MacVays (and a MacDonald) in McAdam
In my first post about the MacVay family, I mentioned that my great-grandfather, William MacVay, helped his brother Joseph (who was working with his son, also named William) build the railway station in McAdam, New Brunswick. Well, today I read a news article from New Brunswick that mentions the MacVays’ work.
The article provided me with a couple of interesting bits of information:
1) Apparently there was a master mason named Archie B. MacDonald who worked on the station. So my great-grandfather may have been MacDonald’s apprentice, which is a great bit of information for me because I’ve always wondered how and when William MacVay became a mason. In all the records and stories I knew of, he’d been working in lumber and carpentry and then suddenly he was a mason. Now I may have some perspective on his transition to that trade. However, MacDonald was younger than my great-grandfather (according to NB census records), so the teacher-apprentice relationship may have been the other way around. Also, apparently the station was built between 1900 and 1911. William MacVay moved to Cape Breton sometime in 1901, so I wonder how much of the stonework he actually did on that station.
2) William MacVay is alive! No, not my great-grandfather, but my cousin. Actually, he’s my second cousin, once removed. He’s also the only male MacVay descendant of Alexander MacVay outside of my immediate family. When I wrote that first post on the MacVays not long ago, I wrote that he had passed away, since I’m pretty sure another cousin told me he had. And yet there he is, alive and well, visiting the McAdam railway station with his sister. William and I used to write letters to each other; I think I’ll try to get in touch with him again. I’ve edited the original post.
Anyway, do check out the article. Great stuff, and nice to see another MacVay.
Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod: Duncan’s Kilt
My family’s pretty Scottish, despite the fact that the most recently anyone in my family tree actually lived in Scotland was around the middle of the 19th century. Many of the Scots on my mother’s side of the family, all Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, lived in little communities filled with other Catholic, Gaelic-speaking Highlanders — usually from the same places they were from — after they moved to Cape Breton. When one thinks of such people, one might imagine they wore kilts. They were, after all, very Scottish. However, that wasn’t the case.
Duncan MacLeod of Eigg, whom I often call Duncan the Gardener, probably didn’t wear a kilt, which in his lifetime had long since ceased to be an integral part of the Gael’s daily dress. His children most probably didn’t wear kilts, including his son Angus, my great-great-grandfather, who lived on River Denys Mountain in a place that was at the time called Upper Southwest Mabou. Angus married Jessie MacInnis, whose family also probably didn’t wear kilts. Instead, the Scottish men in my family, who were all very Scottish, wore pants. Probably wool pants. They probably didn’t even care much about tartans and clans and all that. The Jacobites’ loss at the Battle of Culloden had a lot to do with this, but it might also have had something to do with the fact that people (and peoples) change. They move on; they adapt; they evolve.
I wore a kilt the evening of my wedding reception. In fact, for several years the wearing of kilts at weddings and other formal occasions has been gaining in popularity where I’m from. For the wedding itself, the day before, I had worn regular clothes, a shirt and tie and all that. But for the wedding reception, I was decked out in full Highland dress, complete with kilt, sporran, sgian dubh, the whole nine yards. Leen and I were even piped into the hall. I wore the MacLeod tartan, something I had long before promised my mother I would do, to honour her family. But while I was honouring my mother’s family, and perhaps following traditions once followed by my ancestors, I was really doing something that people in my family probably hadn’t done for over two hundred years. I was recreating a romanticised version of my family history, though I have no regrets for having done so.
Who knows? Maybe my Scottish ancestors in Canada did wear kilts. I was told by an elderly relative that my great-grandfather, William MacVay, wore a kilt at least once (though he was probably just looking back to a romantic family past, the way I did years later). Surely some people in my family have donned kilts in the last couple of centuries. In fact, I do know of one post-Culloden, post-migration example of someone who owned a kilt on my mother’s side: a young man named Duncan MacLeod, a son of my great-great-grandfather, Angus.
Duncan was born near the end of the 19th century up on the mountain, in that small, Catholic, Gaelic-speaking community the MacLeods had settled into. My grandfather once told me that Duncan, his uncle, joined a local Highland regiment during World War I and was given a kilt as part of his dress uniform. As the story goes, the war ended just as Duncan was walking off the ship in England, so he turned around and walked right back on and went home. His kilt was hung on a wall in his living room, where it remained for several years. He had only worn it a few times. Duncan died in a mine accident in Timmins, Ontario in 1928 at the age of 36.
I don’t know what happened to his kilt. Mine was returned to the place I had rented it from the day after the wedding reception.
Using My Head
After watching Monsters Vs. Aliens, Al and I were playing with some of his toys.
Me (holding the head of a robot dinosaur): Hey guys!
Al (holding a transformer in one hand and a generic Voltron-like robot in the other): Hey!
Me: What’s your name?
Al: My name Robot.
Me: OK. And how about you? What’s your name?
Al: My name Transformer.
Me: Wow, you guys have such original names.
Al: What’s your name?
Me: Uh…Robot Dinosaur…Head.
Al: Robot Dinosaur Head. Haha! (That’s two-year-old-speak for ‘Wow Daddy, that’s such an original name.’)
Cooties = Kudis?
Last night, after a good workout at the gym, Leen and I were on our way home when in the course of a conversation about post-workout close physical proximity I joked, “Well, it’s not like you have cooties.”
I expected her to ask me something like, “What the heck are cooties?” But instead she said, “I had that once when I was a kid, actually.” I was surprised to hear someone say they’ve actually had cooties, considering it’s an imaginary affliction, used by kids in the west as an excuse for shunning and/or teasing other kids. But Leen wasn’t talking about that. She was talking about the very real skin infection known in Malay as kudis.
