Mother Nature’s Cruel Tricks

My grandfather’s mother was not there for him!

While that sounds like an awful sentiment for a mother, I don’t mean that in the sense that she did not care about him or love him. I suspect he was the most precious thing in her life.

Grandfather James Pearson Shepheard was born on 12 March 1891. His mother, Mary Elizabeth (Pearson) Shepheard, died of phthisis (consumption or tuberculosis) on 4 October 1891, before he was seven months old. She was only 24. I wrote about her death in a blog post on my other blogsite, Discover Genealogy on 23 June 2015 (The Scourge of Phthisis).

Grandpa Shepheard never knew his mother and she never got to see him grow up. And because his father travelled a great deal in his job as a ship’s steward, his upbringing was left to relatives, first his maternal grandparents, but for most of his early life, his father’s brother and his wife.

Is there a crueler trick that Mother Nature can play than taking away a child’s mother before an infant can even understand what has happened? For my grandfather, losing his mother was a life-changing event, although he would not have known it at the time. It was to set up situations beyond his control, but that had wide-reaching impacts on his life.

Great-grandfather Charles Pearson died in 1892. Grandpa Shepheard was then in the care of his grandmother, Susanna Pearson, in Leamington Prior, Warwick. Following her death in 1895 he came to live with his aunt and uncle in Torquay, Devon. He would have begun school at about that time as well. They later relocated to Taunton, Dorset.

Grandpa Shepheard left England at a very young age. Perhaps, with absent parents, he had been conditioned to be self-reliant and wanted to strike out on his own. Always the optimist, he embarked with other young men on a ship to Canada at the age of 17. Grandpa worked his way across Canada, finally settling and marrying in Alberta in 1914. Jimmy, as he was known, was a respected and locally renowned horseman, also noted for becoming the master over any and all mean broncs. His father joined him to farm in Alberta in 1913.

Despite the distressing circumstances of his early life, my grandfather was known as a very happy child and man. He could often be heard singing in his clear tenor voice, whether in church, meeting halls or tending animals in the field. He was sociable and full of fun and we certainly always remember him with a smile.

It was not as unusual in previous centuries for people to die at a young age, with diseases such as tuberculosis rampant (see Discover Genealogy blog post 26 September 2017, Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 7: Disease). We have several examples in our families where one of the parents was stricken with what proved to be an untreatable or unbeatable illness. Many ancestors of my wife and me died of tuberculosis, often leaving small children behind. Women occasionally did not survive childbirth. Medical care throughout pregnancies and the birth process were not as advanced as they are today.

Other epidemics also struck people down in large numbers: cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, typhus fever, yellow fever, puerperal fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, scarlet fever, smallpox, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough. Their impacts were only alleviated with the move to better hygiene, improved practices of health care and the use of vaccines.

Sometimes tuberculosis was a result of the confinement of people for other reasons. My wife’s grandmother was institutionalized for mental problems in 1918, at the age of 33. The only hospitals for these types of ailments in Scotland at the time were where patients with tuberculosis were confined. The result was that many, physically healthy patients contracted the disease. Elizbeth (Walker) Cooper’s death record shows she died in the Woodilee Asylum of Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Organic Brain Disease in 1922.

Upon her commitment, she left her husband unprepared to care for six children ranging in age from one to ten. The loss of their mother was also traumatic for of them in many and different ways. The circumstances certainly impacted their entire lives, as well as their relationship with their father.

Disease shows up as one of Mother Nature’s most virulent traits, attacking at random and indiscriminately. Individuals and families can suffer both immediate and long-term effects. There are probably very few families that have not experienced loss or unhappiness from serious illnesses. Nor many that have not been subject, at one time or another, to such cruel tricks of nature.

The Impact of Coastline Changes on Families

In my last blog post I described how my cousin’s family came to live in and then move from Canada in the 1930s, following their new farm being hailed out in Alberta.          https://mothernaturestests.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-hail-with-it.html 

In my wife’s family there is also an instance of loss of livelihood due in part to natural causes. Her grandfather, Alexander MacKay, was a salmon fisherman for most of his adult life, living and working in a small village called Findhorn on the northern coast of Scotland. Over decades, the harbour in which the village was located gradually became filled with silt brought in both by the Findhorn River and by longshore currents from Burghead Bay. Fishing had been a major industry in the area as far back as the 13^th century with portions of the annual catch exported as far as the Baltic States and continental Europe.

With the shallowing of the bay from sand bar buildup, fishermen found navigation in and out of the estuary increasingly difficult. Gradually the village was replaced as a centre of commerce as boats began to deliver they catches more frequently to other ports. A severe decline in fishing activities was occurring about the time Alexander reached middle age. He is shown on the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses as a salmon fisherman, living in Findhorn. By 1920, though, he and his family resided in Dyke, a small farming village several miles to the southwest. The last twenty or so years of his life were spent working as a farm labourer, no longer being able to make a living in an occupation he had spent most of life doing.

As I explain in my book Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests, Long-shore currents along the northern Scottish coast have carried large quantities of sand and silt from rivers and estuaries and deposited the material in beaches and bars. The bars have always been in constant flux during the centuries since the end of the Ice Age, growing with the generally seasonal deposits and eroding when current conditions increased in strength or frequency. As river mouths became plugged with sedimentary material, they often shifted to areas of less resistance.        https://mothernaturestests.blogspot.com/p/surviving-mother-natures-tests.html

Such was the history of the Findhorn Estuary. Toward the end of the 17^th century, the main channel of the Findhorn River received an inordinate amount of silt, eventually plugging its mouth. Findhorn Bay became a lake. But with continuing water flow from inland, a breech was finally made in the shoreline barrier, somewhere between 1701 to 1704.

 

Shoreline around Findhorn Bay, north coast of Scotland about 1700 AD; also showing relative position of present-day shoreline (modified from Shepheard, 2018: Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests)

The break, as it happened, was right where the old village of Findhorn was located. The community was destroyed. The inhabitants, thought, has foreseen the danger and moved lock, stock, barrel and boat to a new site about a mile southeast. The bay was gradually flushed of much of the silt buildup and the re-created town became the centre for the salmon fishing industry. A new cycle was then established with silt continuing to invade the estuary and a longshore bar built up along the coastline.

These were two minor incidences – a hailstorm (my previous blog post) and a silt-invaded estuary – both in terms of the regions in which they occurred and in the history of our family. One event took less than one hour; the other developed over a generation. But both had profound effects on the people involved as well as impacting future generations. My cousin grew up and made his life in the USA, a country he was not born into. As a result of my wife’s grandfather changing his occupation, her father grew up in an inland, farm-centred village instead of in a coastal, fishing village. Lack of opportunity led him to seek a future in Canada, an ocean away from his place of birth and his heritage.

Reference

Shepheard, W. Wayne. (2018). Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests: The effects climate change and other natural phenomena have had on the lives of our ancestors. St. Agnes, South Australia: Unlock the Past.