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.