So we talked about kudis for a bit and it seemed quite plausible to me that the imaginary western affliction known as cooties came from kudis. But I’ve been wrong about stuff like this before (after hearing several times from several sources that the word bogeyman had something to do with colonial powers’ fear of the Bugis, I wrote about it and was corrected by those who knew the word actually had English origins from way back; one of those who corrected me was a linguist who seemed really annoyed by the perpetuation of the Bugis myth). Whatever the case, I wanted to check it out.
The Wikipedia article on cooties is a mess. There’s no mention of Malaya/Malaysia, but that’s not necessarily a refutation of the kudis connection, considering how dodgy the etymology section of the article is. There is, however, an external link at the bottom of the article that goes to a page at The Straight Dope. There, in a piece from 1985, someone replies to a question about the origins of the word cooties by saying:
Cooties in the sense of “an intangible profusion of vileness emanating from an especially loathsome individual” is probably peculiar to this country. However, cooties in the original sense of body lice is known to most speakers of English. According to Eric Partridge, whose knowledge of things linguistic is almost as awesome as my knowledge of things in general, the word cooties, and probably the reality as well, was picked up by sailors from the Malayans, who had a similar word meaning dog lice. A possibly related term is kutu, a Polynesian word meaning lice of any kind.
So there is a known connection between cooties and kudis. A quick look at some entries at Dictionary.com reveals this as well:
coot⋅ie1 [koo-tee] Show IPA
–noun Informal.
a louse, esp. one affecting humans, as the body louse, head louse, or pubic louse.
Also, cooty.Origin:
1910–15; perh. < Malay kutu biting body louse, with final syll. conformed to -ie
Another mention of Malay origins. Fair enough, but hold on: why is it attributed to the word kutu, which generally refers to lice and other wingless biting insects? Did cooties really come from kutu?
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate (I’m no linguist, after all) that cooties did actually come from kudis, not from kutu. The association with lice may have something to do with the fact that a certain kind of kudis (kudis buta, known in English as scabies) does involve mites. People I’ve asked about kudis have all told me it’s not contagious, but scabies certainly is (at least through skin contact); if regular kudis is the same as impetigo (it is according to the Malay Wikipedia article on kudis), a bacterial infection, then it can be spread through contact as well. Ease of transmission aside, kudis would be repulsive enough that children afflicted with it would be shunned by their peers, or at the very least teased. We all know how cruel kids can be sometimes. Considering its repulsiveness, and its prevalence among children (like the imaginary cooties, kudis is more common in children than adults, whereas kutu refers to lice and fleas more generally), it makes sense that it would develop into an insult to be used against someone who might not even have the condition (”Stay away from her,” the class jock said, pointing at the nerdy girl, “she has kudis!”).
Cooties could very well be from kutu — after all, the people who wrote that dictionary thought so — but I’m not so sure. Even if kudis is the real origin of cooties, it might be something linguists already know — but again, I’m not so sure. I guess I’ll just have to keep scratching…er, digging.
Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod: The Gardener’s Crossing
I mentioned in the first post in the Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod that Duncan, the Highlander from Skye who was wounded at the Battle of Culloden and escaped to the small isle of Eigg, had three sons, Donald, Malcolm and John (Duncan and Catriona aka Catherine also had three daughters: Mary, Effie and Ann). One of those sons, John, was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was born sometime between 1762 and 1770 in the village of Laig and married a woman named Effy (short for Euphemia), who was born in 1771 in nearby Gruilin (on an island that small, I suppose everything is nearby). John and Effy had five children that I know of: Mary, Catherine, George, and a set of twins named Flora and Duncan. Flora’s twin brother, Duncan MacLeod, who was born sometime between 1807 and 1811, was my great-great-great-grandfather.
Duncan MacLeod worked as a crofter (a tenant farmer) in Lower Gruilin and married Anne MacIsaac. (Anne was born around 1811 and was a daughter of Hugh MacIsaac and Effy MacIsaac of Cleadale, who would leave Eigg in 1843 and settle in Upper South Mabou on Cape Breton Island. Hugh MacIsaac’s father was Duncan MacIsaac, who may have been married to Mary Swan.) Duncan MacLeod, besides being a farmer, was also an avid gardener, and was apparently skilled enough at gardening that he was eventually able to make a living from it. That is, until the MacLeods were forced to leave the island.
The hardships faced by Highland Gaels after the Battle of Culloden, which resulted in their culture being severely repressed, were compounded by another scourge that would displace many Gaels from Scotland: the Highland Clearances. As the clan system eroded, clan chiefs became landlords and their clansmen became little more than slaves. The situation was made worse by the landowners’ realisation that using their land for grazing sheep would be more profitable than having it farmed by tenant farmers. The absentee owner of Eigg (a MacPherson, if I’m not mistaken) began to force the island’s inhabitants from their homes. Among the hundreds of people who left Eigg in 1843 alone (140 families, with most of the remaining inhabitants cleared out by a decade later) were Duncan and Anne and their nine-month-old son, Duncan. They and the other families joined many, many more who left Scotland to pick up the pieces of their lives in new lands. Sir Walter Scott said of the Clearances:
“In too many instances the Highlands have been drained, not of their superfluity of population, but of the whole mass of the inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice, which will be one day found to have been as shortsighted as it is unjust and selfish. Meantime, the Highlands may become the fairy ground for romance and poetry, or the subject of experiment for the professors of speculation, political and economical. But if the hour of need should come—and it may not, perhaps, be far distant—the pibroch may sound through the deserted region, but the summons will remain unanswered.”
