M A C V A Y S I A

I’m not a big fan of the Royal Malaysian Police. As far as I know, none of the police reports I’ve made since coming to Malaysia have resulted in anything resembling a thorough investigation; no one I’ve ever made a report against has ever been held accountable for whatever it was they had done. I’ve even had run-ins with the police myself: one off-duty officer nearly killed me when he acted as if a one-lane road had two lanes, then pulled me over when I gave him the finger; one time an officer who was directing traffic watched a motorcycle cut in front of me and run into me, then told the motorcyclist to continue on his way and told me he didn’t care about me or my car. Then there’s all the bribery. I don’t think I need to point out that Malaysian police officers will often take (and ask for) bribes. We’ve all seen it.

Yet I was glad to see news recently that officers of the Royal Malaysian Police will be getting a raise. Yes, believe it or not, I think they deserve more money. I think if Malaysian cops made more money, they might (and hopefully would) become more professional. Or, to put it another way: a pay raise would be one of just many steps the government could take towards making the Royal Malaysian Police a better police force.

The response to that statement is almost always the same: Even if they’re paid more, people told me, Malaysian cops will be corrupt. Do I really believe cops here would stop asking for bribes if they were paid more? No, I don’t. I understand it will take some time to eradicated corruption in the Royal Malaysian Police, because it’s deeply ingrained in the culture here and isn’t just caused by low pay. But I really do believe paying Malaysian cops more money will help. They’re currently getting what to me seems like the equivalent of what I made when I was working as a security guard on the Halifax waterfront. Except for one overzealous guard, who had a tricked-out utility belt and a badge and desperately wanted to be a cop but kept getting rejected, pretty much everyone who worked for that company did the barest minimum of work that was required of them. Why? Because they were all getting paid minimum wage. The boss paid them the least he was required to pay, so they all gave the least amount of effort (when I say they I mean we, of course). Even the wannabe cop finally cracked and was arrested for breaking into a shop on his watch and stealing clothes.

When I was working as a security guard back in those lean times, I didn’t think I was getting paid nearly enough to deal with drunks, shoplifters, panhandlers, and the occasional rowdy pub-goer. There was even an armed robbery once on the property I was guarding, but I wasn’t about to chase a guy with a gun. Not for the crap money I was making. That’s a job for real cops. They have weapons, they have training, and they have a sense of pride in what they do. Malaysian cops, it seems to me, have only two of those three things (and only barely so, I might add). They face the same dangers as cops back home — even worse dangers, I think, considering how much violent crime we have here — but they don’t even come close to displaying the same professionalism. It’s not a stretch to think their low salaries might have something to do with that. No, they wouldn’t all suddenly become better cops if they were paid more. But I really do think higher salaries would lead to a rise in professionalism, or would at least be part of any sincere effort to improve policing here.

My father with a new police car in 1978.

My father is a retired police officer. He served for over 20 years with the Sydney Police Department (now known as the Cape Breton Regional Police Services), first as a beat cop and then as a member of the ‘Ident’ section (basically, Dad was a CSI). My best buddy from high school is currently a member of the force. I thought about becoming a police officer myself, long ago, as did my brother. It’s a job people want to do, and one they’re proud to do. Cops back home make decent money. It’s not that they do their job well just because they’re paid good money. They’re paid good money because of the work they do, and because of what’s expected of them. There are lots of good police forces in Canada, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which to me seems as different from its Malaysian counterpart as day is from night.

The MacVay boys, Officers Mopey & Dopey.

Malaysia has a lot of cops who don’t do their jobs very well, but there must be cops here who do. Reward them. Make police work something Malaysians want to do, and something they can be proud of. Higher salaries constitute just one step, of course, in a series of steps required to make the police force better. It’s a start, though.

And while we’re at it, how about teachers? And nurses? I know, maybe what I’m suggesting isn’t 100% realistic. I mean, we’re not just talking about different police forces but different countries, different economies, different-sized middle classes, different styles of government (I’m having a good day so I won’t elaborate on that last one). But still, it would be nice.

