1847

My Buchanan ancestors left Ireland during the Great Irish Famine. They had travelled north to the port of Londonderry, where they booked passage on a sailing ship for Canada. But after 10 days at sea they ran into a terrible storm. Sometimes they feared that they would sink. Mercifully, that did not happen, but the ship was damaged so badly that it had to return for repairs.

https://pixabay.com/images/search/sailing%20ship/

On the second attempt, a “plague of immigrant fever” broke out on the ship. These illnesses were incurable with the primitive medicines of that time. When the family arrived in Canada, the official quarantine station at Grosse Isle, Quebec was already beyond capacity. So their ship was sent up the St Lawrence River to Kingston, Ontario for quarantine. There, the father, Andrew Buchanan, and the baby of William Buchanan died of the sickness. After being released from quarantine, they came west and settled in a wilderness of huge trees that neighbors called Buchananville, later named Donegal, Perth County, Ontario.

On Thanksgiving Day, let us pause to be thankful for the many blessings we enjoy and for the sacrifices of earlier generations that made it possible!

I Love Old Photos

A little over a week ago I had a phone call.

"A trunk and two boxes of Sally's genealogy needs to be moved and I do not have a place for it. I wonder if you would be willing to go through it and see what needs to be kept."

If the phone call had come when we still lived on the acreage, I would have had no problem. But now I live in a rented apartment and do not have extra storage space. Still I owe a lot to Aunt Sally. Most of the research on my wife's mother's lines was done by Sally. And I hate to think of research being lost, so I agreed to look at it. Besides, I had some hope of finding Sally's lost personal history.

The next day the items were delivered, and I was pleased to see that one box was entirely made-up of old photos. Excitedly, I found some familiar faces, and many that were not familiar. Almost half of the photos were identified by writing on the back,

For the next week or so, my "spare time" was taken up by scanning, editing, uploading to FamilySearch, and tagging. This took about 25 hours, but I was glad to do it. I have been able to save many of these photos for posterity.

The fate of the physical box of photos is still uncertain, but digital copies are now preserved online.I wonder what I will find in the trunk ... maybe Sally's lost personal history? I hope so. She was a remarkable person, Her talents were many and were developed to enrich the lives of family, friends and neighbors: poetry, gardening,flower arranging, calligraphy. cake decorating, liquid embroidery, ceramics (from mixing the clay to the final firing in her very own electric kiln), and that just scratches the surface.

She was also a woman of great faith, who embraced the restored gospel taught by the missionaries and spent the rest of her life serving joyfully in the church, She sent her two sons off to teach the gospel in distant lands, and in her old age, she saw one of her sons baptize her beloved husband. She has a special place in my heart. I will help to preserve her efforts.