The MacLeods sailed from Tobermorey on 13 July 1843 as steerage passengers on a 448-ton ship called the Catherine. The book Mabou Pioneers, an invaluable guide for anyone doing genealogical research on the families of Inverness County, Cape Breton, lists Duncan and Anne (and their infant son) among the passengers, along with Duncan’s twin sister Flora, her husband Alex Morrison, and their children. What the book doesn’t say, however, is that the Catherine never actually made it to Cape Breton.
A couple of weeks into its journey across the Atlantic, the Catherine began to take on water. Rather than risk the possibility of sinking in the middle of the ocean, the captain turned the ship around. On or just before 23 August, the ship limped into Belfast harbour, its home port. The passengers, who were all poor and had already paid a lot of money for the passage, were starving because the ship’s master had made them pay for their own bread, pretty much the only food they got for the whole trip, which was supposed to be included in the price of the passage itself. Because the passengers were all destitute, many only got a half-pound of bread each day (the allowance for each passenger was supposed to be a pound a day); some couldn’t afford bread at all and had to rely on help from their fellow passengers. An officer of the Government Emigration office in Belfast, Lieutenant Peter Stark, was unsuccessful in his attempts to force the ship’s masters to refund some of the passengers’ money, but he did manage to arrange for sufficient food and water to be supplied to the passengers until another ship arrived to replace the very-leaky Catherine. On 1 September, almost two months after they had left Tobermorey, Duncan MacLeod and his family left Belfast on the 501-ton John and Robert, bound once again for Cape Breton. (An account of the incident, including correspondence between Peter Stark and his superiors at Westminster, can be found here.)
Sometime in early October 1843, Duncan MacLeod and his family were among 200 people who disembarked from the John and Robert at Ship Harbour (now called Port Hawkesbury) on the Gut of Canso (now called the Strait of Canso). Duncan and Anne settled on land near Creignish; Duncan worked as a gardener for the Hon. William MacKeen in nearby Mabou. Duncan and Anne had nine more children in Creignish:
Angus MacLeod, Flora Anne MacLeod, Jessie “Janet” MacLeod, Effie MacLeod, John MacLeod, Hugh MacLeod, William “Wild Bill” MacLeod, Mary MacLeod, and Flora MacLeod (yes, they had two daughters named Flora, which is nothing really, compared to how many families in the area had several sons named John). Then in 1871 they left Creignish and moved inland.
By the time the MacLeods got off that ship in 1843, Scottish settlers had been arriving in the area for several decades, so all of the good land — the land in low-lying areas and on hillsides near the sea along the west end of Cape Breton — had already been taken up. The land the MacLeods lived on in Creignish may have been rented from someone else; either that or the junior Duncan, now almost 30, was farming the land and the family had grown too large for it. Whatever the case, the senior Duncan MacLeod decided to go for a bigger plot of land; in order to get one, he and his family and other latecomers had no choice but to walk up over what is now known as River Denys Mountain and pick a plot of land in the less-hospitable inland areas known in Gaelic as an Cul — the Rear. Duncan moved inland with his wife and most of his children in 1871. I’m not sure if he had already cleared most of the land and built a house by the time they moved there, or if he only set about doing that when the family got to their plot. But I do know Duncan MacLeod died the following year, leaving the new family farm at Upper Southwest Mabou to his second-oldest son, Angus — my great-great-grandfather.
What happened after that? That’s a story for another day.
Chronicles of Duncan MacLeod: The Swans of Eigg
My maternal grandfather, Duncan MacLeod, whom I call Papa, once told me we were kicked off the Isle of Skye for stealing sheep. He told me this early in our talks about the family history a few years back, though they weren’t really talks. No, they were storytelling sessions, an important part of our culture, and I sat in rapt attention as he told me stories of his youth and his — our family.
Papa may have been wrong about the reason our ancestor left Skye; in fact, it turns out he was wrong about a few details of our family’s past, and there were plenty of details he never knew at all. Still, his stories form the backbone of what I know about the MacLeods. The rest — things that happened before Papa was born — I discovered through my own research, and the research of others. It was through this research that I learned of the story of the MacLeods who came before us, the ones who endured hardship and worked to build new lives in other lands.
The historical record of Clan MacLeod goes way back, but the trail of my MacLeod ancestors stops (or rather begins, depending on whether you’re going back or ahead) on 16 April 1746, on Culloden Moor, near Inverness, Scotland. On that fateful day, two armies met on the moor: the supporters of Charles Edward Stuart (also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie) on one side; a force led by William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, on the other. The supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie were fighting to remove the House of Hanover from the British throne and restore the House of Stuart. Known as Jacobites, the prince’s supporters had marched into England but stopped short of London to go back to Scotland to strengthen their ranks, and to wait for ships to arrive from France in support of the Jacobite cause. The Jacobites were mostly Gaelic-speaking Roman Catholic Highlanders. Some clans, notably the MacDonalds, came out in force to fight for Charles. The chiefs of some other clans, such as Clan MacLeod, would not commit their men but would also not stop them from joining the battle. And so a young Highlander named Duncan MacLeod stood among the troops on Culloden Moor that morning. He was my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
Battle of Culloden (1746), a painting by David Morier (taken from Wikipedia).
The Battle of Culloden did not go well for the Jacobites. To make a long story short: they lost. The ships from France never came, the Jacobite army was routed, and Bonnie Prince Charlie escaped to live out the rest of his life in Rome. The Duke of Cumberland, who would later earn the nickname ‘Butcher’, ordered Jacobites who were found injured on the battlefield to be killed on the spot. Duncan MacLeod was among the injured, but somehow he escaped and, along with other surviving Highlanders, fled towards Inverness and continued to Fort Augustus. It was there that on 18 April the Jacobite army was disbanded and the remaining soldiers dispersed, with some fleeing the country and others attempting to resume their lives at home.