Most people who know me (and probably most people who read my blog) know that it really annoys me when someone spells my last name wrong. Actually, it annoys me a little less these days, just because I’m so used to it. But it’s still annoying. No matter how many times I tell people it’s M-a-c-V-a-y, I still see all sorts of different spellings. Probably the most common misspelling is the use of Mc instead of Mac. But while I’ve always found it somewhat irritating to see my name spelled M-c-V-a-y, lately I’ve been thinking it might be just as correct — or at least almost as correct — as the way I currently spell my name.

First things first: Both Mac and Mc mean exactly the same thing. Mac means son in both Scottish Gaelic and Irish. Contrary to popular belief, if does not mean son of. Instead, the word mac before a name places that name in the genitive case, which in Gaelic necessitates what’s called lenition or aspiration. In plain terms, that means the first letter of the name changes a bit. Names beginning with B, for example, will become Bh, which sounds like V. Hence beatha, meaning life, becomes bheatha (which is, interestingly enough, very similar to words for life in Latin languages), so that the family name becomes MacBheatha, which is pretty much pronounced the same as MacVay.

Mc is simply a contraction of Mac. There are all sorts of theories out there about the difference between Mac and Mc, the most common being that Mac is used by Protestant and Mc by Catholics (and also that Mac is Scottish, Mc is Irish; from these two misconceptions we get the origins of Irish Catholics being called Mickeys in America), but while that may be true in some cases (more on a possible example below), in most cases Mc is nothing more than a contraction of Mac. Here’s a better explanation than mine, an extract from a book called Tartan for Me! by Philip D. Smith, Jr. (which I found here):

Mac, Gaelic for “son”, is the most common element of Scottish and Irish surnames. In both countries, Mc is always an abbreviation of Mac. There is absolutely no truth to the American myth at Mac is Scottish and Mc is Irish. Mac used to be abbreviated M’ although this spelling is not common now. At times, all three versions can be seen. in an early book on Highland music, the author spelled his own family name three different ways on the first two pages — “MacDonald”, “McDonald”, and “M’Donald.”

Black’s The Surnames of Scotland and MacLysaght’s The Surnames of Ireland both treat Mac in the same way — as the only and original spelling. Persons seeking a name spelled “Mc” are expected to know that it is a conventional abbreviation for Mac. This same approach is used in Tartan For Me! To find “McDeal” look for “MacDeal.”

Mac is always considered an addition to a name. Before there was a “Donald’s Son” there was a “Donald”. In both Scotland and Nova Scotia, names beginning with Mac were traditionally alphabetized under the first letter of the second name — MacArthur under “A”, MacZeal under “Z”. Many Scots dropped “Mac” as they became Anglicized or emigrated, “Mac Wyeth” becoming simply “Wyeth”. “Kinzie” is from “MacKenzie”. The one notable exception is the Innes and MacInnes families, each quite distinct. The Innes family have Pictish roots and are from the east coast of Scotland with a red tartan. The MacInnes are of Gaelic origin from the west coast and wear a green tartan.

Mac takes a variety of pronunciations. In Islay Gaelic, Mac is pronounced like /mek/. In the United States one hears it as “mick”. Preceding a /k/ or /g/ sound, the final /k/ of Mac disappears. It became the practice in both the south of Scotland and in Ireland to write two words as one (MacGill to Magill; MacHale to Makale). In other names the /k/ sound of Mac is duplicated and attached to the front of a following word if it begins in a vowel (MacArter to MacCarter). The reverse also occurs. If the second name begins with a /k/ or /g/, producing two /k/ sounds together, one may disappear (MacGill to Magill; MacKenzie to MacEnzee). Mac is at times pronounced “muck” and written that way (Mac ‘il Roy to Muckleroy).

There’s also an interesting bit about the Anglicization of Gaelic names being helped along by the fact that a lot of Gaelic speakers could not read or write Gaelic (this one’s debatable) and would therefore just write names in English as they sounded in Gaelic.

Anyway, I’ve always taken it for granted that my family has used the MacVay spelling for a long time, beginning way back in Scotland, before my family moved to Ireland in the 17th century. Sure, the name was always recorded as McVay (or McVey, McVea, McVeigh, McVeagh, etc.) on old documents from Scotland, Ireland and Canada…but I know my MacVays have always spelled the name M-a-c-V-a-y, at least in Canada.

Or have they?

