Sepia Saturday for September 28, 2013

 An assortment to Norman Rockwell pictures from my calendar.

 I remember the pain of listening to my brother when he got his first guitar too!!

 Norman Rockwell had a way of portraying everyday things in a way that it was rather classical.

 Oh my, how I remember the sheer fun and  fright of sledding a steep slope.....

For more fun, check out www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com

Sepia Saturday September 14, 2013

I looked real hard for a woman sewing anything, but came up with nothing, so I decided to go with the hairdo the lady in the picture is sporting.  The following is a story of one of our own from Newcastle, (now the city of Miramichi) New Brunswick, Canada. Her name is Frances Lillian Fish, she lived on the corner of King George Highway and Jane Street.  I remember going past her home and marveled at her beautiful tulip garden.  I was just little and had no idea that she was a lawyer.

The following is an exert from a history of Frances Lillian Fish.

"Everybody Called Her Frank"

The Odyssey of an Early Woman Lawyer in New Brunswick

Barry Cahill

Independent scholar in Halifax

Abstract

In February 1934 Frances Fish was called to the bar of New Brunswick and spent the next forty years practising law in her home town of Newcastle (now City of Miramichi) NB. In 1918 she had been both the first woman to graduate LLB from Dalhousie University and the first woman to be called to the bar of Nova Scotia. Though she initially intended to remain in Halifax, she instead left Nova Scotia almost immediately, abandoning the practice of law altogether. She spent the next fifteen years working as a paralegal in Ottawa and Montreal before returning to New Brunswick and resuming the practice of law. This article is a study of Fish’s career in New Brunswick, framed within the experience of the first women lawyers in Canada, of whom she was the seventh. 2

1 The subject of this article is one of the ten first women lawyers in Canada. Its central theme is the interaction of the personal and the professional and consequences arising therefrom that affect an individual career path. It is an essay in life as career, and the slow and deliberate progress towards that fateful decision—evading Hobson’s choice before ultimately making it. New Brunswicker Frances Fish’s life journey was replete with inconsistencies and contradictions. She had no apparent interest in law as a career before she became a law student at age twenty-five. She did not enter law school for another two years, and then not in her home province but in neighbouring Nova Scotia, a place with which she had no connection and where there had never been a woman law undergraduate. The first woman called to the bar in Nova Scotia, Fish did not return to New Brunswick to practise law. Nor did she remain in Nova Scotia; instead she abandoned both Halifax and her budding law practice almost as soon as it had begun. With a profession but without a professional career, Fish seemed to lack a focus for her life. For some fifteen years she worked as a solicitor’s assistant and paralegal in Ottawa and Montreal, where (in Ontario) she could have become a lawyer had she wished to. She finally found her "sailor’s legs" and second life as a practising lawyer in, of all places, her hometown, where she was from "the right side of the tracks." (Novelist David Adams Richards, who was born and grew up in Newcastle while Fish was the resident deputy county magistrate there, has described it as "a great town with a grand tradition" 3). In early middle age she finally settled down, dabbled unsuccessfully in politics and survived and flourished as a small-town woman lawyer on the Miramichi—a novelty if not an oddity in her own time and place. Her life is the stuff of fiction and reads like a novel.

For a more indept history of Frances, you can google Frances Lillian Fish/Newcastle.  Of course, she was friends to Lord Beaverbrook who was practically her neighbor growing up....

And if you want to be kept in "stitches", the thread to this link will help you:

www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com

This was REALLY a woman out on her own....

For this week's post, I see a woman out on her own.  I came across this picture and comments on  another site I belong to OUR MIRAMICHI HERITAGE PHOTOS, it is a site of local people, the pictures have to be at least 25 years old.  This picture certainly is.  An amazing story of a woman who forged a trail for herself even building her own home out of cedar.

·  "Mysie, born Margory MacDonald, was eight years old when she and her family
entered the wilderness of New Brunswick in 1836. After a six-week sail to
Saint John, another boat took the settlers from Saint John to Fredericton, NB.

The settlers then travelled north through dense forests to Scotch Settlement
by horse team. A recorded 45 Scottish families, mostly from the Isle of
Skye, came to the Stanley, NB  area that year. (Another 15 families from England
also settled in the area now known as English Settlement.)"

In the spring of 1838, many of the remaining immigrants pushed on to Stanley and the nearby communities. Of the survivors was a family of McDonalds. The daughter Mysie McDonald remained until a few months prior to her death. She is buried in the old Catholic cemetery in Stanley. Mysie was a strong woman determined to survive. She cut logs and built her own cabin shingling the roof with cedar bark. She carried her dead brother on her back to Stanley for burial. It was reported she was honest and never begged but would accept a cup of tea or a hot meal. Her ability to tell the future resulted in her being called a witch. Some people poked fun at her. Mysie was an incredible woman, a survivor.

A 1861 Canadian census in Stanley listed James as a brother and farmer and head of household, a Margaret as a mother, a brother Donald who was a Trapper and a brother Charles who was a laborer and then a Mysie who is listed as an "Idiot." How sad to be listed as such. She was no "idiot" as this census reflects if she was able to live off the land, build her own home, etc. 

Women had to be strong to be on their own then, come to think of it, women still have to be strong to be on their own now.....

If you are looking for women this weekend---- go to this site  www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com  

Well-that didn't sound real good, but, you know what I mean!