Duncan MacLeod made it to the small isle of Eigg, where he would spend the rest of his life. Surviving records say he was from Skye, so Papa may have been right about the sheep-stealing episode. Whatever the case, Duncan was a fugitive. A few months after Culloden, men from Eigg who had fought in the battle were rounded up by a Captain Ferguson and sent to the West Indies as slaves. It seems Duncan managed to evade detection by using the name Duncan Swan, Swan being the surname of a nearby family who were most likely in on the ruse—or maybe there wasn’t anyone on the island whose real name was Swan, all such people being fugitives. Duncan and his family used the name Swan until at least 1764/65, when a religious census was carried out in the Small Isles (like other Catholics, the ‘Swans’ were listed as ‘Papists’). At that time, Duncan was living with his wife, Catriona MacLellan, and their three sons, Donald, Malcolm and John.
After Culloden- Rebel Hunting, an 1884 painting by John Seymour Lucas (taken from Wikipedia).
Duncan’s son Donald is sometimes referred to as Pioneer Donald. He was born on Eigg in 1752 and married Jessie MacPherson (also of Eigg) when he was a young man. They went to North America in 1791 and settled in the Cape D’Or, Horseshoe Bay area (near Parrsboro, Nova Scotia). In 1808 he and his family (he and Jessie had seven daughters and two sons) moved to the area now known as St. Rose on Cape Breton Island. He was granted some land at Broad Cove Marsh, an area henceforth known as Dunvegan in memory of the MacLeods’ ancestral home. Through their son Duncan, Donald and Jessie had many descendants in that area. Their most famous descendant is the author Alistair MacLeod, one of Canada’s greatest writers, who wrote the novel No Great Mischief. In that novel, one character laments, “If only the ships had come from France.”
Malcolm, another of Duncan’s sons, moved to Garrick (near Glasgow) and was married to a woman from the Isle of Mull. I’ve read that some of Malcolm MacLeod’s descendants left Scotland and settled in Ontario.
Donald was the only one of Duncan MacLeod’s sons to settle on Cape Breton Island, my home. However, it was not Donald who would pass on genes that eventually led to me and beyond. Instead, it was his brother John, who married a woman named Effie and died on Eigg.
But that’s a story for another day.
Five years of MACVAYSIA
Wow, so I’ve been at this blogging thing for five years now. May 14th marked five years since MACVAYSIA’s first post. My online home has gone through plenty of changes since those early days. It started out at Blogspot, then went to Blogsome, then briefly to a domain owned by a friend’s deranged husband (now ex, thank goodness), and then finally here to my own domain. Some posts have disappeared with all these moves (someone hacked into my Blogspot blog and deleted several months of posts which I never got back; my friend’s crazy ex even deleted my entire blog once), but MACVAYSIA is still here.
In the last five years, not only has my blog gone through changes, my blogging has as well. I don’t blog as often as I used to, for a variety of reasons. For example, a lot of stuff that would have once gone into my blog before (lots of photos and some more private notes) is now usually shared on Facebook; when I want to share a short comment or a link to something I find interesting, now I either do so via Facebook or Twitter. With other forms of online interaction available to me, I find myself turning less often to my blog. Still, I continue to write here, and people actually keep reading it, mostly a small core of readers, people who started reading some time ago, maybe during the days when I was more actively involved in the local blog ’scene’ and often pinged PPS (which is now pretty much obsolete since the rise of RSS feeds). Some of my family and friends read the stuff I put here, but I really don’t know who most of my readers are. It’s all good, I keep putting stuff here anyway.
This blog has done a lot for me. First and foremost it has allowed me to indulge my passion for writing. It has also put me into contact with a lot of great people I might not have otherwise come to know. I’ve made friends who have not only encouraged my writing but enriched my life as well. I’ve even had opportunities to write professionally. I’ve had my articles published in magazines, online and even in a book. Speaking of books, I’m even working on one of my own. Needless to say, I’m really glad I started blogging.
I can’t pretend to know what the future holds, but I know I will keep on writing. And I know I’ll keep putting some of my writing here in my blog, for now at least. Maybe people will even keep reading it. That’s a bonus. So here’s to five years of blogging and writing, and hopefully many more. It’s all good.
The MacVays, Part Three
In Part One I told the story of my ancestors’ Irish origins, and about my particular branch of the family’s journey from Ireland to Scotland, back to Ireland, then back to Scotland again before they finally moved to Canada. Part Two covered the family’s departure from New Brunswick and their early years on Cape Breton. Now it’s time for Part Three, a rundown of life for my MacVays from the death of my great-grandparents till the passing of my grandparents.
Francis Reginald MacVay, known to family and friends as Frank, grew up in Sydney, along with his brother Ralph, who was actually his nephew. By the time Frank was 20, his brothers were all gone (Robert had died; Alexander, Kirk and Ralph had all moved to the US). William and Fanny moved out of the family home at 115 George Street so they could be cared for by their daughter Maude; Frank stayed at 115 George.
Sometime in 1934 or 1935, Frank married Muriel Alice Davison, daughter of Robert Davison and Christina MacKenzie. Muriel’s father’s side of the family consisted mainly of a number of Cape Breton County families: the Davisons came from New Brunswick and settled in the area between Ball’s Creek and Point Edward, where they became connected to Beatons, Dicksons and Grants, among others (the Beatons and Grants may have been descendants of soldiers from the Black Watch who spent time in Sydney; the Dicksons moved to the area from Main-a-Dieu). Muriel’s mother, Christina MacKenzie, was from North River Bridge, in Victoria County, where her family was related to the MacRaes (Christina’s mother was a MacRae), MacLeods and MacLennans.
