Tag Archives: Angus Family

Genealogy

A Blacksmith’s Legacy

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How does a gardener in a failing economy afford to purchase passage on a ship for a family of four in the hope of bettering his life in Canada? The answer may lie with a blacksmith.

The gardener was my great-great- great-grandfather Charles Brodie, born 1796 in Innerleithen, Scotland. The extended Brodie family lived in three neighbouring villages along the River Tweed: Peebles, Innerleithen and Traquair. The economy of the area rested on raising sheep augmented by wool-weaving. Hand weavers, however, were replaced by machines following the introduction of the steam engine at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Factories were built in cities close to cheap transportation routes forcing workers to leave their farms to find employment. The Scottish border towns fell into economic decline.

The blacksmith was Charles’ great-uncle, Alexander Brodie (1733 – 1811). Alexander was born in Traquair but reached the status of a master blacksmith in London. He designed The Register Stoves and Fire Hearths for Ships. Wood-burning iron stoves were a central feature of ships in those days, essential for cooking and warmth, but at the same time very dangerous. Many ships went to watery graves in flames. Brodie’s design was not only bigger but safer. The Royal Navy placed his stoves in all its ships “to the preservation of many valuable lives” according to a plaque in Traquair’s parish church commemorating his achievement. Alexander was handsomely rewarded for his design.

After the untimely death of his wife and two children, Alexander returned to Traquair. There he put his fortune to work to improve the lives of his fellow villagers. He eventually opened a woolen mill in Innerleithen, ushering in the industrial age. When Alexander died in 1811 his estate, worth over half a million pounds, was distributed, following a twenty-year court feud, among seventeen nieces and nephews. Charles’ father William (1751-1836) was one of the inheritors. Shortly thereafter Charles immigrated to Canada. One can only assume that the money came from his father’s inheritance.

Charles and his wife Elizabeth Kerr (b.1805) arrived in Canada in 1831 with two sons, Charles age twelve (1819-1859), and William age two (1829-1908). They settled in Montreal where the family grew to include two more sons, Robert (1835-1905) and Thomas (1838-1894). Charles was my great-great grandfather.

In 1850 Charles Jr. moved to Quebec City and opened a flour and grocery business. Robert, William and Thomas eventually joined him. Following Charles’ death in 1859 Robert and William formed a new partnership, the W. & R. Brodie Co. This company monopolized flour distribution in Quebec City and was the beginning of what today is the Brodie Flour Company.

In Quebec City’s Mount Herman cemetery, a granite monument stands high on the cliff overlooking the St. Lawrence River. The four sides of the monument detail the life of each Brodie brother. Two sides include the inscription “Born at Innerleithen, Scotland. Died at Quebec“. A blacksmith’s legacy.

Brodie Grave Stone (2)

 

 

Notes and Sources:

Brodie, Peter – ancestry.ca.  Blair Family Tree

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/brodie_robert_13E.html

http://www.pastinnerleithen.com/alexander-brodie

William N. Boog Watson (1968) ALEXANDER BRODIE AND HIS FIREHEARTHS FOR SHIPS, The Mariner’s Mirror, 54:4, 409-412, DOI: 10.1080/00253359.1968.10659464

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Genealogy, Quebec

Lead Crystal

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My grandmother was seventy-one, barely five feet, less than ninety pounds, and very frail. She lay propped up with pillows as family hovered around her hospital bed. Her eyes were rimmed with purple with the bruise spreading down across her cheeks. Her arm was in a cast and her smashed glasses had not yet been replaced. At nine years old, I could only stand and stare in horror.

I’m sure the mugger had thought Jean was an easy mark – a quick shove, grab the purse and run. But the mugger didn’t know my grandmother. She had fought for years to keep food on the table and she was not going to relinquish her grocery money without a fight.

My grandmother was born Jean Jamison Brodie (1884-1971 , the daughter of wealthy Quebec City flour merchant. She was sickly as a child and, strangely, given into the care of her mother’s spinster sister. In 1902, Jean trained as a teacher at MacDonald College in Montreal. Controlling students bigger than she was proved to be too strenuous and she gave up teaching after only a year.

In 1911 Jean married James Rankin Angus (1878-1964) from Glasgow, a naval carpenter who immigrated to Canada. James opened The Angus Bookstore within the walls of the old city. The couple had two boys a year apart, Colin (1912-1943) and Oswald (1913- 1977), and a third son, Ian (1918-2003), five years later.

