roots around the Black Sea, even if you know who your parents are.

In Soviet society, post WWII, elders kept family history and stories AWAY from their descendants rather than passing the stories on, according to an academic paper I read.9

This was for their protection.

“The less people knew about their family history the better.”

The Pontic Greek diaspora in Europe and North America now struggles to keep its cultural identity. Persons who went to Thessonaliki or other parts of Greece in the 1923 exchange were often slighted by natives and not considered ‘true’ Greeks, so they didn’t showcase their past.

The other surviving descendants of the citizens of the once dazzling Empire of Trebizond now live in Ukraine (Mariupol) and Kazakstan and Turkiye and many likely don’t know (or want to know) their ethnic heritage.

It’s no wonder I can’t figure out who my bio-father is – and probably never will. His relatives, if they exist at all, reside in places where they don’t do DNA – and sometimes for good reason. But, thanks to modern science and copious online sources, I do know an awful lot about his very mixed-up ethnic heritage.

THE END SON Кінець Das Ende Τέλος Koniec Sfârşit

Footnotes

1. I only get one or two new matches on that side a week, or maybe a month. Most are Americans or Brits with some Romani. (I’m 1 or 2 percent Romani) or distant descendants of Black Sea Germans (Eberhard from North Carolina!) and an occasional Pontic Greek.

2. I only know this because I have a twin who did his Y DNA and the one match had a Turkish name. J2A.. My 3rd cousin match, a Turkish woman, is a stand-alone match, with no mutual matches. Her ethnicity profile mirrors my bio-father’s, though, suggesting to me Crimean Tatar roots. See Note 4. Bob Dylan, apparently has a similar ancestry.

3. I am almost certainly related to the Hemmerlings of Gimli, Manitoba. Are you?

Most Black Sea Germans were repatriated to Germany or Poland during WWII. As the borders changed during the war some had to go back to Russia. A few of these Germans lobbying to return to Germany had ‘mixed marriages,’ according to records kept by the Germans. The mates were mostly Russian, but quite often Moldavian (sometimes referred to as Gagauz, a kind of Christian Turk native to Romania) and but rarely Hungarian, Polish, Bulgarian or Greek.

4. Ancestry doesn’t acknowledge Tatars or Crimean ‘journeys’ but on many other platforms the algorithms give me Crimean Mountain Tatar, at least way back. These people were a mix of Northern Italian (Genoa) Southern Italy and Greece, (Sicily), Allans (Persia) and Goths (Germany) with Nogai, as in Steppe Tatars who in turn have Central Asian and Mongolian. (I have all of these things 🙂 I have only one distant match with a tree totally from Crimea and, yes, the surnames are Tatar.

5. I have a cluster of family trees with people from a town called Hoffnungstal in Bessarabia (Odessa area). I also have a cluster in Galicia (Poland-Ukraine border)in a town called Bruckenthal. There was a trade route between these two areas and smack in the middle was a town called Botosani, Northern Romania, where I also have a tree match- a Jewish match with people who moved to Montreal. Yikes! (Any ideas? Contact me, please!)Added a week later: The immigration path of the Black Sea Germans in my trees seems to go from Baden area to Poland down to Galicia north of Lviv, around Moldova to that bit of Ukraine west of Odessa where Hoffnungstal and Kloestitz (my villages) are. The researcher says there were many long stops along the way. Works perfectly. Bruckenthal Rava Ruska is north of L’viv.

6. The Euripides play Iphigenia in Taurus speaks to this. Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon, is saved from death by the goddess Artemis and hidden in the land of the Taurians (Crimea). The Greeks have a long history in Russia. Rich shipping families from the Aegean ran the grain trade there in the 1800s. Many of these rich Greeks assimilated into Russian society. At the founding of Odessa, that became a bustling multicultural economic center, there were already many Greek families, who often were the wealthiest citizens there. At one point the Mayor of Odessa was a Greek.(Odessa Recollected; The Port and the People. Patricia Herlihy. 2018 Boston)

7. According to one online source, the Asia Minor and Pontus Hellenic Research Centre at Chicago, Illinois: In the city of Samsun, where I very likely have some ancestors, 72 Greek community leaders were arrested and sentenced to death in 1921. Other Greek men were killed, imprisoned or conscripted into the army and the women and children sent into exile or deeper into Turkiye where they were forced to change their Greek surnames to Turkish ones.