The grave of Alexander and Elizabeth MacVay

When I posted my family’s history a few months back, someone noticed the McVay spelling on my great-great-grandfather’s gravestone and asked in the comments if the family name had once been spelled that way. Here’s what I wrote in reply:

I’ve seen the name spelled McVay on documents, and of course on that gravestone. As far as I know, in my family it’s always been MacVay. Some members of the family got used to the McVay spelling and stuck with it, but most continued to use MacVay, even when they were still in NB. It would have been MacVay originally anyway, ‘Mc’ just being a contraction.

One interesting thing is the presence of the lines under the ‘c’ in ‘Mc’ on the gravestone. Alexander’s name was also spelled that way on the birth certificate of his daughter Isabella in Scotland in 1855. The clerk who copied down the name didn’t spell other ‘Mc’ names with the little lines. I know the lines were used to signify a raised ‘c’ (and therefore ‘Mc’ as a contraction of ‘Mac’); I suspect they were also used to show that a name spelled with the contraction ‘Mc’ was actually spelled ‘Mac’, whereas ‘Mc’ names without the little marks were always spelled ‘Mc’. That’s just a theory though. The short version of all this: I’m pretty sure we’ve always spelled it MacVay.

I now know that all of the descendants of my great-great-grandfather used the MacVay spelling, but in spite of that, I have to admit there’s another possibility besides what I wrote in that comment. That possibility is that my great-great-grandfather, Alexander MacVay, may have actually spelled his name Alexander McVay. The 1855 Scottish birth record of Isabella MacVay that I mentioned in that comment provides another clue: it appears to contain my great-great-grandfather’s signature, which reads Alex McVay. It looks like it may have actually been written by the clerk, because it looks suspiciously like the other signatures on the page. But if it is indeed my great-great-grandfather’s writing (the only example of it I have ever seen), then it appears the family name may have actually been McVay.

While the whole Scottish/Irish/Protestant/Catholic explanation of the difference between Mac and Mc may not be generally true, interestingly enough it may have been the reason behind the spelling change (if indeed there was one) in my family’s name. When my family arrived in St. Stephen, New Brunswick in the early 1860s, they found a number of McVays already living there, all Irish Catholics who had been in the area for many years. My family had lived in Ireland for several generations but didn’t consider themselves Irish. They were Ulster Scots who were fiercely proud of their Scottish roots; they were also staunch Presbyterians. Had my family settled in Cape Breton straight off the boat, I might just think they changed the spelling to fit in with their neighbours (who mostly used Mac). Instead, it seems like my family may have been trying to do the opposite.

Sure, it’s possible the spelling was MacVay all along. Like I said, maybe that signature wasn’t really written by my great-grandfather. And maybe the name was spelled wrong by whoever made that gravestone. All possible, but I’m not sure. After all, Alexander’s eldest son, my great-grandfather William MacVay, was an expert stonemason and may have made that gravestone himself, or at least had a hand in it.

Whatever the case, the name is MacVay now and my kids will be at least the fifth generation to spell it that way. But when I see our name as McVay (when, not if, because it’s pretty much inevitable), maybe I’ll be slightly less annoyed than before. Maybe. But only slightly.

I finally got in touch with William Alexander MacVay Jr, my only living MacVay relative outside my immediate family (well, unless we count his sister, who goes by her married name). Bill, as he’s called, lives in Florida and is a widower of about 90 years old. We had a great chat about his side of the family; while he doesn’t know as much about the family history as I do, he was able to fill in some gaps in my knowledge of the MacVays who stayed in New Brunswick. Bill never had children, so he was delighted that there are still MacVays around to carry on our endangered family name, with even more on the way (ahem). Al even got to talk to him for a minute.

When our conversation was just about finished I was thinking to myself, It’s too bad Bill probably doesn’t have a computer. It would be great if we could stay in touch via email. Too bad. I was about to tell him I’d mail him a printout of the family history when he said, “Here, I’ll give you my email address. We can stay in touch that way.”

“Wh…well that’s great,” I said. So he read out his email address to me.

“Do you have Skype?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, “but I don’t use it much.”

“Oh, you don’t have a webcam?”

“I do, but I don’t have a microphone.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “My webcam has a built-in mic.”

Just goes to show you that the ‘danger of a single story’ that Chimamanda Adichie so eloquently spoke of applies to age as well as culture. Elderly internet users for the win!