Their home was a spacious flat on Fraser Street. Jean’s aunt moved in with them, the boys grew, and the book store prospered. All was comfortable until the stock-market crash of 1929, the year the two oldest boys graduated from high school. James struggled to keep the bookstore afloat, adding a branch store in a more affluent part of town to attract new customers. He downsized his family’s living quarters. Colin and Oswald found jobs and contributed to the household finances. Jean learned to be very frugal. She walked miles to save five cents on a bunch of carrots. My father Ian claimed his mother could create a dinner with five chicken wings and make it look like a feast.

In 1935, the inevitable occurred. Both bookstores were lost. My grandfather joined the ranks of the unemployed.  But not my grandmother!  One would think, given her frailty, she would simply collapse from the weight of the stress. Instead, the desperate situation seemed tgrandparentso galvanize her strength.  She collected the books from the bankrupt stores and set about running a lending library from her home.

It was not easy for Jean to deal with the public – she was a  private person and the family’s financial downfall was very humiliating. How difficult it must have been for her to collect dues, particularly late payments, and suffer petty complaints from  customers who, once her equal, now looked down on her as merely a sales clerk. But she had a family to feed and so she persevered.

Twenty years later, in 1955, Jean was mugged on the way to the grocery store. By then, my grandfather had found employment, the children were grown and had children of their own. Jean no longer had to worry about money for the next meal. Still she refused to give up her purse. Never would she allow herself to become a victim.

 

Notes:

  • Birth certificate of Jane Jamieson Brodie – on file with author
  • Certificate issued to Jean Jamieson from the McGill Normal School – on file with author
  • Wedding Announcement, Quebec Chronicle Telegraph June 1911 – on file with author ; Quebec Vital and Church Records (Drouin Collection) 1621 – 1967
  • Death to the Ashes. A self-published memoir  by Elizabeth Craig Angus, daughter-in-law to Jean Brodie Angus, in which she reminisces  on various incidents in the life of the Angus family.
Genealogy

THE KATHRYN LINE

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By Barb Angus

 

Kathleen Willett, my mother’s sister, was the first of the Kathryn line. She appeared to have been born with a wanderlust, leaving her Gaspe village in her teens for Montreal and points beyond. She trained as a teacher and the summer vacation allowed for lots of travel time .She combined that travel with study opportunities: education courses at Columbia in New York and French lessons at the Sorbonne in Paris to name but two. She taught at an armed forces base in Germany for four years and added a third language. Her travels continued well into her eighties. A photo shows her sitting on the Great Wall of China on one of the last trips of her life. In her will she left an elegant red oriental china dragon to my son who had stared at it for hours as a child.

 

Kathleen never married. Her nieces and nephews were her children. When my mother was held up London on route to East Pakistan to join my father, Aunt Kay crossed the Channel from Germany, stuffed mum and three kids into her Volkswagen and toured us around the country side. Years later I found her slides from that summer neatly filed and labeled among dozens and dozens of slide trays.

 

My sister, Kathryn Angus, was named for Aunt Kay. She, too, had a wanderlust. She was born on May 29th, 1953, the day Hillary and Tensing were the first climbers to reach the summit of Everest. Certainly an auspicious date for travellers. Kathy was only four when the family went to East Pakistan, five when my parents took her to Darjeeling in the Himalayas. Tensing was so charmed with this child and her birthdate that he took her on a pony ride! Kathy loved to travel – to places in Europe, Japan, Newfoundland, New Mexico and most of all to the sun soaked beaches and tropical waters of the south. She claimed that life was meant to be spent on vacation. Just being in airports thrilled her with the promise of new adventures!

 

Kathy’s daughter is Annah Kay Michaud, a name derived from the Joanna Kathryn I named my own still-born daughter, each a homage to our Aunt Kay. She will be our shared daughter, promised Kathy, when I held Annah for the first time. Annah was raised in two languages, the English of her mother and the French of her father. Today she is married to a Montrealer with strong Italian roots. When Annah was fourteen, Kathy and I took her to Japan to visit my son Stephen. He and his Japanese girlfriend Madoka (now his wife) drove us to a variety of both famous and little known towns and sights across the country all the while sleeping and eating in local inns. That trip clinched Annah’s wanderlust. She has since worked in Australia and China and vacationed in Europe, Viet Nam, Thailand and Costa Rico. Like her mother, she too believes that life is meant to be spent on vacation.

 

Today the most recent member of the Kathryn line is Marisa Kei (pronounced Kay) Tarrant, Stephen and Madoka’s second daughter. Only two years old, she has already travelled from Vancouver to Japan twice with her big sister Evelyn Haruka. Both girls speak English and Japanese and at times can certainly be the fiery little dragons of Stephen’s childhood fascination! I suspect a good deal of travel is in their blood!

