When you get to be my age and you look around, and life just hasn't been what you expected, you can end up feeling quite forlorn. I am not living life right now. I am instead spending my days re-living old memories. Some people that reach my age have families and rich active lives. But some of us have travelled paths which have left us alone. And this is where I am. So instead of having days full of things to do, we instead our left in a torturous silence that eats away at our souls. Nothing to do but think of all our memories.
When I started to do my ancestry many years ago, my one and only goal was to find my Grandma Ida's grave. I just wanted to pay my last respects to a woman who I never got to see after I was removed from their care way back in 1964. In the end I kind of found her grave. It's an unmarked grave in Toronto somewhere. There were records of her being buried in a particular area with other 'paupers'. And of course this never sat well with me over the years. I felt so bad for this woman who languished in a nursing home - alone for so many years. And then got thrown away as an 'unknown' in a paupers grave. I felt I owed her somehow,... and that is how this ancestry journey began.
I learned that this line of women goes way back and we are one of the first pioneers of Ontario. All of these women ended up in what back then was the historic town of the City of York in Upper Canda. And the main theme I can see that runs through all of our lives from Anne-Louise Boude in 1835, all the way down to myself,.... is hardship. We all struggled.
So I found my (3rd) Great Grandmother came over from Ireland and settled as one of the very first pioneering settlers. Anne-Louise Boude ~ Born in Co. Donegal, Ireland in 1835 ~ and that is where this line of women I speak of begins... I don't know much about how this lady died or even where she is buried, but I did find out about the rest of them.
Her daughter,.... Annie Louisa Calgey had a short life dying at the age of 43 of chloroform narcosis. (??) I have researched her for so long but aside from knowing she was buried in Toronto at Necropolis Cemetery I can't find out just how she died. It says she died in an emergency hospital (?) So? operation gone wrong? Dental work gone wrong? Either way, she too had a short life. And died when little "Lizzy" was so young.
Elizabeth Anne Ball ~ after her mother died young she wandered around doing domestic work for room and board before marrying and settling down on a farm. But when the Spanish flu came through, in 1920, she and her infant daughter died. "Lizzie" was only 39 years old. Again ~ so young.
That left her daughter Ida Maye Dyer with no Mother at the age of 4. Her busy father gave her to her Aunt and Uncle to be raised. So she, too, was removed from her family. But it was in her last years of life that she was forgotten about. She ended up being left alone in a nursing home for over 20 years.
My mother,... Diane Holyoak fled to BC away from her family too. She died alone and was buried in an unmarked grave,...
I am seeing a pattern here. All of us - removed from our families. I am still researching why but will probobly never know. I think large families back then had their daughters work in other peoples homes as domestics. But either way most of us left home early. Hardships mainly,... illness,... loss of family.
So as I sit here tonight pondering all of this, it makes me wonder,...
Is the sadness I feel so deeply, not just my own? Is there a thread of lonliness where the feelings of rejection and abandonment run so deeply through all of us women, it never allowed us the joy we so desperately seeked? Starting way back in Ireland and ending up here in Ontario. Four woman who's lives were very different than what they wanted or expected. Four woman taken from their families for one reason or another,... maybe,... just maybe,... that pain runs so deep it travelled through all of our veins. Settling in reminding us of a haunting past? Ingested so deep it will never leave. We all feel it,...
I can't describe the feeling of my sadness in words. It's not just lonliness. It's knowing you are alone because you were rejected,... that is a pain engrained so deep it envelopes every cell of your being.
Is this curse I talk about real? Are the women of this line doomed to a life of hardship somehow? Existential thoughts for someone nearing the end. I think it's natural to go over your life and why it even existed at all,... a queation I ask myself often. Why did I even exist at all when noone really seemed to want me??
I think this is why I feel so strongly about getting a headstone and putting all of these forgotten women on it. Valadate they existed. Inscribe their names into granite to prove they belonged somewhere. Maybe not on this planet,... but we belong together in eternity.
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