Mother Nature’s Bounty Altered

Under normal conditions, at least in the past, people derived their most life-giving benefits from rivers. It was along waterways that communities settled and grew. The rivers provided one of the most important necessity for life: water, for drinking and irrigating of the crops which were the prime food source.

Annually, spring floods brought nutrient-laden material from up-river areas to restore the capability of fields to produce crops and water to nourish the seedlings that would mature into those crops. Occasionally, larger volumes of water during flood stages would cause damage to communities and temporary dislocation of residents and animal stock.

If drought hit the region, water flows would have been reduced, severely affecting the agricultural areas. As more people crowded into the farming regions, mostly from urban expansion, the pressure to control floods grew. It is still ongoing as illustrated by what has happened in the Mississippi River valley over many decades.

Hurricane Katrina and Louisiana, USA

One of the most negative results of human influence in control water flow is the devastation that can happen when normal river processes are not allowed to happen. In efforts to control Mother Nature, humans have created whole new categories of disasters with the basic elements of natural phenomena magnified. In the case of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in Louisiana, in 2005, the destruction of parts of the City of New Orleans was made worse by long-term changes to the hydrology and ecology of wetlands in the region as well as by the design of flood protection infrastructure.

 

New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, showing Interstate 10 at West End Boulevard (retrieved 29 October 2019 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KatrinaNewOrleansFlooded_edit2.jpg )

Hallsands, Devon, England

People can also change the natural equilibrium through their exploitation of minerals and material used in construction. I wrote about the situation in Hallsands, Devon, England, in the 1890s (Shepheard, 2018). The village had been protected by a broad sand and shingle beach fronting Start Bay. The low incline of the beach and offshore area insured that potentially destructive waves did not encroach on the lands where the community had been built.

Dredging of the beach and offshore area commenced in 1897. The material was needed to build up the port area of Devonport. Millions of tons of rock and sand were removed with the effect that the beach level fell, and the offshore areas became deeper and with more severe slope. By 1900 waves were breaking on the sea wall and foundations of buildings nearest the shoreline. In subsequent years, infrastructure and roads suffered failure, collapsing into the sea.

Destruction culminated on 26 January 1917 when a major storm hit the region. With high tide combined with gale-force winds, waves broke over almost all the buildings in the village. The end result was that, because of human interference, an industry based on fishing was decimated, 54 families were rendered homeless and an entire community was abandoned.

 

Map of Hallsands area from 1904 report by H. R. worth

The result of such catastrophic events as Katrina and Hallsands is the same, of course: widespread suffering of people, more so that would normally have been the case in past decades or centuries.

The lesson is, “Don’t mess with Mother Nature!”

References

Jodal, Morten. (2019). New Orleans and hurricane Katrina – the real story. Watts Up With That blog post, 2 August 2019. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/08/02/new-orleans-and-hurricane-katrina-the-correct-story/

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

Worth, R. Handsford. (1904). Hallsands and Start Bay. Report and Transaction of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art, 36, pp. 302-346.

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes Blog Posts

The following post (Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 18: Comets & Meteorites) is a continuation of similarly-themed subjects started on my Discover Genealogy blog. They were and are meant to point out many of the natural phenomena that have impacted individuals and families and, in many instances, caused changes in lives and livelihoods. Links are attached to the titles for readers who wish to go back and read (or re-read) any of them.

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 1: Galveston 1900

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 2: Tornadoes

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 3: Droughts

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 4: Earthquakes

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 5: Tsunamis

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 6: Floods

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 7: Disease

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 8: Volcanoes

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 9: Landslides

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 10: Appalachian Storm 1950

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 11: Effects of Natural Disasters on the Unborn

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 12: 1811-12 New Madrid Earthquakes

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 13: 1791-92 El Nino Event

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 14: Deadly Hail Storms

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 15: Heat Waves

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 16: Plague

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 17: Glaciers & Ice Fields

Examples of how people endured Mother Nature’s Tests will continue to be published here in subsequent posts. There is no shortage of stories about how nature has affected the lives of people around the world and throughout history. Stay tuned.

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 18: Comets & Meteorites

We occasionally get news reports of meteorites that come close to Earth as they move through the solar System. One such case was in July of this year when a comet apparently came within 40,000 miles of our planet. For reference, the Moon is 238,900 miles from Earth. Asteroid 2016 D, a 450-foot wide rock, was entirely missed by scientists as NASA, who track these things, until it was almost on us. Had it struck, it would have produced an event the size of about 30 atomic bombs.