8. Ancestry gives me no journey on the paternal side, but there is a function that allows me to see the journeys of my paternal matches. These include: all parts of Germany; Black Sea Germans/ Leibenthal Beresen Enclaves; Pontic Greek; Eastern European Roma; North Eastern Hungary/Slovak Border. (That’s on edge of Ukraine near L’viv.) I appear to be connected to Szekelers, a sect of Hungarians who moved to Northern Romania, Bukovina.

9. A. Pahl and Thompson. 1994. Family history was dangerous even for families who left for North America. In Lubomir Gleiman’s self-published book “From the Maelstrom” reflecting on truths and untruths during messy times during WW11 in Eastern Europe (Slovakia) he says that American agents gave his family a story to keep to before their emigration to North America.

10. https://www.grhs.org/pages/Villages A concise list of Black Sea German villages. Many descendants of Black Sea Germans and of French Canadians mixed it up in the Dakotas or Western Canada later on, so I have hundreds of distant ‘unassigned’ matches with both these heritages.

11.https://providencemag.com/2017/09/forgotten-christian-history-turkey-review-byzantiums-empire-trebizond-book-review/

12. In 1954 Crimea was returned by the Russian Soviet Socialistic Republic to the Ukraine SSR. The Russians felt that the Crimea fit more naturally with them.

13. In Family Tree’s public Pontian Greek Y database, the vast majority of subscriber surnames are Russian. This appears to show the extent these people were absorbed into Russian society.

14. MDLP algorithm, that is supposed to be best for people of my bio-father’s ancestry, is unequivocal. I am Romanian. And sometimes a Romanian Jew or Gagauz (that’s the Turkish bit). Lots of Romanian Jews immigrated to Montreal. That would mean perhaps that my closest community is not Black Sea German but Danube Swabian, Wurrtemburg Germans who lived for generations in Romania, Serbia, until expelled after WWII.

This video says genetic studies prove Pontic Greeks are descendants of Ancient Greeks. Indeed, their mountain monasteries preserved elements of Ancient Greek culture long after Byzantium died out. Also, family history information was ‘encoded’ in their dress, the fabrics and patterns of their clothings, every day and ceremonial. Now, that ‘s interesting. Because of their cohesive social system and the make up of their terrain, Pontic Greeks in North Central and Northeast Anatolia largely resisted Turkish invasions.
This book, from the University of Toronto Press, 2014 by Paul Robert Magocsi, is available on Archive.org. It contains pics of a Taurian Burial Ground 300 BC; Greek Amphitheatre; a cave village/Jewish Karaite; early 4th Century Christian Basilica; 14th Century Armenian Church; a Genoese Castle, and many mosques, attesting to the rich, complex history of the Crimea, a place still very much in the news for the usual reasons. This was the home of the sedentary TAT Tatars (as opposed to Steppe Tatars) as well as the Northern Pontic Greeks – as distinguished from the Pontic Greeks on the southern coast of the Black Sea in Northern Anatolia.

Montreal, Quebec

A Spontaneous Act of Kindness

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A World of Education, page from a pamphlet given out to school children in 1967 about Expo 67.

My mother, Mary-Marthe, would put herself out for people. At the check-out counter of the grocery store; on the bus; in the park my mother was not shy about helping out others. She sometimes forced spontaneous acts of kindness on complete strangers, often to my childish embarrassment.

This habit, I imagine, she picked up from her own mother, Maria, a pious French Canadian who married well in 1901 and was generous with food and home-remedies.