Frank and Muriel’s first child, William Henion MacVay (I think Henion was the family name of some close friends of Frank and Muriel), was born on 18 April 1936. Two years later they had a daughter named Edna. Then along came the Second World War.
Frank, probably unaware that he was sort of following in the footsteps of his physician ancestors (well, if we’re actually descended from those people anyway), joined the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps and was stationed in England. You might think being in a non-combat role that far from the front lines would have been a pretty sweet deal compared to where he could have been sent. But from 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, those pesky Nazis dropped a lot of bombs on Britain, killing over 43,000 civilians in a campaign that became known as the Blitz. There were many military casualties as well, which included Canadian military personnel. During one particularly nasty night of bombing, Corporal Frank R. MacVay was riding a motorcycle in London. It was standard practice to keep as many lights out as possible so the Germans couldn’t see what they were bombing. If riding a motorcycle with no headlight in the middle of London at night with the only light coming from exploding bombs and anti-aircraft fire sounds dangerous, well apparently it was. Cpl. MacVay crashed and badly injured a leg. He was being wheeled into an operating room to have the mangled leg amputated when a doctor who knew him saw him and took over, to see if he could save the leg. To do so he did something that even today sounds pretty amazing to me: he took tendons from a pig and put them in Frank’s leg (I’m told it was a first of sorts, and that it ended up being written up in a medical journal). Frank’s leg was saved, but his tour of duty was over.
Frank returned home and got a job with Metropolitan Life. That job didn’t seem to suit him very well; going door-to-door selling life insurance left him with a fear of dogs that would be difficult for him to overcome. So when he got an opportunity to work for the city government, he jumped at it. At some point Maude sold the family home and Frank moved into a house around the corner on Amelia Street; later he bought a little house at 59 Atlantic Street. In 1948 Frank and Muriel carried on another family tradition of sorts: having children well after having children was thought to have been over with. In January 1948, ten years after the birth of his closest sibling, my father was born.
Life was good for Frank and his family. Frank moved up through the ranks of the municipal government; he had a wife, three great kids, a house…a pretty good life by most standards. There was trouble beneath the shiny exterior of the family’s life, however: Frank MacVay was an alcoholic. There doesn’t appear to have been any particular event or set of circumstances that led to his alcoholism. He simply got carried away with the drinking, and at some point he became an alcoholic. But he didn’t stay that way for the rest of his life. he managed to kick the habit in 1954. But barely two months later, he would face a traumatic event that some feared would drive him back to the bottle.
It was 1954 and Frank’s eldest son William, known as Billy, to family and friends, was swimming with my aunt Edna and her friend Heather at Lake Ainslie. The kids were jumping from a floating platform on the lake (another version of the story is that they were horsing around in a canoe); Frank was on the shore. For some reason, Billy didn’t return to the surface after jumping in the water. Frank, who couldn’t swim, could only jump up and down on the shore and scream his lungs out. Billy’s body wasn’t found until several days later.
Despite the sadness caused by that traumatic day, Frank stayed sober. In fact, he became very active in Alcoholics Anonymous and served as a ’sponsor’ to new members for several years. His success in kicking the habit seems admirable, inspiring even. But in the end, he was nonetheless done in by his urges, and his inability to know when to quit. It had nothing to do with drinking, though. Rather, it was hunting that proved to be his Achilles’ heel.
It was October 1970, and Frank (now the city’s Deputy Clerk) had just bought a new pick-up. Muriel reluctantly accompanied him to Blues Mills on the west side of the island, where his buddies were raving about a giant buck and doe that had been spotted in the woods somewhere. Frank took his rifle and went to have a look. The RCMP were called in when he didn’t return. He was found lying in a gravel pit in Blues Mills, with his arms folded over his chest and his rifle by his side. It turns out he’d probably got that big buck in his sights, but when he went to shoot it his heart exploded. Thinking he could still save himself, he took a nitroglycerine capsule he kept in a little locket around his neck, then lay back to wait for it to take effect. But when your heart has just exploded, nothing is going to help. Frank was only 62 years old.
It was bad enough Muriel had just lost her husband, but she soon discovered she had lost his army pension as well. It took almost a year of lobbying by the local Member of Parliament before the Department of Veterans Affairs caved in and gave Muriel the pension, back-dated to the day he died. Muriel spent her remaining years in the family home on Atlantic Street, where for some reason she collected newspapers and tin cans. She died in 1977, also of heart disease, which she’d inherited from her mother (Christina Davison had died of a heart attack at the age of 61, exactly a week after a heart attack claimed the life of her 64-year-old brother, Neil A. MacKenzie).
Muriel died during my lifetime but I don’t really remember her. My only real memory of her may not be a real memory at all. Maybe I just saw a photo of it once and now I think it’s a memory. We were all at my aunt Edna’s house. I was riding on the back of Edna’s black Labrador retriever, Jet. Muriel was watching from a chair in the corner. That’s all I remember.
It’s a real shame I never got to know Frank and Muriel. Aside from the obvious reasons for someone wanting to know their grandparents, there’s the purely genealogical interest, in that they could have told me a lot of things I don’t know about our family.
Of course, the story of my family doesn’t end with the passing of my paternal grandparents. In fact, the story’s just getting started. Wait till I get to my mother’s side of the family.