Genealogy

Tears of Remembrance

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Remembrance Day services always bring me to tears.
My childhood was spent in the shadow of World War II. My father, Douglas Ian Rankin Angus, and my uncle, James Oswald Stewart Angus returned home from overseas but they left an older sibling in a grave in Germany 1. My grandparents grieved for the rest of their lives.
My earliest memory of Remembrance Day is of my father parading down Quebec City’s Grand Allee to the cenotaph with his head held high, so handsome in his RCAF uniform. No tears then, just a stiff upper lip.
The first tears I remember were shed when I was fifteen. On the way home to Canada from a contract in East Pakistan, my father took his family to Hong Kong. At the Sai Wan Bay War Cemetery, my dad stood by the graves of many of his high school classmates who had served with the Royal Rifles of Canada in the defense of Hong Kong and sobbed. It was the first time I had seen my father cry and I was shocked. 2
In school that September my history teacher was one of the men who survived the horror of a Japanese POW camp. “He was never the same”, claimed my grandmother. Was my father also not the same man who joined the air force in 1940?
Dad never spoke of his war-time experiences. When discharged from service he returned to his old job at Price Brothers in Quebec City, bought a house and started a family. I often wonder how he and my mother were able to resume a marriage after four years separated by war. Dad spent additional periods of time in a military hospital following his discharge. All I knew is that while hospitalized, he made wonderfully big stuffed felt rabbits for my brother and me.
Every year without fail Dad took part in Remembrance Day services. He joined the Canadian Legion and sold poppies; he presented scholarships to the children and grandchildren of veterans at graduation ceremonies ; he attended squadron reunions and, following several medical procedures, convalesced at the Veteran’s Hospital in St. Anne de Bellevue .
I struggled to push my father’s wheelchair over the bumpy lawn at the Field of Honour in Pointe Claire on what would be his last Remembrance Day. Tears streamed down his face throughout the entire service and he sobbed uncontrollably during the Last Post. At his funeral seven months later, at age eighty- three, friends and colleagues who had also served overseas hobbled up to the altar in tears and laid poppies on his urn.
It was only after his death that I learned of dad’s war time service. I found his Pilot’s Flying Log Book, his service file, his discharge papers, a scrapbook of newspaper clippings my mother had complied, various certificates and a bundle of letters.3
Dad began his military service as a Wireless Air Gunner and was discharged to the Reserves as a Flight Lieutenant. He was trained to fly Hampdens, Elbacores, Wellingtons, Tiger Moths, Ansons and the Link C. He served in the Swordfish Squadron #415 and, when deployed oversees, he was assigned first to the RAF Costal Command and then to Bomber Command. He flew out of air force bases at Thorney Island, North Coates and St. Eval in England, Tain and Leuchars in Scotland, and Sumburg in the Shetland Islands.

The average expectation of life for nine crews out of ten was less than six months.
In one of the articles my mother clipped from the Quebec Chronicle Telegraph, Dad was listed as a Dambuster having participated in the 1943 bombing of the Mohne Damn and the Eder Damn which destroyed the heart of Industrial Germany in the Ruhr Valley: the factories, roads, railroads, mines, bridges and power stations.4.
One journalist attempted to interview a returning Dambuster and was told that the men had been ordered not to talk about it. It would seem that Dad never disobeyed order. In the his book Bomber Country, Daniee Swift refers to the “forgetting” by the bombers, “For in the place of a full record of the bombing, there is a curious absence.” 5
More than 500,000 German civilians were either killed or drowned in the raids on the damns. Immediately following the war the politicians of the day argued that to honour Bomber Command for their enormous contribution and sacrifice towards defeating Hitler was too politically charged because of the deaths. It was not until 2012, sixty-seven years “too late” that a memorial to Bomber Command was unveiled in Green Park, London. By then, Dad had been dead for nine years and with him the loss of the stories he never told.
And of the Remembrance Tears? They are shed for the bombers and for the bombed.

1. Service Record of Sergeant David Colin Brodie Angus, Library and Archives Canada
2. http://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/history/second-world-war/canadians-hong-kong
3. Documents on file with author
4. http://www.dambusters.org.uk/
5. Daniel Swift. Bomber Country: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot’s War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Genealogy

First Brush

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Morning came early at Hebron Academy. At six a.m., I would enter the bathroom, calmly pick up the basin with the snake curled up inside, and walk outside to dump it in the bushes. I was a border and this was not my first brush with snakes.