The story goes that in the 1920’s my mother’s Sherbrooke Street West grey stone had a mark on the gate that indicated to homeless men, or ‘tramps’ as they called them, that a hearty meal was in store for them should they knock at the back door.

I most vividly recall an incident that unfolded in the summer of 1967, the year of Expo 67, the World’s Fair, when I was a young adolescent and because of my prickly age extra prone to being embarrassed by my mother.

My family lived in Montreal and we all had ‘ passports’ so we could visit the nearby World’s Fair anytime we wanted.

The Canadian section of Expo 67. The Western Provinces Pavilion, a forest, smelled so wonderful compared to smoggy city air!

I was 12 years old and I sometimes took the number 65 bus to those blissfully bright Expo isles alone, likely skipping school, and the bus stop was right under my 6th grade classroom window! I wasn’t too afraid to be found out. Didn’t my teacher say we’d learn more at Expo than at school?

Over that six month period from May to October 1967 I travelled the short bus and metro route to Expo 50 times, sometimes alone, sometimes with my brothers or other relations and sometimes with friends and their families. I recall that one mom was so afraid of losing her many tweenage charges in the swelling sea of thrill seekers she looped a long rope around our waists to keep us contained. How embarrassing!

I wandered to the Expo site in all weather with a packed lunch since I had no extra money to spend.3 I liked the wide open Canadian and Ontario pavilions the best. I’d eat my sandwich on the Katimavik watching the rusty monster emerge from the lake adjacent. I experienced their exhilarating movies1 over and over again. The five Expo theme pavilions were a hit with me, too. 4I mostly avoided the popular national pavilions: the American, Russian, Czech and British pavilions with their long long line ups.

The movie We are Young in the Cominco Pavilion another favourite haunt of mine in the summer of 67. The exhibits explored the five senses. See link below that includes info about The Eighth Day at the Christian Pavilion and all the other landmark films that prepared us well for the future of media.

But I did like escaping to the sculpture garden behind the American pavilion. It was uncrowded, cool and peaceful in that place and all the avant-garde works of art, both life-like and abstract, were exciting to behold.2

One installation at the Sculpture Garden. The Watchers.Lynn Chadwick, UK 1960. No wonder I felt safe.

My older brother, a cutting-edge type, liked the Cuban pavilion for the vibes so we went there together, feeling slightly rebellious. He dragged me into the Christian pavilion one day and we saw a film with a monk setting himself on fire that depressed me for a days. And together we saw Harvard’s famous all-male Hasty Pudding troupe at an outdoor bandstand in a play called a Hit and a Myth that was quite bawdy. Although a good fit for my brother, it was bit mature (sic) for my tastes. I recall the energetic finale, Acalpulco, with a group of ‘grown men’ dressed like Carmen Miranda dancing in a conga line. Their unanchored brassieres kept riding up to their necks.

The list of songs inside this programme reveals that Acapulco was the penultimate song in the play, not the last. Characters in the play included Xerox and Tenintius and there were also Vestal Virgins. The Montreal Gazette said the play was written by the sons of Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights and would be of interest to anyone willing to get into the panty raid spirt. (I checked on Wikipedia: one writer, Timothy Crouse, became a journalist for Rolling Stone. The other, John Weidman, wrote for Sesame Street.)

Yes, I went alone to those glittering Expo Isles in the St. Lawrence, despite the fact that in the spring a policeman had visited our sixth grade classroom to tell us about the dangers lurking there. He said a girl could be drugged in a bathroom and then sold into white slavery. I’m guessing I never mentioned this to my father and mother. I wasn’t too worried being used to walking the big city streets on my own and not understanding the term white slavery – something to do with snow, I imagined. However, I did keep a look out for any suspicious Boris Badenof types around the Russian Pavilion.

Yardley paintbox eye liner from the era. So obviously aimed at little girls like me. I still want one!

