Anne attended Vancouver School of Art on a scholarship one year after high school, but couldn`t continue, for financial reasons. She went to work as a keypunch operator for BC Packers, a big fish-packing company in Vancouver. A mutual friend introduced Anne to my father, Ray, at an ice skating rink. He drove her and her friend…
In the summer of 1931, family friends took 9-year-old Anne on a driving trip to Vancouver, BC, so she could spend 3 months with her mother. The 2-week trip from California was in a big old touring car, equipped with running boards full of camping gear, staying in river-side campsites on the way north. She remembers being…
Lying in bed this morning, I lazily checked my email on my ever-handy iPhone. Suddenly I bolted up in excitement. (The truth is that I continued to lie lazily, but my brain did perk up.) I had received by email, a blog comment from a hitherto unknown half-second-cousin-once-removed, who found my post about Charles Douglass Waddell, who happened to her great-grandfather.…
My mother’s story began in 1922. In fact it began a bit before – let’s say September 1921. That is when her parents were married. Adam, age 35, was a World War 1 veteran who, like many other vets after the war, was having trouble finding suitable employment. He was from a family of Scottish…
Here is the plan for the new year: Diet for the month of January (a minor “correction”). Finish doing whatever I decide to do with my mother’s photo collection. Label the rocks from my Australia trip. (Yes, I’ll explain that in a blog some day.) It is #2 that presents the most difficulty. Since I was…
For 100 years, my family gossiped about the identity of my great-great-grandfather. Presumably he was named Charles Waddell, since those two names were given to the child who took his mother’s surname (B) when he was born in 1860. According to lore, the erstwhile father was an officer in the military, based at Windsor Castle where the…
Seeing Clarely 