Path of comet 2019D (retrieved 2 October 2019 from https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9968765/nasa-asteroid-earth-missed-bad-weather/

Over the past twenty years, 556 asteroids have entered the Earth’s atmosphere.  Most of them burn up before hitting the ground – the fireball called a bolide – but the Earth has seen a few larger ones strike the surface with devastating consequences.

This diagram maps the data gathered from 1994-2013 on small asteroids impacting Earth's atmosphere to create very bright meteors, technically called "bolides" and commonly referred to as "fireballs".  Sizes of red dots (daytime impacts) and blue dots (nighttime impacts) are proportional to the optical radiated energy of impacts measured in billions of Joules (GJ) of energy and show the location of impacts from objects about 1 meter (3 feet) to almost 20 meters (60 feet) in size. Image Credit: Planetary Science (retrieved 2 October 2019 from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2014-397)

Humans have always been fascinated with heavenly bodies, raising some appearances to almost religious worship status. They have both amazed and frightened people for centuries, studied by scientists and philosophers alike. Even liked to diseases and witchcraft! The presence and path across the skies have been featured in books and drawings for centuries.

A depiction of the Great Comet of 1577 over Prague by Jiri Daschitzsky; In addition to the comet, five zodiac symbols appear in the sky: (L-R) Aries, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Sagittarius. Below the comet's tail are the crescent moon and Saturn, depicted as a star with the astronomical  symbol ♄. At the bottom center, a man draws the comet by the light of a lantern. (retrieved 2 October 2019 from commons.wikipedia) 

Comets and meteorites striking Earth have been topics of conversation and scientific research projects for thousands of years. We readily see the evidence of comet-strikes on the face of the Moon. On Earth they are more subtle, modified by erosion and covered by vegetation, and in some cases, by ice. One collision favoured by geologists annihilated dinosaurs about 65 million years ago when a comet, estimated at over 6 miles in diameter, struct near what is now the Yucatan Peninsula resulting in a crater (the Chickxulub Crater) 110 miles wide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater The gases and debris thrown into the atmosphere caused masked the Sun for probably decades, changing the climate through acid rain and excessive cooling which choked out life around the world.

Modern geophysical tools are able to reveal the locations and size of the impact area.

Location and gravity anomaly maps of the Chicxulub impact area. The coastline is shown as a white line. A series of concentric features reveals the location of the crater (retrieved 2 October 2019 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicxulub-Anomaly.jpg)

Beneath the ice sheet in Greenland is a massive, 20-mile wide crater thought to have been created by a mile-wide asteroid colliding with the Earth about 13,000 years ago. Human civilization had yet to be developed but such an event could have resulted in death and destruction of animal life in the Northern Hemisphere and a disruption in the migration of humans into Europe and North America.

Left: Ice-penetrating radar disclosed a possible crater under a Greenland glacier; right: map showing location of impact crater under Hiawatha Glacier (images retrieved 2 October 2019 from https://www.sciencenews.org/article/greenland-impact-crater-top-science-stories-2018-yir)

Often these astroblemes are regions where mineralogy has been changed. In the Sudbury, Ontario, Canada, region the impact of a 6 to 9-mile wide bolide over 1.8 billion years ago (Palaeoproterozoic) resulted in a basin 20 by 40 miles in size. Rock fragments thrown up have been found thousands of miles away. The crater filled with magma, probably from the Earth’s mantle which contained valuable minerals and precious metals. Deposits have been mined since the 1880s.

Left: NASA World Wind satellite image of the Sudbury astrobleme in Ontario, Canada; right: geological map showing the Sudbury Basin, produced by Natural Resources Canada in 1955.

We don’t have definitive reports of widespread death and destruction in the written historical record, but there are stories that go back thousands of years that might reflect these types of events.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is now thought by scientists studying Jordan’s Tall el-Hammam area to be an historical account of an impact from a meteor that struck about 3,700 years ago. The meteor probably exploded at low-altitude, wiping out villages and farms and rendering the region uninhabitable for several centuries.