My father worked for Expo as a comptroller but I never visited the fair with him. He obviously was too busy. I did go with my mother, though, a few memorable times. On one occasion we saw Bobby Kennedy walk by surrounded by his team of FBI agents in dark glasses, and on another day we witnessed Haille Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. He had a little dog following him. (I assume this wasn’t a coincidence. My mother wanted to see these famous figures.)

And on one very hot day my mom decided to visit the British pavilion. That place, more than any other, always had an especially long line up. This was the era of Swinging London, after all, and the pavilion included a MOD London exhibit with the Beatles (remember them?) and a Mini Minor Car. I was excited to go. I was a big fan of The Avengers with gorgeous Emma Peel karate-chopping Cold War baddies in her colourful Carnaby Street attire and of the Monkees TV show that featured Yardley commercials and “the London Look.”

The long line up at the British Pavilion. No shade. Wikipedia Commons.

My mom and I queued up realizing we probably had a very long time to wait. It was a hot day and in the line you couldn’t escape the sun. The person ahead of us was an ‘older’ woman with a young child – perhaps around 15 months old -who was not happy in the heat. The baby girl was kicking up a big fuss the whole time and would not be pacified, not in her stroller, not in her mother’s arms.

As was her way, my mother struck up a conversation with this woman.

She was British but this is where the similarity to Emma Peel or any other British ‘bird’ ended.

She was tall and thin, yes, but with wispy light brown hair and lots of stress lines around her eyes. Dowdy would be a good way to describe her attire. She was self-conscious about it, too. “I must look like the wreck of the Hesperus,” she said, combing back a rogue lock of hair with her hand.

This statement impressed me. Here was a smart British lady, just like my 6th grade teacher. And yes, in fact, this beleaguered mom was a teacher but in Toronto. She also had a 15 year old son who was off somewhere exploring the grounds – and she was divorced.

I started to feel sorry for her. She said she had driven to Montreal for just one day so her teenage son could visit the Fair. Just one paltry day to see Expo, how sad! And all she wanted was to visit the pavilion of her homeland. Minutes, maybe hours ticked by and the long line inched forward. The little girl squirmed wildly in her mother’s arms, her shiny face getting redder and redder.

We were getting closer to the entrance and then my mother offered to do something very generous. She said WE would watch the baby for the woman in a shady area nearby so that she could visit the British pavilion in peace. (Our own visit would have to wait for another day.) And, what do you know, the woman took her up on the offer. I guess all that time in the line had made us seem safe and familiar to her.

The harried British mother passed through the turnstiles by herself and my mother and I and the baby found a big tree to sit under.

Detail of Mod Britain exhibit British Pathe video.

Then the lady returned and we said our goodbyes.

At Christmas she sent us a card with a long thank-you note written in impeccable teacher handwriting. (She had told us she didn’t have a phone. Too expensive.) I remember the note was on blue paper, maybe one of those aerograms popular in the day for overseas correspondence.

So, it seems, this overwhelmed mother did, indeed, appreciate my mother’s spontaneous act of kindness, as outrageous as it was – even for the 1960’s. I, myself, don’t recall being embarrassed at all.

  1. http://cinemaexpo67.ca/reimagining-cinema-film-at-expo-67/ https://www.nfb.ca/film/in_the_labyrinth

2. https://expo67.ncf.ca/expo_sculpture_index.html

3. ” Take a bag of ham sandwiches and a thermos of coffee to Expo- where there are 146 restaurants and snack bars, 46 food shops and 500 automatic vending machines to serve you,” says the opening line of the article “Easting Exotically and otherwise at Expo,” in the Star Weekly insert for February 11, 1967. The pic shows Indian, Japanese, Italian and Mexican chefs with their exotic fare: tacos, pizza, sushi and a meal with pilau and nan. (I think I ate all these things this past weekend.) A pic on the next page caption says :A snack bar in Expo terminology means glamorous dining, indeed. (So, no real cheap food at Expo.) Oddly, the advert in this article was for KLIK and Kam luncheon meat with a pic of little squares of this ‘meat’ on toothpicks on a pickle. How ironic.

