A Family Story

 In this story I have mixed some family history with some genealogy.   I must have been 8 or 9 years of age when we made this trip.    

Happy Thanksgiving!

CANADA

 

It took four days to drive from our home in Willows, California to Lacombe, Alberta where my dad was born in 1922.  It was in the 1950’s when we made the trip to a family reunion.   It was all two lane highways back then, no freeways.  The first day we drove to Bend, Oregon, then to Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho and by the third day to Fort MacCleod, Alberta before arriving at our destination at Gull Lake.    Here we stayed in a cabin that did have electricity, but no indoor plumbing, so an outhouse was available and a hand pump outside for water.   My grandparents were there to meet us since they had taken a plane from their home in southern California to Edmonton where they rented a car.   Over the next week there were different relatives coming and going.  Some were descendants of our second great grandfather, Patrick Burke and Bridget (Gallagher), who had migrated from Ireland sometime in the 1840’s to the Ottawa Valley in Ontario where he took up farming.    According to a census in 1851 Patrick’s father, Michael Burke was living with them.  He was born 1777 in Ireland and died 1852 at the age of 75. 

Patrick and Bridget had 10 children, including our great grandfather Edward born 1849, who later married Mary Kenney born 1860 to John Kenny and Ellen Gallagher (not sure the relationship between Ellen and Bridget, maybe cousins?).   Edward and Mary had 9 children and possibly two more that died in infancy.  They migrated to Iowa, then to Nebraska where our grandfather, John Raphael or as we remember him as J. Ray was born in 1894.  Sometime between 1900 and 1910 Edward and family migrated to Alberta to work on the railroads being developed from western Alberta into British Columbia.   Our great uncle Dan was born 1896 in Nebraska.   He told the story about working as a clerk for the railroads as they constructed the railroad down the Frasier River canyon in British Columba.   The crew lived in train cars and one car was used as the kitchen.   He said venison was the primary source of meat as deer were shot from the train.    Ahead of the train was a steam shovel digging out the grade to lay the tracks.   He would describe landslides that would push the shovel into the river and the train would back up to allow another shovel to be moved to the front and continue digging.  

Our grandmother, Agnes (Caldwell) and her family also migrated from Alabama to work on the railroads and sometime around 1915 she met our grandfather and married.   Their first born son, Vernon was born in Alberta, but later died of pneumonia at the age of 11 in southern California.   My grandmother still had two living siblings at the time of the reunion, a sister named Mary and a brother named Gavin.    Mary and her husband had a farm near Red Deer where we stayed one night.  Here again no indoor plumbing.   The outhouse was near the back door of the house as I remember.   Great uncle Gavin was in the hospital in the small community of Rimbey after having a heart attack.   He was not allowed visitors inside, so my dad, grandfather and great uncle Dan talked to him through the window next to the bed he was in.     I remember they all were smoking cigarettes, including the patent as they talked.   Gavin and his wife Anna lived on the family farm near Rimbey.    Anna had all of us over for dinner, with roast beef, potatoes, carrots, green beans and much more, all from her garden.   Gavin Caldwell died a few years later.

In 1968 my grandmother and I went back to Alberta by plane and visited Anna at her small home in Rimbey, since she had sold the farm.  The only others relatives living in Alberta were members of the Foy family in Edmonton, offspring of James Foy and Jane (Burke), an older sister to our grandfather.   There are other descendants of the Patrick Burke family living in Saskatchewan.   The rest of us are scattered in the states.