The school was in the village of Coonoor, high in the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India.1 Most of the students were the children of missionaries but a few like myself were “business kids”.2

Shortly after arriving at Hebron in 1957 I found two names in the front of an old text book: Margery Angus and Kathleen Angus. It was enough of a curiosity that I wrote home about it. Imagine my surprise when Dad wrote back that they were his cousins, cousins he had never met! Their dad, the brother of my grandfather, had been a missionary in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Now my curiosity knew no bounds!

How did they travel to Hebron? They could not have come like I did, four days from Calcutta on a train. Had they come by ship across the Bay of Bengal to Madras and then on the narrow- rail train up into the hills? At what age did they come? As teenagers? Or were they Kindergarten age and placed in The Nest? Did their parents join them for the May vacation or were they required to spend the holiday month with the school staff?

How did they feel about the school program? About tennis and field hockey? Art lessons, music, and drama? About being kept busy every minute of the day? In what academic subjects did they excel? I bet they had no trouble memorizing scripture or praying publicly in the daily prayer meetings being the children of missionaries. How did they feel sleeping six to a dorm on wooden beds with straw pallets? Or bathing in a tin tub twice a week in water heated over a wooden stove? Did they like the blue and white checked frock uniform?  And the navy tunic and tie on Sundays?  Were they as homesick as I, living for the daily mail distribution and letters from family?

This was my first brush with genealogy. Names were insufficient – I wanted stories, not just the knowledge that I walked in steps they had walked. I wanted these cousins to come to life for me! Today I want the same thing. The family tree I inherited from my dad was just a list of names and dates. Who were these people, where and how did they live?

Today the internet allows me to find some answers.

Margery and Kathleen’s father Thomas Angus was an Evangelical missionary from Glasgow.3 His wife was Eliza Simpson and they had five children: David, Robert, Joan, Kathleen and Margery.4. There was an Anglican school for girls in Kuala Lumpur but Thomas likely chose far-away Hebron to ensure that his daughters were educated in their own faith. 5 Perhaps his sons went to Breeks Memorial, Hebron’s sister school for boys. Or they may have been left at a school in Britain on one of the furloughs. Thomas’ final trip home was in 1940.6 He suffered from a heart condition and died in 1948.7 His son David took over his work in Malaysia until his interment by the Japanese during WW2.8

My work on Thomas’ family remains incomplete. I will likely never find answers to my questions about the girls’ years at Hebron. The school is now an orphanage, academic records and yearbooks likely lost to time. I have not yet been able to trace the remaining years of the girls’ lives. What is key for me today, however, is that this long ago first brush with genealogy led to my insatiable quest today for family stories.

 Notes and Sources

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebron_School

Hebron Gleanings 1958 (yearbook) – on file with author

Note: The school was surrounded by plantations growing the famous Nilgiri tea.

  1. My father worked for a Canadian mining company that was part of a NGO in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The job involved the construction and start-up of a newsprint mill in the village if Khulna south of Dhaka on the Ganges River. At the time, Bangladesh was under martial law.

 http://www.gospelhallkl.org/?page_id=14

“Mr. and Mrs T.R. Angus arrived to work with the Hakka tin miners and in October 1903 found “a crying need for the gospel on every hand” but few to meet the need. Training locals to serve the Lord proved difficult as the miners led a rather nomadic life and were unable to attend church regularly. Just before the Second World War engulfed the Pacific, the aging Mr. Thomas Angus returned to Scotland and was replaced by his son David Angus.”

  1. Eliza was listed as the wife of Thomas on his death certificate. To date (February 2015), I have been unable to find any other documentation. The children’s’ names are those provided by my father. The children may have been born in Kuala Lump, indeed Thomas and Eliza may have married there, but I have been unable to access Malaysian records.
  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary’s_School,_Kuala_Lumpur
  1. Finding passenger lists (outgoing and incoming) have proven difficult. Angus is not an uncommon name in Britain, there are many British ports from which Thomas may have left, and a Malaysian destination is often merely a port–of-call on the way to a final destination like Australia. The lists I have been able to find sometimes show Thomas travelling alone, sometimes with his wife, or with his wife and children. The children’s names do not all match those given to me by my father. I have found a David, a Robert, a Margery, an Annie and a Frances. I have not found a Joan or a Kathleen. Were they younger than the others or did they go officially by other names?
  1. Death Certificate: http://www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk/
  1. http://www.preciousseed.org/article_detail.cfm?articleID=744

“In 1931 Mr. David Angus joined his father to continue the service the hallmark of which was grace and humility. During the war years Mr. Angus and other missionaries suffered imprisonment at the hands of the Japanese invaders. He survived the horrors of prison with fortitude and emerged with a new understanding of the people in the country of mixed nationalities he had come to serve”