4. Man the Explorer; Man the Producer; Man the Creator; Man the Provider. I recall Man and the Community had a revolving exhibit (Czech artist) with little wooden models of a man and a woman in bed and all their needs revolving around them on a belt. “The cause of all progress is laziness.” Reading a list of that place’s exhibits, it sounds amazing. I want to go back!

The Star Weekly insert wrote about the Man out of Control? exhibit in Man the Producer with it’s “maze of signs showing man besieged by the information explosion.” The article continues: “The question mark in the title is no accident. Will the devices of man swallow him up or will he remain in control?” Hmm. Why do I feel this question to be extremely timely?

genealogy, Montreal

The Other Side of the Street: a story inspired by Lovell’s Directory

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Decarie between Isabella and Dupuis, June 1961. Archives de Montreal VM105-Y-3 545 001-010. My back porch is somewhere in there.

I spent my elementary school years living on Coolbrook, a one-way street in the Snowdon district of Montreal, adjacent busy Decarie.

Before Decarie became “the trench” in time for Expo 67 it was a wide boulevard with a stretch of storefronts on the east side of my area including Young’s Vegetable Market and Green’s Pharmacy; and on the west side right behind my upper duplex apartment were a few used car lots as well as one empty lot where we children sometimes played. This lot, I remember, was strewn with dirty old toilet bowls and big baffling, almost supernatural chunks of quartz, but also sprinkled in between with enchanting pink hollyhocks and charming pussy willows. 1.

In those early days, I would cross Decarie at Isabella and skip down a few steps to the basement Decarie Handy Store to spend my 25 cent allowance on, usually, a MacIntosh Taffy or Cherry Blossom, ten cents each in those days. Any extra pennies would go to Lik-M-Aid, a sour powder in a paper tube.

My allowance didn’t permit me to buy the giant, perhaps healthier, Fruit and Nut bar I so craved. It cost 39 cents and I never thought to save up week to week.

The major commercial area in the neighbourhood was one and a half blocks south, up an incline on Queen Mary Road. There was a Woolworth’s on the corner of Coolbrook and Queen Mary with a lunch counter that featured enticing ads for banana splits for, yes, 39 cents. Again, too expensive for me although I imagine I could have always asked my Mom to buy the ingredients and make me one. She wasn’t cheap like my accountant Dad, who made us sign for our meagre allowance in a little booklet he kept for the purpose.

Nuway Tobacco Store with bit Export sign 1961, Montreal archives. There was a little hat shop tucked in beside it. An oddity in the 1960’s when hats were not in fashion especially among the young..

Every fall, we bought our school supplies at the Woolworth’s, sometimes a new pencil case. You could still get the old fashioned wooden ones with the sliding top or a newfangled plastic pouch with a zipper. I still get excited at the sight of an unsullied Hilroy scribbler.

The other stores of importance on Queen Mary was Black and Orange stationery shop, a dingy post-war style store but, still, all that potential in the pens and paper!

And the Zellers further up towards Cote des Neiges, also a bit of a dust bowl. Morgan’s Department store had a small shiny two story branch on Queen Mary, but that store was of no significance to me although my brother, fooling around with friends, once kicked in their showcase window.

And a little further up the street was the NDG library for boys and girls where I borrowed the horsey tome King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry over and over.

Yes, I remember the stores in my area with varying degrees of yearning, for sugar and for learning, but when it comes to the block of Coolbrook on which I lived, I only have half a memory of it.

That’s because I don’t recall one person, not one, who lived on the other side of the street. I suspect no children lived across the street in the 1960’s. Maybe whoever owned those duplexes refused to rent to families with children. And it was the baby boom era!

Corner Isabella and Decarie. Archives de Montreal. This was taken a few yards away to the right of the Decarie Handy Store.

