History
The readers of this blog will already know that my grandmother passed away yesterday at the ripe old age of 99. She was an amazing woman who never backed down from a challenge and lived her life showering others with love. I still have the two grandparents on my mothers side that are alive which I fully realize makes me an incredibly lucky person to have been able to know my grandparents for so long.
It has got me doing some thinking though. I don’t know if it will head anywhere but I watch a lot of history YouTube videos. They are generally war videos. as that seems to be the main form of communication for humans, but there are others too. As a white male in his thirties, I am endlessly interested in the two world wars though. I also have a grandfather that repaired planes in the second one and a great grandfather that I am told fought in the trenches of the first.
But, I don’t know anything about either of these. I think my dad and some uncles could fill in some details about my grandfathers service but I’m not so sure about my great-grandfather. What unit did he serve in? What was his main job? How long did he serve? Etc.
I did a REALLY quick search of his name this morning in the Canadian and British archives and they didn’t come up with anything I immediately recognized as being him but I spent all of five minutes on my phone so I don’t count that as a quality search. It also appears that there may be some records that still haven’t been digitized.
I wouldn’t mind putting together some of the information though. What did he do before and after the war? While it probably had a major impact on his life, it also would hazve been a fairly short part of it. And that’s just my great grandfather on my Dad’s side. I couldn’t even tell you the names of the rest of my great grandparents, which I realize doesn’t say many good things about me. I think I only ever met two of them though, and I was very young at tthe time.
I’ve asked my Dad to set aside any historical documents from my grandma Irene if there are any and if nobody else wants them but I think in the future months and years I might have to start doing some research. I’m not a great writer and I don’t need to write paragraphs about each person, but just some jot notes or something like that as a start. Maybe just a bibliography of sorts so people know where to look.
I’m not sure if anything will come from this or if I’ll ever get around to doing any of it, but I just want to make sure my grandparents aren’t forgotten. They were/are wonderfuul people and their legacies should be remembered by the world to come.
Comments
I have some stuff collected about Grandpa's service that I've never finished compiling into a lucid story. But there's some of that aroundd as well.
And Aunty Janet has Granpa Roch's old computer and all of his geneaology and family history stuff. We've had converstations that it will come to me in time, but I've never really had any follow-up on that. All I can say is that it's out there somewhere and it wouldn't take too much to get access to it if you asked the right people.
I just want to add a note to this blog about grandma since it's fresh and she also acheived a lot of amazing stuff.
Maybe most impressive is that her first job was picking tomatoes for Heinz ketchup. That's right she was a condiment pioneer! She worked a long career as a nurse but also turned that work into some amazing community work. She was part of the team that launched Healthline in Saskatchewan so people could have access to preliminary healthcare by phone. She also helped deploy a medical alert system that gave people with limited mobility access to emergency service at the push of a button they'd wear around their neck. None of that seems too amazing in 2025 but we're talking about work she did in the 80's and 90's when this technology was still very fresh.
But her greatest acheivement and the one that just immediately hit me yesterday was her jam-jam cookies. Healthline continues and seniors have better access to emergency care than ever. But we will never again have one of grandma's jam-jams and that's just one of the reasons my heart hurts today.