So it’s a family tradition, then…
Throughout my growing-up years, I was always the more sensible of the two MacVay boys. My brother Troy and I were both daredevils, but somehow he always managed to go a bit too far. We’ve both taken falls, from cliffs and trees and other things, but his falls were almost always more serious. Usually that was because when we were climbing something he rarely gave a single thought to how he would get back down; it also probably had a lot to do with the fact that he was really into mountain-biking. He’s broken a lot of bones over the years, from his arms (several times) to his nose to his collarbone to his sternum. He can’t wear his hair too short these days because he’s got so many scars it looks like he has a map of Damansara Heights on his head. He still has a bump on his upper lip from the time we were biking down by the government wharf and he did a face-plant onto cement. He was feeding through a straw for a while after that.
Me, I was the sensible one. I’ve had my share of spills, but my history of broken bones is limited to the three times I broke my nose, the one time I slipped and landed on a finger and blew a piece of the knuckle out, and the two times I cracked a rib (the most recent being a mere few weeks ago when I went back to judo after several years). Even if we include all types of injuries, I’ve done much better than my brother, who has damaged his body in an impressive variety of ways.
So there I was last Thursday, showing Hijabman around KL, and we ended up strolling by Pudu Prison. We walked down Lorong Hang Tuah to the mosque behind the prison and then slowly walked back towards the main road, killing time before our scheduled lunch meeting with Azlin over at Times Square. As we walked along the prison wall, something caught my eye: a thick vine, snaking its way down the wall from a tree inside the compound. I pulled on the vine a couple of times; it felt strong. Hmmm, I thought, I’ve always wanted to see what’s on the other side of this wall up close. Maybe I can just take a peek. We were still near the back of the compound, where the wall is shorter and doesn’t have much barbed wire. After two or three more exploratory tugs on the vine, I hoisted myself up and planted my feet on the wall. Then the vine snapped.
I hit the cement pretty hard. My first reaction was to writhe around a bit, cursing through laughter (after all, it may have hurt like hell but it was still somehow funny). For those who are curious what that sounded like, it was something like “OH FAHAHACK!” I was still laughing when I tried to get up and a lightning bolt of pain shot through my left heel. My left arm felt like it had suffered a nasty jolt as well. My back, surprisingly, didn’t hurt much. I tried to get up again and failed yet again; this time I felt dizzy. I kept laughing while the world spun around me. I was laughing, but I was also a bit worried: I thought I’d broken my foot, maybe my arm as well.
While Hijabman went up to Jalan Hang Tuah to get a taxi, I made a ‘guess what I just did’ call to Leen, who told me she’d meet me at Hospital Kuala Lumpur. The taxi that eventually rolled down the lane took me to HKL, where I had to sit in a wheelchair because I couldn’t put any weight whatsoever on my left foot. We were still waiting when Leen arrived. The wait seemed to take forever, but eventually I was wheeled in to see a young doctor, who sent me for an x-ray. The x-ray technician was gentle with my foot but whacked my arm into the table. After a painful ‘twist it a little more this way’ session I was wheeled back to see the doctor, this time with a disturbing lump on my arm.
The doctor was as surprised as I was that nothing was broken; he even had to consult with a senior doctor just in case. But it was true: nothing was broken. I did, however, have what the doctor rather vaguely called “tissue damage”, apparently his way of saying I’d made a mess of my Achilles tendon. He prescribed me some strong painkillers and something for inflammation and soon I was being wheeled out of the hospital, with not even so much as a wrap on either my foot or my arm. That might sound positive, but it didn’t help me walk. I still couldn’t put any weight on my foot; I had to hop on one foot from the car to our apartment, not something I would like to do again.
Leen strongly suggested I go for a ‘traditional massage’. I strongly objected, but she swore it would help. I was feeling a bit sheepish about the whole incident in a stereotypical buffoonish sitcom husband kind of way, so I reluctantly agreed. I slowly hopped back to the car and before I knew it I was hopping into As-Syifa, a ‘traditional health centre’ in Bangi, where my foot was ‘massaged’ by four different men. One was Ustaz Sheikh, As-Syifa’s friendly, grandfatherly proprietor; the other three were Indonesian guys with arms like Popeye. They took turns squeezing, pressing and wrenching my foot and the rest of my lower leg as if they were determined to eventually tear it off and keep it. The last guy was the worst. He was so rough he had me growling like a lion. After two hours of excruciating ‘massage’ I actually managed to limp out of there instead of hop. I still felt incredible pain with every step, but compared to the massage it wasn’t so bad.
I don’t bruise easily. In fact, falling backwards three or four feet onto cement didn’t leave me with a single bruise. The massage, however, left me with a small bruise on my arm (Popeye’s Indonesian cousins had given that some loving too) and a really nasty bruise on the sole of my foot. Ustaz Sheikh was sure this indicated a problem with my bowels or something. I kept telling him to focus on my heel, but these reflexology people apparently just love bruising the hell out of the arches of people’s feet and then telling them it’s proof of some underlying condition. They even have a big poster that shows your guts on the arch of your foot. Anyway, Ustaz Sheikh wanted me to come in for a follow-up and bekam lintah, which basically means they wanted to make that bruise go away the old-fashioned way: with leeches.
Bring on the bloodsuckers
On Saturday I drove back to As-Syifa and managed to limp in. Hey, that was a big improvement in a short time. So it seems the massage, as painful as it was, actually helped. Sure, my foot was hideously swollen and had a huge black bruise on it. Sure, my arm felt worse than on the day I fell. Sure, the massage had left my left shin with a massive rash. But dammit, I could limp. Yes, that was an improvement. However, as I limped in through the door of As-Syifa, I wasn’t thinking so much about how much I’d improved. I was thinking about the leeches.