Our duplex block of four homes, two lower, two upper, was one of a stretch of five or more owned by the same man, an unpretentious French Canadian, a Monsieur D. who dressed like a hobo. My mom also said he thought I was the loveliest little girl, so kudos to him. Monsieur D. was very cheap, it seems. He painted all the doors of his brown/red brick buildings dark brown and all the porches grey, casting a gloom over the entire block. He must have got a deal on paint, my mom said.1

Gibeau’s Orange Julep from other side of the trench. wikipedia commons
I lived smack in between two of Montreal’s most iconic structures, the Orange Julep
and the Snowden Theatre, below, in an otherwise dreary-looking neighbourhood.
I visited Orange Julep but once. The drink tasted sulphury to me.

It’s a condo today after lying in disrepair for ages. I saw the Lippizanner movie there.
Also maybe Sound of Music. I didn’t see many movies as a child.
Children were banned from theatres until 1962 in Quebec due to the Laurier Palace Fire of 1927

It didn’t help that in those days no one bothered to decorate their upper or lower balconies with pots of flowers except for the Italian man a half dozen doors down living in a gaudy new duplex (Lovell’s reveals he was a landscaper) and an unknown family in one of the few stand-alone houses on my street, up near Queen Mary Road, who had a very splashy flower garden in summer. One year it snowed in the middle of May and I recollect the sight of a lovely row of red tulips with a cushion of white on top as I passed this tiny cottage on my way to the Nuway Tobacco Store at the corner of Decarie and Queen Mary to buy my mom a carton of Du Maurier cigarettes.

Luckily, the trees along my stretch of street were tall and leafy and during the hot, humid Montreal summers the setting sun dappled the baking macadam with light. I could reach out over my balcony and touch a branch of my very own mystic maple. I do suspect the tree’s leaves protected me – a bit – from the ubiquitous 1960’s air pollution and the lead-laden fumes of the pink, turquoise and fire-engine red Corvairs, Thunderbirds and Mustang convertibles idling on the street below. These automobiles belonged to visitors as few families on our side of the street actually owned a car. Kids cost money, after all.

A glance at Lovell’s Directory on BANQ reveals to me the familiar surnames of families living around us. I recognize, too, the phone numbers, as I dialed many of them over and over during my childhood. The family names from across the street are new to me, of course. Mostly French, some English and one Finn. The breadwinner of the family is the only one listed on Lovell’s, but had any children lived there, French or English or Finnish, I would have seen them playing on the short sloping driveways or on the sidewalk or at least walking to school.

Yes, we kids played out on the street in those days, chanting to skipping games like“double dutch” on those short sloping driveways, bickering over the rules of hopscotch or “yoki” on the sidewalk. The boys sometimes played ball hockey right on the road.2

However, when it comes to the other side of the street, I have no recollection at all. Ain’t memory funny.

I recall not one incident, not one visual. Nothing has imprinted itself on my brain for life, such as when my neighbour’s German Shepherd got hit by a truck late at night and my friend’s mom sobbed loudly on the street and there was leftover blood and sawdust on the curb the next morning.

I don’t recall one bit of gossip about anyone on the other side of the street. On our side plenty: “Did you know the L family’s kids are ONLY fostered? Did you know that in the S family, the Mom makes more than the husband?” Did you hear that the W sons went with two girls they hardly knew on a car trip out West? Real shameful stuff it was!

I don’t even remember seeing anyone out shovelling the walk across the street in winter. And I stared at that side of the street for seven years from my tiny bedroom window. No one picking up garbage strewn around by a stray dog. No one leaving the house in the early morning, rubbers on feet, leather briefcase in hand, felt fedora on brylcreemed head to take the brown and yellow No. 65 bus to some downtown skyscaper like Place Ville Marie.

I have to smile: the 1966 Lovell’s reveals that there were quite a few vacant homes across the street from us. Is it possible that it was harder to rent that block on that side of Coolbrook because of us? Because there were so many boisterous, loud, unruly children (I count about fifteen) playing out on our small section of Coolbrook Street.

