Seasonal wishes for my SepiaSaturday friends

This week's prompt for SepiaSaturday got me looking for bygone Christmases.  I came up with these pictures:

 Here I am with my niece and nephew Christmas 1971.  Dad would always go out and cut a "real" Christmas tree, some of them had odd shapes, but the smell always was so nice....

 Speaking of Dad, here is me, Dad (who thought he would don  a wig on for the pic) and my sister, Christmas 1971.

 I am holding my firstborn, David, Christmas 1972.  I am wearing the "going away" dress from my wedding from a couple of years prior to this.  It seems any girl getting married had to have a "going away" dress for the honeymoon.  I made this one (you guessed it) out of polyester crimpknit.  Who remembers sewing with that material?

 MY friend and I each holding one of my daughter's "Cabbage Kid Doll", that was all the rage back in the '70's.

My little brood, David, Christina, and Andrew around 1984 or 1985.  Where have the years gone?  Now they are all grown and away.

Finally, I will finish with  this collage of pictures I took this past year, just to bring us up to the present.

Please go to www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com  for more seasonal wishes, for all the unChristian people, I wish you all Happy Holidays, Happy Hannakuh, whatever you celebrate, please have a good time over the next couple of weeks.....

SepiaSaturday December 7, 2013 edition

This week I thought I would feature a MAN in an apron. It is from the site of "Our Miramichi Heritage Photos".  Life was certainly challenging back in the '30's and '40's.  A man back then did not need a "man cave", he practically worked in one...LOL

 Below the picture was this write-up:

Miramichi River
c 1930
During the winter months, trees were felled in lumber camps that could lodge between 20 and 100 loggers. This group photo shows the various roles the men could have. There is a cook wearing a white apron; a man, probably the camp owner, in suit and tie; and loggers. The loggers would also go hunting in winter - hence the sporting guns.

Moving right along, since we are "in the season" I will include a picture of my sister, Dianne, and me in our Christmas aprons getting ready for Christmas Dinner in 2005.

 There are butlers on our aprons singing Fa La La La La....

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays/Happy time off to all!!!  :)

For more apron strings, please visit:   www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com

Middle Island, Miramichi, NB

I searched in vain for some sepia pictures depicting something relating to the theme for this week, but could find none.  I did, however, chose these pictures of a day at the beach on Middle Island, Miramichi, NB, with a colleague and her two daughters.  This was taken a couple of summers ago, we followed up with a picnic, it was a gorgeous day!

Hope you enjoyed this pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them.  For more pictures of themelike or unthemelike pictures, go to www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com  Happy SepiaSaturday to all other Sepians out there!!!!   :)

Sepia Saturday 201

This week, the prompt is houses.  I have selected a few from around here (Miramichi) and around the Atlantic provinces, also including Quebec.  I will start with a couple of stately homes here in Miramichi.  They are still standing, I remember going by them as a young girl, still like to see them as I drive by now.

And of course, there was the house I was brought up in, not as grand, that's for sure, but a lot of good memories there.

Then there is this old house I happened upon on a trip to Miscou Island, a little island just off North Eastern New Brunswick.  There must be a lot of stories that could come out of this house....

This is an old sugar shack, belonged to Uncle Albert from Kamouraska county in Northern Quebec.  I have made a few visits during maple syrup time in the Spring, yum yum, can still taste it now...

These were the maples behind the sugar shack.

Well, be it ever so humble, there is no place like home!!!

For more "homey" pictures, mosey on down to www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com

SepiaSaturday, October 12, 2013

This steamboat traveled from Newcastle to Chatham, New Brunswick (which is known as just plain Miramichi) in the late 1800's.  It was a work boat in the daytime loaded down with tons of lumber from the Cunard and Rankin lumber kings, and an entertainment boat by night, with music, food, and dancing, and just a wee bit of drink..........  It would go down the Miramichi River to Chatham and come back to port upriver at Newcastle in the wee hours just in time to start hauling lumber again.  Local singers, Connie and Paul composed and sang a song about the Alexandra's travels.

If you want to keep above water, visit www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com for more pictures of boats of all shapes and forms.

Memories are not always picture perfect.......

I searched my albums and came up with these pictures.

 My first communion, 1957, I seem to be a little in the dark....LOl

 My graduation picture, unlike the first picture, my face now seems to be in the dark....

 This picture is of my son, David and my daughter, Tina.  Their grandfather, Willie carried this photo in his wallet for years.  Of course, I would like to think it was because they were his beloved grandchildren, but on the back of this picture (below picture) was our then Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau's autograph, Willie was a staunch liberal all his life!

My aunt Bertha's wedding, (1958), here she is pictured with my Mom.  Aunt Bertha and Uncle Fred celebrated their 55th anniversary this past June, and she was able to fit in her wedding dress, amazing!  I believe I had outgrown mine in the space of 10 years or so. Looking at this picture, I notice Dad was particular about rain getting on the hydro meters on the side of the house, he made a little roof over them, LOL.

For more shadowy and blurred and imperfect pictures in general, please negotiate your way to:

www.sepiasaturday.blogspot.com

Fall colors on the Miramichi

The Fall colors are coming in.  We had a lot of rain lately and I find that the colors are not as bright as they could be.  I see this on my way home everyday, it is nice and colorful!  Hope to see more colors this weekend.

Shadows Thursdays

This is a picture I took in the mid '90's with my SLR camera.  You can just barely make out the rose at the bottom of the cup.

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! 

SepiaSaturday, August 31, 2013

This week, I went with ties and suspenders.  The first one is of our former Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson.  He was prime minister from 1963-1968.  Earlier he won the Nobel prize for peace in 1957.  Under his Liberal government, the present Canadian flag was introduce.

 These hard working men were the crew of the original Max Aitken boat, one man is visibly wearing suspenders, the man with the jean coveralls almost has suspenders....  Miramichi now has a new Max Aitken tour boat, named after Max Aitken who became Lord Beaverbrook.

 

A couple of SepiaSaturdays ago, I posted a couple of steel workers working high up building our Centennial bridge, I then came across this picture of some of those steel workers.  If you look closer, one is wearing suspenders.  Brave lads!!

 

The man below is John Calhoun from Boiestown (pronounced boystown) who wrote a ballad about a young man called Peter Emberley from Prince Edward Island, Canada who left the island to start a new life  lumbering in New Brunswick.  Here is an excert from a local paper:

 Many people do not realize that a song written in the early 60’s by Bob Dylan has roots here in Miramichi. The Ballad of John White, written and recorded by Bob was based on a traditional Miramichi Folksong written in the 1880’s. Peter Emberley, a true story about a young Prince Edward Island boy who was killed in a tragic lumbering accident on Parker’s Ridge and written by John Calhoun of Boiestown formed the basis for Bob Dylan’s song. Bob acknowledges this in the liner notes of the album it was featured on.

You can hear some of the song Peter Emberley by going to Youtube and key in the singer's name, Bill Staines- Peter Amberly (the name was mispelled).

Last weekend on my return from visiting my son in Fredericton, I stopped off in Boiestown and took a picture of the tombstone of Peter Emberley.

For further ties, men, and suspenders, go to  http://sepiasaturday.blogspot.com