Since I’ve been writing about my family history lately, maybe now is a good time to mention that leeches actually feature somewhat prominently in the history of the MacVay family. Not all of my ancestors in Scotland bore the family name MacBheatha. Some became known for their profession; because they were physicians, and because medicine at that time seems to have mostly consisted of bloodletting, some of them got the family name Leech. Had I inherited that name, I might be more amenable to changing my name as per Malay custom, just as I would if my family name were Snodgrass or Dick or Fluffernutter or something unpronounceable in almost every language on earth. (Apologies if anyone with such names takes offence. I’m sure they’re all fine names, really.) But my direct ancestors kept the name MacBheatha and just changed the spelling to MacVay. Way to go, fellas.
Fast forward several hundred years to me lying on a table in a very small room while the Indonesian sadists from two days before gently and lovingly took leeches out of a plastic container and set them loose on my foot. The first two leeches latched right on and started siphoning my blood right away. Like the mosquitoes here, they were probably pretty excited about getting a chance to eat Western food instead of the same old boring Asian food. The third leech, however, was rather picky and didn’t want to bite my foot — at least not until after yet another Indonesian sadist rather unceremoniously jabbed my foot with a needle. Cue blood; enter leech, centre stage.
After about an hour of that, the leeches were killed off and promptly regurgitated a ridiculous amount of my blood. As nasty as that sounds, I wouldn’t have even gone for the treatment if Ustadh had not promised to immediately kill the leeches, which is actually standard procedure at his centre for obvious reasons. Anyway, after bandages were placed on my foot a pretty lady came into the room and started massaging my heel. She spoke to me with an Indonesian accent and I felt the urge to bolt for the door, but it was too late. She tightened her grip on my foot and she proceeded to focus every bit of strength she had on just the area that had been injured. The optimist in me thought, Well, at least the rash on my shin won’t get any worse.
Lucky for me the lovely little lady, who as it turns out is from Bali (as are the Popeyes), didn’t tear my foot off. On my way back to the car, I noticed my limping gait was not nearly as bad as before. Hooray again for painful massage.
Thanks to a nifty anti-coagulant that leeches inject into their victims (they even inject painkillers, which is kinda neat), and the location of the leech bites, my foot bled for days. If the Hansaplast people think they’re still doing better than other companies despite the worldwide recession, I may be responsible. Fortunately, four days after the bloodletting and almost a week after my fall, the bleeding has stopped and I only look slightly disabled when I walk. My heel still hurts, and I can’t stand on it very long; my arm actually hurts more than it did last week, probably because I’ve been driving. But I’m feeling much better now, really. And I even have a cool story to tell the folks back home. I mean, how many people have been injured while trying to get into Pudu Prison?
So what have I learned from all this? Two things:
1) While I am a good climber, I’m not a very good judge of the tensile strength of vines, and
2) I’m not as different from my brother as I thought.
But it’s all good.
The MacVays, Part Two
As I mentioned in Part One, my great-grandparents, William and Fanny MacVay, had several children. The first, Robert Franklin MacVay, was born barely nine months after their marriage. Next came Alexander MacVay, Alice Maude MacVay, Elizabeth Armour MacVay, and finally William Kirk MacVay. All were born in New Brunswick except Kirk, who was born in the US, probably in Grand Lake Stream, Maine, where the MacArtneys had moved just before Fanny’s marriage to William.
It seems to have been fairly common in those times and those parts for people’s first and middle names to be interchangeable. Robert and Alexander were known by their first names (most people knew them as Robbie and Sandy, respectively), but the other three MacVay children were almost always called by their middle names: Maude, Armour and Kirk. However, I have to admit I don’t actually know which names were their middle names, because the names were used interchangeably to such an extent that I’ve seen both combinations of each name in pretty much equal numbers, even in official records. Like I said, though, it seems they went by the names Maude, Armour (the family name of William MacVay’s mother) and Kirk.
Life for the MacVay family in New Brunswick was good. But at the turn of the 20th century the family got an opportunity for an even better life: A steel mill known as the Dominion Iron and Steel Company had just been built in the town of Sydney, on Cape Breton Island in the neighbouring province of Nova Scotia. William’s masonry skills would be in constant demand at the new steel plant, whereas in New Brunswick Joseph’s lumber skills were more bankable. In 1901 the MacVays left Little Ridge and moved to Sydney.
For the first couple of years in Sydney the MacVays lived in a house on Falmouth Street not far from the waterfront. William worked as a bricklayer at the steel plant; Robbie and Sandy worked there as well. On 21 May 1903, William paid James and Suzannah Burchell a dollar for a 41-by-100-foot plot on the land known as Louisa Gardens in the city’s north end, took out a mortgage and built a house. It was a large house, perfect for a large family. William even added a personal touch: a fireplace that he crafted himself. The fireplace is still there; the house is now a ‘bed and breakfast’ and still looks beautiful.
The MacVay family home, 115 George St., Sydney NS
The fireplace William MacVay made for his home in Sydney
My family’s first few years in Nova Scotia were happy. The men of the family, William and his two eldest sons, had good jobs at the steel plant. Every morning they would dress in their finest suits, walk to work, change into their work clothes, spend the day in what was surely a filthy environment, then clean themselves up, put their nice suits back on, and walk home.
When he wasn’t working, William was practising masonry, but not the kind he did at work: he was a member of the Freemasons and eventually became quite prominent in the local lodge, where I’ve been told his picture still hangs.
William was proud of his Scottish heritage and did his best to hold onto what he perceived as his Scottish culture. An elderly relative who knew him told me once that he played the bagpipes and even occasionally “danced the swords“. Still, he was very reserved and preferred to express his fondness for his culture behind closed doors. Young Kirk, however, was less reserved; William often scolded him for doing the Highland Fling on street corners.
The MacVays circa 1904. Back row, left to right: Armour, William and Maude. Front row: Robert, Frances, Kirk and Alexander.
