My mother was Canadian, my sister is Canadian, my father was raised in Canada and literally all of my extended family is from Canada. My paternal great grandfather, James Watson MacPhail, was born in Scotland in 1863. When he was a little boy, his family emigrated from North Eastern Scotland to North Eastern Canada (New Brunswick) in the early 1870's. They were part of a group of over 800 Scottish settlers, many of whom were poor and despondent tenant farmers, who sailed across the ocean in two separate ships, with the goal of building new lives through free land grants.
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Books handed down through my mother's family
which record the history of this Scottish Settlement |
My father's mother was an avid family historian. Her father, William Merton Whitman, descended from John Whitman, an Englishman who arrived in Weymouth, Massachusetts some years prior to 1638. His great grandson Deacon John moved to Nova Scotia, Canada in 1761. This move is linked to thousands of descendants in this small Canadian province alone. We are even related to writer Walt Whitman and the missionary Marcus Whitman who brought religion (and measles) to the indians who later killed him in Washington state.
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Books handed down from my father's mother detailing
Nova Scotia Whitman family geneology and history |
Canada Day, formerly known as Dominion Day, marks the joining of the British North American Colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada (later Quebec and Ontario) into a federation of four provinces in 1867. Canada became a kingdom in its own right at that time but Britain retained limited political control until 1982. Needless to say, Canada Day is just as significant, if not more significant for me than Independence Day.