I often find myself lamenting the lack of sidewalks here in Malaysia. Sometimes I think it’s silly to feel annoyed that there are so few real sidewalks here, but I just can’t help it.

Well, maybe it’s simply in my blood to feel that way: while googling for some further information on the members of my family mentioned in my previous post, I discovered that my great-granduncle Joseph MacVay’s son, William Alexander MacVay (technically my first cousin, twice removed), actually co-invented the sidewalk as we know it today. The Wikipedia article on sidewalks says:

Arthur Wesley Hall and William Alexander McVay invented concrete sidewalks and partitions in St. Stephen, New Brunswick in 1924.

The source given for that is page seven of a book called Memorable Maritime Inventions (1828-1930), which I can’t find any mention of online outside of references to sidewalks. Anyway, obscurity of the source aside, it’s an interesting little fact, and yet another reason for me to try to get in touch with Bill MacVay, William Alexander MacVay’s 89-year-old son.

And I still find it annoying that there aren’t a lot of sidewalks over here, but I kind of understand, given that it’s too hot to walk anywhere anyway. Sigh.

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.

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.

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 only person with a family name like ours 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.

While I’d like to consider myself a fairly competent, experienced amateur genealogist, and have unearthed a great deal of information about my family history, I have to admit that it’s impossible to write a complete family history. The further back I go in time, the more ancestors I had: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents, and so on. The further back I dig, the bigger my family gets. Statistically, it seems, there’s a point somewhere in the past where most people alive in Europe at the time were my ancestors. If that’s the case, then writing about my family history seems like a pretty massive project. It would be a story of millions of individual lives and the ways they interacted with each other and the world around them.

Still, it’s interesting to see how much we can discover. It may be near impossible to put together a truly comprehensive family history, but there are things we can know about our ancestors. I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned, beginning with the history of the people whose history could perhaps most accurately be described as my family history. They were the people from whom I inherited not only some of my genes, but also my family name: the MacVays.

There are several variants of the name MacVay and several possible origins as well. Most likely my family came from Ireland, where my ancestors were hereditary physicians named MacBheatha, an old Gaelic name which means ‘Son of Life’ (and is pronounced pretty much like MacVay). Around the year 1300, the king they were serving in northeast Ireland sent them to Scotland with his daughter as part of the dowry paid to her new husband, one of the Lords of the Isles. The MacBheatha family were inheritors of what was at the time advanced medical knowledge: the knowledge of the great Arab and Persian scholars Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd and Jabir, knowledge which reached Scotland and Ireland via the monasteries of France and Italy and the centres of learning of Muslim Spain. (There’s even a theory that the MacBheatha family’s knowledge of those scholars’ work led to the invention of whisky, which was called uisge-beatha — water of life). The MacBheathas prospered under the Lords of the Isles (who were later known as the MacDonalds) and later served several other prominent families, such as Clan MacLean. After a few hundred years in Scotland, the descendants of the original MacBheatha physicians bore many different variations of the MacBheatha name, including Beaton and several variants of the name MacVay. By the 1700s, my MacVay ancestors were probably either soldiers or farmers.

At some point, perhaps during the 1700s but most likely during the 1600s, my MacVay ancestors, whose own ancestors had gone to Scotland as Irishmen, returned to Ireland as Scots. They became what are now known as Ulster Scots, Scottish settlers in what is now Northern Ireland. My MacVays ended up somewhere in County Antrim. I first knew of this around the time that I first got hooked on genealogy, when I found my great-grandfather’s obituary in a micro-film archive of my hometown’s library. As my quest deepened over the years, I found more and more references to Antrim.

Unfortunately, almost 20 years after I first discovered my family’s Irish connection, I still don’t know which part of Antrim my family lived in. I blame this gap in my records on an event seemingly unrelated to my family history, the shelling of the Four Courts building in Dublin in 1922, which resulted in the destruction of most of Ireland’s census returns and other records important to genealogists. Anyone whose ancestors came from Ireland faces a real uphill battle, if not a brick wall. Not one to let a brick wall stand in my way, I’ve done as much detective work as I could, using available census substitutes and what I already know about my family. Somehow I’ve been able to put together a hypothesis that my MacVay ancestors lived in the north of Antrim, specifically in and around the parishes of Billy and Derrykeighan. I might even go as far as to say they may have lived in or near the village of Lisnagunnogue, not far from the Giant’s Causeway. My other theory, just as shaky, is that they lived in Antrim town, or in its parish, also called Antrim. Ah, I don’t know.