William’s reserved manner could probably be attributed to the fact that, like most Ulster Scots, he was a staunch Presbyterian. He often reminded his children that they were forbidden from marrying anyone who wasn’t also Presbyterian. Only a couple of his children stuck to the rules. Religion, however, would be the least of his worries in the years to come.
Robert, after spending his early years in rural New Brunswick, was now living in a nice house and had a good job. Not only that, he had something else to celebrate: he had met the love of his life, Bessie Randall Higgs, daughter of Thomas and Susan Higgs of Bayfield, Antigonish County. Robert and Bessie got married on 24 October 1906 by an Anglican minister. Soon they would have their first child and William and Fanny’s first grandchild. However, while giving birth to her son Ralph Higgs MacVay in Buffalo, New York, Bessie died. Robert was devastated and blamed Ralph for Bessie’s death. He refused to have anything to do with his son, forcing his parents, William and Fanny, to care for the child.
William was in his 60s at that time; Fanny was in her 40s. It had been a decade since the birth of their youngest child. People say that couples who spend a lot of time around babies can get pregnant more easily. I’m not so sure, but I do know of at least two examples of this happening: when Leen got pregnant we were helping our friend Azlin take care of her son Faaris in China; and not long after the birth of her first grandchild, Fanny MacVay got pregnant. When she was 45 years old she gave birth to her sixth child, Francis Reginald MacVay. Frank, as Francis was known, was almost the same age as his only nephew, so the two would be raised as brothers.
For Robert, things only went from bad to worse. Already devastated by his wife’s death and suffering from depression, he contracted tuberculosis and began to deteriorate physically as well as emotionally. His family sent him to Colorado, where it was believed the high altitude might improve his condition. But he had already given up on life and his condition continued to worsen. When it became apparent her son was not long for the world, Fanny boarded a train for Colorado and took Robert home so he could spend his few remaining days with his family. When he saw his son for the first time in almost two years, he felt great remorse for having blamed him for his wife’s death. He spent his last days getting to know Ralph, then died in the early hours of 25 October 1909. His sister Maude would later say he had died of a broken heart.
Robert’s brother Alexander, known to family and friends as Sandy, had his own problems. As a result of a terrible accident at the steel plant, Sandy had a steel plate put in his head; it seems he was never the same after that. While still a young man he left his parents’ home and headed west, drifting from place to place. He ended up in Seattle, Washington, where he married twice. He and his first wife, Katherine, had a daughter named Barbara. Sandy died in Seattle on 19 September 1952, leaving a widow named Bertha, a stepson, and his daughter, who married a police officer and became Barbara Cook. In the early 90s she and her husband drove across North America and visited my father, her first cousin.
The elder MacVay daughter, Maude, stayed in Sydney and married William L. Totten, whose family owned a construction company. Will and Maude lived down the street at number 47 (maybe it was 41), where they would spend the rest of their lives. They never had any children, perhaps because Maude was very stern and conservative (I’m told she went into the closet to change her clothes; the fact that she and will had no children may have resulted from the fact that he hardly ever got anywhere near her). Maude died on 22 may 1955.
I think this photo was taken in the late 1920s. From left to right: William, Frances, Maude, and my grandfather, Frank. I think the guy in the car is Maude's husband, Will Totten.
Armour married Ambrose Higgs, brother of Robert’s wife Bessie, and they had five daughters. They moved out west, to Hythe, Alberta, but Ambrose left Armour to fend for herself and her five girls. Armour became a Jehovah’s Witness shortly after that (it was probably Jehovah’s Witnesses who cared for her when she was abandoned by Ambrose). I tracked down one of those daughters, Olive, through her mother’s 1964 obituary. Olive was an invaluable source of information on the MacVay family and was able to give me precious firsthand accounts of the lives of people I had only known from photos and old documents. If I recall correctly, it was Olive who put me in touch with our cousin Joe Flewelling in New Brunswick, another great source of information and anecdotes.
Kirk MacVay, like his brother Sandy, left Cape Breton Island after high school and moved to the US. He ended up working in a coal mine somewhere in Pennsylvania, where he was killed in an explosion in the late 1920s or early 1930s. At least that’s one version of the story. According to my aunt Edna, Maude and Will told her Kirk had been killed in an explosion while welding an oil tank somewhere in the western US, maybe Oklahoma (if that’s true, he wouldn’t be the first person with our family name to blow something up in Oklahama). His story remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of my family history. As far as I know, he never married or had children, though Edna says he married and had a couple of kids. That presents an intriguing possibility: that there could be more MacVays out there to whom we’re somewhat closely related.
Ralph MacVay, the grandson that William and Fanny raised as a son, also moved to the US in his teens having been born in Buffalo, he was an American citizen and moved there before reaching the age of majority so he could retain his citizenship). He spent many years in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he worked in the boys’ wear department at MacArtney’s, the shop owned by his uncle (actually his granduncle), Fanny’s brother Robert MacArtney. Ralph was married to a woman named Anne; she died and he remarried, but never had any children. I think he spent his retirement years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
William MacVay worked as a foreman bricklayer at the steel plant until he was 81 or 82 years old, when failing health forced him to retire. He moved in with Maude and Will at 41 George Street, where he died on 19 June 1932 at the age of 88 (though it could have been 87, since I’m not 100% certain what year he was born). Fanny also died at Maude’s house, on 26 June 1935, at the relatively young age of 72, apparently of breast cancer. According to her obituary, the First United Church choir sang two of her favourite songs at her funeral, Nearer My God to Thee and Come to the Saviour.
So what about Frank? For his story you’ll have to wait for Part Three.