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, by John Martin, 1852; original oil painting on canvas at Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (image retrieved 2 October 2019 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Destruction_of_Sodom_And_Gomorrah#/media/File:John_Martin_-_Sodom_and_Gomorrah.jpg)

Over 40,000 people may have been killed instantly in the blast. Fertile soil would have been baked, losing all nutrients through the heat and a following tsunami-like flood of salt water from the Dead Sea. All structures would have been levelled.

Further back in time, the ancient city of Akkad may have been destroyed by a comic asteroid impact during what has been named the 4.2 kiloyear event. During the time following, climate cooled, drought persisted in most areas of the Northern Hemisphere lowering food production, societies collapsed, and social chaos prevailed.

Akkad was the centre of one of the earliest human civilizatons in Mesopotamia. Joachim Seifert and Frank Leske are the authors of a paper titled The Destruction of the City of Akkad by a Cosmic Asteroid Impact and the Link to Global Climate Change, published online in 2013 (http://www.flarchives.co.uk/uploads/1/9/7/5/19752675/akkad_paper.pdf). They assert that the city was completely destroyed by meteorite strikes, as apparently even described and recorded by others in the region as “giant dust plume soaring over Mesopotamia.”

Map showing impact locations in Mespotamia around 2200 BP (Akkad was located immediately to the right of the impact labelled Umm-al-Binni)

Geological and archaeological evidence, along with written accounts support the impact interpretation. The region was apparently struck by several meteorites, probably fragments of a much larger cosmic body. A larger piece may have been responsible for the Umm al Binni Lake crater located next to the old city of Akkad.

So, what does this have to do with genealogy. Not much other that to indicate that people were impacted by these types of evets and could be again, as we have seen from the near misses. Within the most recent centuries, meteors or bollides, were observed with trepidation. In that respect they became symbols of mayhem. Any large meteorite hitting the Earth would cause significant damage and death, as they did in the examples shown above.

Hundreds of impact locations have been found to date. With improved technology many more are likely to be discovered. We may even find a few events that occurred during the last few hundred years that our ancestors might have experienced.

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.

The hail with it!

My cousin Donald told me the story of how his family came to live in, and then move from Canada in the 1930s. Our grandparents had immigrated from Oregon in 1928 and established a farm near the town of Irricana, Alberta. My Uncle Randall came along initially to help them get settled. He returned to Oregon but decided later to come back to Canada and farm on his own.

Randall leased land in the Crossfield area north of Calgary and set out to become fully Canadian. His son, Donald, was born in Irricana in 1932. Unfortunately, in the summer of the family’s first year, a hail storm, not uncommon in that region, destroyed Randall’s entire crop. He decided there and then that farming in Alberta was not for him and moved his family back to the United States.

This is, really, just a minor incident, both in terms of the region in which it occurred and in the history of our family, but it had a profound effect on the people involved as well as impacting future generations. Donald ended up being raised and making his life in a country he was not born into.

But it got me thinking about other people who migrated to far off places during their lifetimes. Were they forced away from their homes because of changes in natural conditions under which they lived and worked. In particular, did a major, or even minor storm disrupt families to the point that they had to change their way of life or move?

Big storms containing hail commonly occur on hot spring or summer days when the heat causes evaporation from the Earth’s surface and carries the moisture up into the cold stratosphere. There the water vapour freezes and starts to fall. The continuous updraft lifts the ice pellets again where they acquire another coat of freezing water. The sequence can repeat several times resulting in vary large “stones” before they can escape the rising air and fall to earth.

In searching historical records, you may find events like the 30 April 1888 storm that devastated the town of Moradabad in India. It struck at midday. Hail stones the size of oranges killed 246 people as well as thousands of farm animals that could not find protection. Strong winds accompanying the storm toppled many buildings. This storm had the highest mortality associated with hail.

As I wrote in my book, Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests (2018, p. 111), “A single storm might produce unexpected results that can affect the outcome of a nation’s history. For example, on 13 April 1360, the army of King Edward III of England were marching against the French at Chartres when a violent hailstorm was unleashed on them. Hundreds of ill-protected men and horses died in the onslaught of hailstones reported to be as large as pigeon’s eggs. Lightning apparently also struck and killed knights in full battle armour. After this onslaught from Mother Nature, with his army in tatters after the onslaught from nature, Edward agreed to a truce under which he got a major portion of the country but was denied the French crown.”