Whatever the case may be, I do know that my great-great-grandfather, Alexander MacVay, was born in Antrim around the year 1812. Around 1835 he married another Ulster Scot, Elizabeth Armour, and they began having children. They had nine children in Ireland but four of them — all boys — died very young. The terrible tragedy of losing a child (let alone four) was something many others in Ireland would experience in those years because of the terrible famine that swept through the country. Among the many, many people who eventually left Ireland were the surviving members of my family: Alexander, Elizabeth, their sons William and Joseph, and their daughters Jane, Mary and Elizabeth, around the year 1854. Their destination was a place that was foreign to them but also a place they considered to be their true home: Scotland.

The MacVays spent a couple of years in Houston, a village near Johnstone just outside Glasgow (basically around where the airport is now), where Elizabeth gave birth to her tenth child, Isabella. Some members of the family may have been working at the Crosslee cotton mill. The mill closed in 1858 after a fire. At some point between 1855 and 1861 the MacVays moved into the south gate house of a mansion called Milliken House in nearby Kilbarchan. Alexander worked as a shoemaker; Elizabeth may have worked as a servant in Milliken House. Then, in the early 1860s, after just a few years in Scotland, the entire family (with the exception of eldest daughter Jane, who married Hugh Cairns and stayed in Renfrewshire) moved to Canada.

The MacVays arrived in St. Stephen, New Brunswick around 1862 and lived on Water Street near Milltown Road. Alexander worked as a shoemaker for a few years; his teenage sons William and Joseph worked as lumbermen. By 1870 the MacVays had saved up enough money to buy a plot of land; they settled on farmland in a place called Little Ridge in the neighbouring parish of St. James. Alexander MacVay was now a farmer, with a very different life from the one he had been born into.

William and Joseph MacVay, though a couple of years apart in age, looked very much alike and often passed for twins. They worked together in the lumber trade; Joseph eventually started his own construction company. While Joseph specialized in wood, William became a skilled mason. The two brothers continued to work together; some of the buildings they made still stand, notably the train station in McAdam, NB.

Joseph MacVay and his family sometime in the late 1800s

The five children who had journeyed to Canada with Alex and Eliza MacVay all married in New Brunswick. Joseph MacVay married Mary Elizabeth Hall, one of 13 children of Ebeneezer Hall; Elizabeth MacVay married Moses Tufts Pomeroy; Mary MacVay married James Hamilton Pomeroy; Isabella married Thomas Andrew Shirley. William, the eldest of the five children, was the last to marry. On 16 Sept. 1879, at the age of 35, William was married to 16-year-old Frances Amelia MacArtney. Fanny, as she was called, was from Grand Lake Stream, Maine, just across the St. Croix river from Little Ridge. Her parents were George Edward MacArtney and Mary Ann McBrine, both from Ireland (I believe they were from Fermanagh). The MacArtneys had a couple of businesses; Fanny’s brother Robert started a successful clothing store in Massachusetts that I believe is still in operation today.

Except for Elizabeth Pomeroy, who died childless at 36, the children of Alex and Eliza MacVay all went on to have children of their own, who in turn had children, and so on; now Alexander and Elizabeth MacVay have descendants with many different family names in New Brunswick and elsewhere. Of perhaps several hundred of that pioneering couple’s descendants, only a handful are actually MacVays: besides a grandson of Joseph MacVay (a nice man named William MacVay who lives in Florida), there’s my father, my brother, my sisters, my nephew, my son and me. Except for William MacVay in Florida, all of the MacVays in our family today are descended from Alexander’s other son, William MacVay, my great-grandfather.

Alexander MacVay fell down some stairs in his home at the beginning of 1892 and never fully recovered. He died at Little Ridge on 3 Feb 1896 at the age of 84. Eliza went to live with her daughter Isabella and son-in-law Tom Shirley in Milltown, where she passed away in 1902 at the age of 90.