As in happens, in 1967, Expo year, while my British grandmother was visiting us from Malaya for the first and only time, my brother was playing ball hockey with a friend when he knocked over one of the Italian man’s pretty flower pots, red geraniums, I think, with a errant slap shot. Supposedly the man was enraged and ran out onto the street and hit my brother with a leather strap, the one and only genuinely violent act I ever heard of on our street- and, yes, it was on our side!

My grandmother, who herself had complained many times about the “shrill” Canadian children playing on the street, convinced my father to move out of the district and within months we were living in a smog-free ex-burb north of the city in a house with a huge yard with at least two weeping willows and more fir trees than I could count.

One broken porch ornament – and a rather Felliniesque incident – and the trajectory of my life took a dramatic turn, for better or for worse, who knows. For sure, my current Facebook friends would be totally different had my brother’s ball just skipped off the railing and missed that freakin’ flower pot! Life, just like hockey, can be a game of inches.

But, as someone who has lived in sleepy suburbs most of her life, I carry that time in the west end of the city deep inside of me, even if it’s only half a memory.

END

1. Our backyard area was especially ugly. It was expansive with a floor of gravel and dirt. Each family had a little yard, yes, with a grey fence about 15 feet by 25 feet, with grass. Our plot contained a giant tree, so no light, and nothing grew there despite my efforts at a garden. We neighbourhood girls would sling blankets over the fence and tie skipping ropes to the wires and play ‘horse.’

Right behind my backyard. Soon the apt at right would be domolished, I think, and that became the vacant lot

A newlywed couple moved in for a while and I recall one time watching from my second story back balcony as the young wife was chased off the porch by her husband who was holding a bucket of water. He caught up to her and swung the bucket and poured the it over her head. I could feel their euphoria. Oh, to be in love.

Beyond the yard was an over-grown alley way, my black cat, Kitty Kat’s, private jungle, where we once saw a pheasant that had flown down from the mountain, so said my mother, and beyond that alley the used car lot. The moms would let kids run wild while at play, as was the usual in the 1960’s, but they would dutifully call their children in for lunch from the backyard porches. One Mom had a bell.

Once I and a friend came upon a ‘hobo’ sleeping in one of the used cars behind our house. He had one leg and he said he was a war veteran. I stole a rather large chunk of left-over roast beef for him, from my house. When my mom wondered what had happened to her leftovers, I told her that I had given it to a stray dog – and she laughed. No fool I.

2. I recall once and only once a huge slimy Norway rat scuttling past us into the drainpipe a we played.. How did that huge thing fit in that tiny hole? A favourite game was yoki ( I thought Yogi) also called elastics or Chinese skipping, where we used a sewing elastic and manipulated it around our lower leg to rhymes. Classic skipping was popular, too, double dutch, etc. “My mother and your mother were hanging out the clothes. My mother gave your mother a punch in the nose. What colour was the blood.” This rhyme sticks in my head probably because my French Canadian mother wasn’t friends with any of the other mothers on the block. She had little in common with them, being French and also a working mother who played competitive bridge at the tony Boulevard Club.

There was a definite pecking order among the children playing on our section of the block in the form of arguments, fights, churlishness, and a lot of one-upmanship. I was a passive observer type, definitely at the lower end of the hierarchy. A good thing too: I recall the two alpha-girls in my group viciously fighting and literally pulling out handfuls of each other’s hair.

My brothers did play ON the road, classic road hockey which was safe on our quiet one-way street. One day a car honked at them and just as they were about to give the guy the finger they noticed it was John Ferguson, the legendary Canadiens enforcer. A rather dishevelled looking man whom we sometimes saw around was related to a playmate of mine. It was Doug Harvey, the Canadiens legend.

Pierre Lalonde, a young teen idol at the time, lived in the Italian man’s place for a few years in the 1960’s. He seemed shy – but he owned two flashy convertibles, both neon aqua and two motorcycles. (I worked in the same building as he did in the early 80’s – a TV station – and lived in the same town as him, in the 1990’s, often seeing him at the pool – but never once spoke to him. I did walk his dog as a child.)