Golf ball and baseball size hail stones are not uncommon. Many readers may have seen such projectiles from the sky. The largest hail storm found so far measured 7 inches in diameter and fell during a storm on 22 June 2003 in Vivian, South Dakota.

Most storms have only been inconveniences. Throughout history some have been deadly. Perhaps more than a few, such as the one that took out my uncle’s crop in 1932, resulted in major changes to a family’s livelihood and history.

The Madness of Mother Nature: Wreck of the Irish Immigrant Ship, the Carrick

Recently there have been several news reports about bodies found on a beach in Gaspé that were buried in 1847. 

In 2011 the bones of three children were found washed up on the beach after a violent storm. Five years later an exhaustive survey of the area unearthed the remains of 18 others. It has been determined that all of them were likely buried together is a shallow trench, creating a makeshift cemetery for the victims. Stories from the survivors, along with analyses of the remains concluded that these bodies were from the ship wrecked in 1847.

Due to poor preservation, only small parts of the skeletons of the deceased were recoverable. Following analyses of the bones, to help determine where the individuals originated and their physical condition at the time of death, the remains were to be reburied in a cemetery near the Irish Memorial on Cap-des-Rosiers Beach. Tests showed the individuals were from an area in which the main diet was potatoes and that they were suffering from diseases related to malnutrition.

Those buried were from the ship, Carricks, which was wrecked during a storm near Cap de Rosier, Quebec, Canada. She sailed from Sligo, Ireland, in March 1847, with 173 passengers, all desperate survivors of the Potato Famine in search of a better life in Canada. Only 48 survived. The passengers were from 27 families originating in or near County Sligo. Descendants of the survivors still reside in the area.

 

The scene at Skibbereen, west Cork, in 1847. From a series of illustrations by Cork artist James Mahony (1810–1879), commissioned by Illustrated London News 1847. (in public domain; retrieved 20 June 2019 from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skibbereen_by_James_Mahony,_1847.JPG)

After a rough passage of 23 days, the ship was caught in a blinding snowstorm in the middle of the night and was driven by winds on to the rocky coast of the Gaspé Peninsula. I won’t recount the entire story here. You can read about it in many articles and news reports and in a book a book published in 1919, titled Treasure Trove in Gaspé and The Baie des Chaleurs. A documentary was filmed

This lone ship was part of a much larger exodus from Ireland that arrived in the St. Laurence River area of Canada. The river was a conduit for refugees escaping the famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1849. Most arrived in the New World sicker than they were when they left, due to poor hygiene, limited food and water supplies, bad weather and the very close confines in the bellies of the ships that carried them. Upon their arrival in Canadian waters, ships were quarantined until authorities could determine whether they posed health-risks to any community in which they settled.

 

Map of Gaspé, Quebec region showing locations of Cap-des-Rosiers and Grosse Isle

Treatment by Canadian immigration personnel was harsh and, in many cases, inhumane. People were trapped on arriving ships, including those already sick and dead. Medical assistance was lacking in any substantive way. By 1847, even the limited resources were overwhelmed by the large numbers of immigrants.

At Gross Isle, Quebec, a central depot had been established in 1832 for receiving, housing and treating people coming to Canada to contain a cholera epidemic. It was reopened and expanded to accommodate Irish immigrants in the 1840s. Notwithstanding attempts to aid passengers, thousands died on the trip across the ocean and while trapped at Gross Isle. Over 5,000 people are buried on the island. From 1832 to 1932, nearly 500,000 Irish immigrants to Canada passed through Grosse Isle.

The experience for those on board the ship, Carricks, was like the trifecta of Mother Nature’s madness: famine, disease and storms. In biblical terms, it was as if three of the Four horsemen of the Apocalypse (Famine, Pestilence and Death) had descended on this helpless group.

References:

MacWhirter, Margaret Grant. (1919). Treasure Trove in Gaspé and The Baie des Chaleurs. Quebec: The Telegraph Printing Co. 217 pp. 

Selected online blogs, articles and news summaries:

·         Memorials to the Carricks of Whtehavem https://ghostofthecarricks.wordpress.com/monument/

·         Bones found on beach in Quebec’s Gaspé are from 1847 Irish shipwreck (CP) 9 June 2019 https://globalnews.ca/news/5371235/bones-gaspe-irish-shipwreck-parks-canada/

·         Genealogy a la Carte (Gail Dever) 13 June 2019 http://genealogyalacarte.ca/?p=28479

·         Human remains found in Gaspé are from 1847 Irish shipwreck, Parks Canada confirms (spencer Van Dyk) 7 June 2019  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/carricks-shipwreck-remains-1.5166478?

