52 Ancestors 2025

 REUNION I have been fortunate to have grown up in a family that valued family gatherings.  As a child, I did resent having to travel 4 hours (each way) every holiday weekend back to my grandparents.  However, as my interest in genealogy and family history developed, I appreciate having grown up knowing not just my aunts, uncles and first cousins, but the aunts, uncles and first cousins of both of my parents.  My parents were from the same small community in Simcoe County, Ontario and both families lived in that area for several generations.   Before my time, the Allens (my fathers side) had started an annual family reunion at a provincial park near Barrie Ontario.  It was established as the descendants of my great-grandparents: William Daisley Allen and Mary Jane Woodland.  My grandfather, Henry "Harry" Woodland Allen was the youngest of 12, so there were many many descendants as Harry as well as many of his siblings had large families themselves....

 MILITARY The military has had minimal impact of my ancestors - even during the two World Wars.  The men were either not at the right age or were exempt because of religious beliefs or being farmers contributed to the war efforts by continuing to tend their farms.   Several of my aunts did marry World War II vets, but only one blood uncle served in World War II.  My uncle Ab was the older brother of my father.  They were the oldest of 10 children and grew up relatively close.  As a young man, Ab left the family farm to work in Toronto and my father stayed to continue working on the family farm.   I knew that Uncle Ab did serve in World War II, but never knew the circumstances until the time of his death in 2011.  When Ab was first drafted, his employer got him an exception as the factory was contributing to the war effort.  His employer was prepared to get another exception when Ab was drafted a second time.  But Ab turned down his ...

 WHEELS Although most of my ancestors were farmers, the automobile industry had been important to my extended family for a couple of generations in the last century. My maternal grandfather, George Schell, was the eldest of 10 children (6 boys, 4 girls).  In 1916, at the age of 21, he took on the responsibility of running the family farm in Simcoe County, Ontario and looking after his widowed mother and younger siblings.  Several of his brothers eventually left the family farm to work in the auto industry factories in Michigan and Ohio.   One of the brothers, Will, eventually returned home, married a local girl and farmed near the Schell farm.  Another brother, Wes, also eventually returned to Ontario to marry a girl from a nearby community and eventually operated a gas station in Brooklin Ontario.  I can remember stopping in there when travelling with my grandparents in the 1960s. Two brothers, Alf and Ed, stayed in the US working in the auto industry...

 At the Library I worked for over 35 years in several academic libraries at Queen's University (starting in 1976 when I was in high school until my early retirement in 2013) and 2 years at the John Archer Library at the University of Regina.  The time at Regina was in the Interlibrary Loan unit and one of the positions I held at the Bracken Health Sciences Library at Queen's was in the Interlibrary office.  What a great experience for someone interested in genealogy research!  Although I never worked in the departments, the Documents Unit at Queen's is also a depository for Canadian government publications - so I had access to microfilmed census before digital records were available on the internet.  And Special Collections and Rare Books department had various genealogical related material as well.  Guess how I would spend my coffee breaks and lunch hours? For the last few years that I lived in my hometown of Kingston Ontario, I spent a lot of time at the ...