Surely we were destined to meet

A few months back, Frances Graff was cleaning out a closet in her home in Washington, D.C., when she stumbled upon a 2003 clipping from the Globe and Mail – a Lives Lived column I wrote after the death of my cousin, Charlotte Grover. The Globe story delivered a flood of memories. When Frances was …

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Diaries capture life’s forgotten moments

I now have proof of what I’ve long suspected: my memory bank is as porous as a kitchen sponge. I can recount – in detail – youthful incidents where I behaved stupidly or where circumstances piled up against me. But moments of youthful glory? Not so much. One day while I was rummaging around in …

Severe cold indeed!

My book Life & Legacy may be a done deal, but the research rabbit holes still taunt me. Just the other day, Ancestry.ca delivered an interesting tidbit – a 1908 newspaper obit for Annetta Elmhirst, whose gravestone identifies her as Nettie Annetta Elmhirst. A couple of weeks later Ancestry.ca added an "In Memorial" for Annetta, …

Will it never end?

That question flashed through my brain on a regular basis – usually in full caps – while I was researching Life & Legacy, my book about my grandmother, Ruth (Birdsall) Elmhurst. Sure, I was fully engrossed in the research. After all, my endless forays down family-history rabbit holes were unravelling my own Peterborough County roots …

Messages from my grandmother

Letters flowed from Ruth (Birdsall) Elmhurst’s pen like a fast-moving creek, her quirky penmanship barely keeping pace with her speeding thoughts and earnest observations about the world around her. Ruth, my paternal grandmother, closed several of the missives in my stash of letters by listing the other people she had to write to that evening. …