Roots

Yesterday I rode to Pike Lake to attend the launch of a book about the area around Pike Lake - the lake closest to where I grew up and which was a large part of my childhood.  There were many people there but probably less than a dozen that I knew from my childhood.  Most people on the lake, despite having moved there 20, 30, 40, or even longer ago, have a connection with the lake but not the community around it.  In a sense, I feel like they have expropriated the history of the families that have roots that go back for five or six generations, and have taken part of it as their own.  I'm not certain that this is a rational way of looking at it but when I saw the relative scarcity of true locals at the opening compared to the 'lake people' (and I don't mean this in a derogatory manner) this thought crept into my mind.  The book itself is very well done and I gave a copy to my father for his 89th birthday.

The tombstone of my paternal granmother & grandfather in

St. Bridget's cemetery in Stanleyville, ON

My mother & father's tombstone. Dad jumped the gun a bit!

In keeping with that theme I did a final tour of the area where I spent my first 19 years taking photos of the homes where my mother, my father, and where my brother and I grew up.  I also made a visit to the local cemetery where many of my relatives are interred.  There, one gets a very graphic sense of the connection with the land these families have had over the past 160 years.  Many of the names on the early tombstones in the cemetery which  was opened in the 1870s are the same as the names that are much more recent, and almost all of the older names are Irish.  I visited the graves of my great uncle Francis Bernard Kerr, whom I remember as a very old man when I was perhaps ten years old, and who was born in 1891.  His younger brother who was my gandfather, Alphosus Ligouri Kerr was born in 1892, and his wife, Mary Jane Fagan, my paternal grandmother was born in 1893.  There are no earlier Kerr tombstones in the cemetery, I suspect, because they were probably too poor to afford them so their graves are unmarked although they are probably mapped.



The house where my mother grew up

The house where my father grew up.

The house Dad bought in 1947 where I grew up.

These roots are very important to a society, and in many cases because of our ability to be mobile and to move 5000 kilometres away from my birthplace as I have done, they are often lost to succeeding generations.  My children will never know the connections to my extended family that I experienced before I left home at 19.  In the ensuing years I have lost many of those connections but I still have the ones I made as a child and a teenager.

I helped plant these trees in about 1960. They are now about 15 metres

high with trunks about half a metre thick.

I am preparing to head back home tomorrow and I will try to continue this blog from the road each day if I can.  When I have the time I will try to add photos to this entry, probably from somewhere in western New York State or Ohio tomorrow.