More History

Our family, like many, lived and breathed history. While I absorbed some of the stories, I mostly blocked them out as boring, as one does when the elders are going on and on and on. It is wildly amusing that suddenly I am interested at all. When I say the family breathed history, I mean that my mother's mother started the PEI Historical Society and wrote books, my father's mother, as I mentioned before, hauled us off to look at cemeteries. All old artifacts, especially if local, were revered. Some of you know the long case clock in our house?

I remember Mum coming home from an auction having purchased that 1840 Scottish beauty for $125.00, anxious what Dad would think of the extravagance. I was about 10 so we've had the clock for 60 years. And the blue and white Czechoslovakian canisters in the china cabinet? My maternal grandmother bought them at an auction in the 1930s for $2.00 so we've owned them for about 90 years. Seriously.

Like any other interest, there is a hierarchy and snobbery involved with history buffs. Our family snobbery was that "we" were United Empire Loyalists, meaning the Ives rellies bailed out of the US during the American Revolution. I'm sure the UEL status elevated Dad to almost acceptable in my grandmother's eyes; no one was ever going to be good enough for Mum but he at least had history on his side. On one of our cemetery trawls, we found the evidence and thank goodness someone added a modern plaque to the stone, proving the status because it is illegible; Isaac Ives, 4th great grandfather, born in Connecticut.

Editorial: no mention of his wife Sarah Thompson coming with him with children in tow and also UEL. Chopped liver apparently for the sin of being female.

Walking around downtown I am driving Jim crazy with "Tom lived in that house, Dick was there, and Harry was around the corner". Aside from all the personal memories (Jim is from AWAY) there are some gorgeous Victorian era houses in the city.

Bets and I had our first decade in one and the first house I owned, purchased for $17,000, was another. It was 4500 square feet, 3 stories, clay cellar, built in 1877, with knob and tube wiring, and an original 1920 furnace when I bought it from my grandmother's estate in 1970. Clearly this was not a sensible buy for a 21 year old and a few years later the house and I parted ways.
We toured Beaconsfield the other day, supposedly the pinnacle of fancy Victorian houses, built in 1877, and I have to say that, beautiful as it is, my house of the same year, built as a wedding present for an adored daughter, had better bones. Snobbery again. 

Half a block from Beaconsfield and facing across the cove to Government House, is the house of our teenage years, a modest one-of-three built in 1947 on the property of a Victorian mansion (the Heartz house) that had burned down.

I am amazed at the details and factoids that still manage to find the way to the surface of my memory!