·         Bones found in Gaspé confirmed to be from 1847 shipwreck victims fleeing Irish potato famine (Morgan Lowrie) 10 June 2019 https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/bones-found-in-gaspe-confirmed-to-be-from-1847-shipwreck-victims-fleeing-irish-potato-famine-1.4459202

·         Lost Children of the Carricks Documentary, Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/carricksofwhitehaven/videos/191785188402448/

·         Grosse Isle, Quebec – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosse_Isle,_Quebec

·         The Irish Exodus – https://www.libraryireland.com/irishamerica/irish-exodus.php

Mother Nature’s Best

Having dealt last month with some of the worst tricks Mother Nature has played on people, perhaps we should look at what positive events she has directed our way.

Humans have always been at the mercy of natural forces and faced the brunt of disasters that killed many, but our development and progress as a species and civilization have also been aided by benevolent and timely changes to our environment.

Earth, Air, Water & Fire

These were the classical, and simple, elements of our world originally defined by the ancient Greeks but referred to by almost all pre-existing civilizations as well. They are, individually and in combination, part of what we refer to as Nature:

·         The earth offers us the means to grow our food and minerals to use in our daily lives.  

·         Water sustains life in all forms.

·         Air is necessary for life but is also part of the atmosphere which regulates the Earth’s temperature.

·         Fire was the energy that drove both the Sun, Earth’s systems and human assertiveness and passion.

Humans have learned to use all of the elements Mother Nature has provided.

Rivers

For most of civilized human existence, farming – of necessity – has been the major occupation. And, in order to achieve the highest productivity, fresh water is required. It is no surprise that people have chosen to live alongside rivers, in areas of fertile soils. These areas are located mostly in the floodplains of large rivers. Annually, springtime floods bring not only needed moisture but also nutrients in the form of organic matter and new soil to be deposited across broad parts of the valley floors. Year after year, farmers come to depend on the bounty brought by rivers.

 

Aerial photo of the Cauto River near Guamo Embarcadero, council of the municipality of Río Cauto, Cuba (downloaded from Wikimedia Commons) 

The water of rivers and oceans was also integral to transportation, allowing people to voyage in search of new trade opportunities and new lives. Both also had their own bounty in the form of food stuffs.

Warm is Good

The Sun provides life-sustaining warmth. Light (from the sun), in combination with water (from the ground) and carbon dioxide (from the air), is part of the natural process of photosynthesis which allows plants to respire, grow and reproduce. Plant material, of course, is a dominant part of the diets of almost all animals on Earth, including humans.

Over the centuries, the best farming conditions have been experienced during the warm climatic periods. During these times, extreme weather conditions were rare, rainfall fell in abundance during the growing seasons, summers were warm.

In each of the warm periods of the last 10,000 years – the Holocene period – living conditions were favourable, civilization prospered, and population grew.

 

Average near-surface temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere during the last 11,000 years based on analyses of the changes in 18O isotopes from Greenland ice cores. The diagram demonstrates the alternating periods of warm and cold that occurred throughout the Holocene Epoch. (reproduced from Shepheard: Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests)

Landscape Beauty

Over the centuries, the natural beauty of landscapes has inspired artists, musicians and philosophers. Social interaction expanded as sunny days, not always during summer months, allowed people to get outside and enjoy the benefits of nature as well as the company of each other.

 

Valley of the Ten Peaks and Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Canada. (downloaded from Wikimedia Commons) 

Poets throughout history wrote of their experiences with Nature, contributions that brought joy and fascination to all those who read them. Many of these poems were written during the dark times of the Little Ice Age and Industrial Revolution when both cold conditions and dingy cities combined to produce dismal living conditions:

·         Frost – Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening

·         Kipling – The Glory of the Garden

·         Masefield – Sea Fever

·         Nash – Winter Morning Poem

·         Tennyson – The Brook

·         Wordsworth – I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Even the symbol we use in genealogical studies is from Mother Nature, with all of its beauty and imperfections: a Tree!

 

The Angel Ok Tree in South Carolina (downloaded from Wikimedia Commons) 

References

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