Two new books from Atlantic Canada will undoubtedly pique the interest of genealogists researching the area and may encourage all of us to write our family’s history.
A Boy from Botwood: Pte. A.W. Manuel, Royal Newfoundland Regiment, 1914-1919 by Brian Davies and Andrew Traficante tells the wartime story of Arthur Manuel, a story that had remained unknown until a few years ago.
When World War One veteran Arthur Manuel was 83 years old, he hired a stenographer, purchased a Dictaphone, and compiled 400 pages of manuscript. The unpublished memoir, however, was only discovered among the family’s records by his grandson David Manuel in 2011. (Don’t we all wish for a similar discovery?)
Determined to escape his impoverished rural Newfoundland existence, Mr. Manuel enlisted with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment in late 1914. His memoir revealed harrowing accounts of his life under fire span the Allies’ ill-fated 1915 Gallipoli campaign, the Regiment’s 1916 near-destruction at Beaumont-Hamel, and his 1917 Passchendaele battlefield capture. His account of his seventeen-month POW experience, including his nearly successful escape from a German forced labour camp, provides compelling insights into the Great War.
A Boy from Botwood was published by Dundurn Press, Toronto, in January 2017.
My Gaelic Grandmother, Memories of Mary Stewart: Rural Life in Valleyfield and Brudenell, Prince Edward Island 1894 – 1987, written and published by Bertha Campbell, is about the author’s maternal grandmother Mary (Nicholson) Stewart.
The book is part social history and part family history, painting a picture not only of Mary Stewart but of life in rural Prince Edward Island decades ago.
To write the book, Ms. Campbell combed the PEI archives, reading any documents from the area she could, including turn-of-the century school inspection reports and anything relating to the Valleyfield Church, because the family was Gaelic Presbyterian. She had already collected reams of family notes, stories and photos, but to learn more about her grandmother, she phoned and visited relatives and friends in Montague and Brudenell where her grandmother lived.
Ms. Campbell had initially planned to write her family’s history, but found the topic unwieldy. Needing a sharper focus, she honed in on her grandmother’s story. Perhaps we can take a note from her experience.
You can read more about the book, available in PEI bookstores, in this CBC report. Ms. Campbell can be contacted through her Twitter account, @mullnabeinne.