The grave of Alexander and Elizabeth MacVay

I visited that part of New Brunswick a few years back and was able to see my great-great-grandparents’ grave. I even got to meet relatives, most notably a lovely man by the name of Joe Flewelling, a grandson of Joseph MacVay. Joe shared my interest in our family’s history and passed a lot of information on to me. He remembered meeting my great-grandfather William several times when he was a boy and told me about conversations they’d had. To me that was amazing: hearing someone give a first-hand account of words spoken by a guy who was born in 1844 and died a long time ago. I know, for example, that William smoked one cigarette in his entire life. It was also Joe who gave me valuable leads on the family’s years in Scotland. It’s a shame Joe passed away several years ago, because every time I find new information on our family I think Joe would love this. And there is always something else to discover. The quest is never over; nor is this story.

Next time: Part two.

I often talk about my maternal grandfather; I quite often write about him as well. But I never knew my paternal grandfather, Frank MacVay, who died a few years before I was born. All I knew of him was the occasional comment or story from my parents or other relatives. I knew that he always ran up stairs; that a stint as a door-to-door salesaman left him with a fear of dogs; that he served overseas with the Canadian army during WWII and was injured in London during the ‘Blitz’; that he was an alcoholic; that he watched his eldest son drown; that he never took another drink after losing his son and spent the rest of his life helping others kick the habit; that he was my hometown’s deputy clerk treasurer or something to that effect; that he had a bad heart and died of a heart attack while on a hunting trip at the age of 62. I knew those things but not much else.

One day when I was fifteen or sixteen, I was sitting in my father’s living room looking at a black-and-white picture of my grandfather when I began to think seriously about the history of my family. I had long been interested in history, but my family’s history wasn’t something I’d given much thought. Looking at that picture of Frank MacVay, all serious with his slicked-back black hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, I wondered: who were his parents? What were their names? Where did they come from? Where did we come from? Thus began my fascination with genealogy, a bug that didn’t bite most people until they were much older.

My father didn’t know much about his grandparents, as they had both died long before he was born. But he did know where they were buried. So we went up to Hardwood Hill cemetery and after a short search found the large stone marking the graves of my great-grandparents, William and Frances Amelia MacVay, and some of their children.

It just so happened that at the time one of my favourite places was the local library. Like I said, I was fascinated by history; I used to spend quite a bit of time at the library, escaping my angsty teenage life through books about other times and other worlds. I knew the library had archived copies of the local newspaper on microfilm, so I copied down the names and dates from the tombstone and went to the library to see if I could find my great-grandparents’ obituaries. I searched through the Sydney Post Record (the old name of the Cape Breton Post) from the date of my great-grandfather’s death and soon found his obituary. Then I found my great-grandmother’s obituary, as well as those of some of their children. Those discoveries led to further discoveries and revelations, more mysteries, meetings with relatives I never knew I had, and visits to some of the places my family had been. I was hooked.

In the twenty years or so since then I’ve done a lot of research, from talking to relatives to sitting in libraries, trudging through graveyards, calling and emailing people and doing a lot of online digging. I’ve managed to put together a pretty impressive amount of information about my family and its history. But it’s not just about information. It’s about stories. It was while talking to my maternal grandfather about my mother’s side of the family that I understood why I felt so driven to learn about our past. I have inherited not just a collection of stories but a tradition of telling them and a desire to pass them on. Storytelling is in my blood; I figure if I’m going to be a storyteller, I should tell stories about the people from whom I inherited that blood, people who had hopes and dreams, tragedies and fears, and experiences that made them who they were, made us who we are, and played a part in making me who I am.

Despite all I’ve been able to discover about my family, there’s always something yet to be discovered, and many things that can never be known. In fact, nothing I write about my ancestors and their times and experiences can really do them justice because most of them are strangers to me. I’m almost afraid to write about them in any creative way because I don’t really know their personalities, their quirks, their ideas, their hearts.

Still, they are a very real part of me, their blood flowing through my own veins. I think it’s nice that they — we — can live on in the blood of those who come after us, and in their memories and their words. So, since I want to write more often anyway (really, I do), I might as well write more about my family history too. That’s the plan, anyway.

I guess I’d better start going through my notes, and the stories in my head. And the ones in my veins.