I recently visited Cornwall, mostly to spend time with a good friend, but also to visit some of the places I’d read about in my family history. We started in Fowey and stayed at the Safe Harbour Inn, right across the street from the Fowey Almshouses where my great great Aunt Sarah live the last …
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A Wartime Romance
As I said in my last post, my grandpa Bert fought overseas in WWI. He never talked much about it; all I knew growing up was that he was wounded in the leg and once, when he was checking gas masks, a shell went through the tent right beside his head. Later I found out …
War
My grandma used to tell us of her uncle Bob Tucker and his son Archie who lived across the road from them in Meanook. She recalled playing with Archie, who was about the same age, until his father was killed in WWI after which he moved to Seattle. This was the last she heard of …
Original records and transcriptions
One of the first archived records I discovered was the marriage of Edward Tucker and Mary Ann Bowtell. This was a stepping stone as it had the names of both their parents. I knew Edward was from Ilfracombe and found a record in the International Genealogical Index ( index based upon data collected by the …
The Shoplands of Cornwall
“William Shopland, born in Somerset in the early 1800s, married a Miss Squire and moved to Par, Cornwall. They had three boys and five girls, including Marie, Agnes, Henry, John Squire and James. John Squire was born August 24, 1849 in Par, Cornwall. The family ended up in Par, Cornwall, where William worked in the …
Williams and wills
The Hopps family history after they came to Canada had also been recorded by other branches of the family as well as information in the history book of the area. That was were I found a picture of my three times great grandparents William and Ellen Hopps and their daughter Hannah. William and Ellen and …
A dusty treasure trove
My grandma kept everything. So when I went on the hunt for pictures, records, documents, etc. in her house, I had to wade through high school exam booklets and lesson plans from her teaching days, every newspaper that mentioned friends or family, boxes of unsold Farmer’s Union cookbooks and other random things, all coated with …
An unexpected pregnancy?
Continuing Leo and Lillie’s story, I’m going to switch to Leo, son of a plantation owner who came from a long line of French nobility. Leo was a younger son of a younger son, so I don’t think there was much in the way of family inheritance for him in St. Lucia. His daughter wrote …
Finding answers leads to more questions
A great resource I’ve found is local history books. There were a lot published in Alberta in the 1980s and families were encouraged to submit stories and information about their pioneer ancestors. This was where I got a start on Leo and Lillie Devaux’s lives. Their daughter submitted a story to the Wheels of Progress: …
The Devauxs
Much of the Devaux history has been well documented by Ian B. de Minvielle-Devaux in 1960 (translated by Gilles Devaux) and by Robert Devaux, Castries, St. Lucia which can be found here https://www.familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/13627388?cid=mem_copy To sum up the information, the Devauxs are descended from French nobility and the three Devaux brothers, Philippe, Guillaume-André and Henry, were …
Lori's family history 