Читать книгу Whatever Happened to Mary Janeway? - Mary Pettit - Страница 6

Since the publication of Mary Janeway: The Legacy of a Home Child I have continued to research the Janeway family. Much to my delight, I located some of Mary’s relatives in Alberta. Her sister Emma Janeway’s children, Gordon Touchings (deceased), Lois Lamble (deceased), Robert “Bob” Touchings in Edmonton, and Walter Touchings in Westlock; Emma’s grandchildren, Wayne Lamble in Edmonton and Gail Horner now in Lethbridge, Alberta; and her sister Caroline “Carrie” Janeway’s granddaughter, Rowena Lunn, now living in Kelowna, British Columbia.

I also learned that Mary Janeway’s parents, William and Martha, along with their children Caroline, John, William, and Mary, relocated from Scotland to London, England, before Mary’s younger sister Emma was born in Lambeth, England, in 1888. Two years later, their mother Martha died in childbirth and her sisters came and took the newborn back to Glasgow, leaving William in London to raise Caroline, John, William, Mary, and Emma.

Eleven-year old Carrie was “ready to be trained for service” and helped raise two-year-old Emma. John, age ten, was sent to an orphanage, then ran off to Vancouver, British Columbia, to work in the coal mines. William, age eight, and Mary, age six, were sent to an orphanage in Liverpool, and then to Canada as home children, and were placed on farms in rural Ontario. Their father passed away in 1902. Carrie worked as a nanny to pay for Emma’s keep in an orphanage in London, married Frank Lunn, the gardener at a well-to-do home in London where she worked as a maid, and had two sons, Francis “Frank” and Harvey, while living in London.

Carrie, along with her family, and Emma were the last Janeway children to immigrate to Canada. Prior to leaving Britain in 1908, Carrie traced Mary and Will through the Red Cross and found them to be living in Ontario.

In this sequel to Mary Janeway: The Legacy of a Home Child, which traces Mary’s life up to age sixteen, the Janeway family, the Church family, the witnesses at the weddings, the woman who helped raise Mary’s son, the Jacques family, and the Hewson family are real people. The rest are fictional characters, threads of the author’s imagination interwoven to create a backdrop to the story in an attempt to tell and understand Mary’s life. The places, cities, town, streets, and identified buildings are real. Mary lived her adult years in Hamilton, fondly referred to as the Electric City, the Lunch Pail Town, and the Steel City.