Family rumor was that Alexander Cecil Pennell was gassed during the war and this was the cause of his death, so its with no surprize there’s no mention of “gassed” in his death certificate.. It says coma due to diabetes. Included in his military records is how they were treating him with insulin and watching his diet.
He is buried in Mount Pleasant cemetery at Ogleston’s Corners in Rutherglen.
Joseph Philip Peters was born in 1838 in Newry, Armagh, Ireland. He was Florence Maud Gallson’s grandfather.
Joseph signed up with the Royal Navy and served on the HMS Hastings in 1859 as a Seaman 2nd Class.
However, in the 1861 census, Joseph was onboard the HMS Topaze “a 51-gun Liffey-class wooden screw frigate of the Royal Navy” in the Esquimalt Harbour – yes, in British Columbia, Canada.
The crew of the HMS Topaze built the Race Rocks Lighthouse:
Race Rocks Light is one of the first two lighthouses that were built on the west coast of Canada, financed by the British Government and illuminated in 1860. It is the only lighthouse on that coast built of rock, (granite) purportedly quarried in Scotland, and topped with sandstone quarried on Gabriola Island. The Islands of Race Rocks are located just off the southern tip of Vancouver Island, about 16 km (10 mi) southwest of Victoria, British Columbia
And another interesting little jaunt that the HMS Topaze made was going to Easter Island and digging up one of the moai statues, dragging it onboard the Topaze and offering it as a gift to Queen Victoria. The lieutenant on the ship made a sketch of the moai (see above) after it was dragged onto the Topaze.
WW1 – Volunteered in 1915 and was sent to the Eastern Front where he took part in heavy fighting in the Dardanelles. On the evacution of the Gallipoli Peninsula he was draftered to Egypt and served in the important operations in that theatre of war, but contract malaria. He was in hospital for some time, and was eventually demobilised in 1919. He holds the 1914-15 Star and the General Service and Victory Medals.
Joseph was born in 1895 in London, married Winifred Richards and was the brother of Florence Maud Peters, my grandmother.
Lester was born March 13, 1897, Ewen, Michigan. He served in the 228th Regiment.
Lester was the son of William Keech and Jane McNamara. Jane was the daughter of Elizabeth Pennell and John McNamara. Elizabeth was the sister of my grandmother, Alice Smith (nee Pennell).
In the picture below, Lester is in the 2nd row, middle.
George Jr. was born March 22, 1883. He was the son of George Mathew Pennell Sr. and Charlotte Edmunds of Rutherglen, Ontario. George Sr. was the brother of my grandmother, Alice Smith (nee Pennell).
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.
Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.
George joined the war effort February 25, 1916 with the 159th Overseas Battalion, 1st Algonquin and had belonged to the 97th Regiment of Active Militia. He sailed on the S. S. Empress on October 31, 1916 to England. On August 31, 1917, he was hospitalized for a schraple wound in his back and he received the Military Medal for bravery. He later was transferred to the 58th Battalion. He was promoted from Private to Lance Corporal.However, the Battle of Mons took place in November 1918, months after George was killed. On August 21–30, 1918, the 58th Canadian Infantry Battalion was in Arras and specifically on August 27 they had just moved into Bois du Sart, France. George was among 30 “other ranks” killed on the 27th. There were many small battles in the Hundred Days Offensive that eventually lead up to the Battle of Mons, which ended the war on November 11, 1918.
“Whilst taking part in the advance North West of Boiry-Notre Dame, he was hit in the head and instantly killed by an enemy machine gun bullet.” George is buried at the Vimy Ridge Cemetery in France.
Scroll the images below. The “M.M.” beside George’s name means he received a Military Medal.
(from Wayne’s Storyworth memories)
These events happened a lot on our farm in the 60’s. Mom was terrified of them. She would get us all out of bed and down to the living room. Often the power was out so we all sat in the dark till it has over. In the dark you could look out the window and watch the lightning racing across the sky.
You would often see Beatrice, Melvin and Randy Sullivan driving around in the middle of the night. Beatrice was so afraid she wouldn’t even stay in the house. The belief was that because a car has rubber tires ,the lightning won’t hit it. Google says this isn’t true but you are protected by the steel shell of the car around you (so don’t drive around in your corvette, they’re fiberglass ).
Buster [the dog] was terrified of thunder and lightning too. He would chew at the corner of the screen door on the porch, to be let in. Dad would let him in. Sometimes he’d make it all the way through the porch into the main house with us, where he wanted to be. It was great fun watching mom chase him around the house with a broom ,to get him back in the porch. Round and around they’d go. I was always cheering for Buster.
One time Basil Mclaren called dad to take a look at what had happened to his house. I went along. The lightning had struck a big White Pine tree behind his place. You could see the burned black strip ,with no bark left on it, down the side of the tree. Then the black strip followed a root from the tree ,across the lawn ,straight over to Basil’s house. It then jumped from the root to an outdoor plug on his house. It blew out his electrical panel. But he was lucky no fire had started.
In 1969 it hit the pole in Emmett’s yard while I was staying there.
When I worked at the Kidd Creek Met Site (1975) it hit our hi voltage line , jumped to the chain link fence around the perimeter of the property and welded all the chains and pad locks together on the steel fence gates. We got a call from the Locomotive operators wanting to know why we had welded their gates shut (of course it had to be the electrical guys playing a trick on them).
Once on the farm the lightning hit something in the back field close to Fichault and our property line. The whole bush there was lit up and stayed lit up. Dad figured the bush was on fire. He got the tractor and cart hooked up. He loaded it up with his chainsaw and two shovels . Told buster to stay home (buster didn’t argue). And off we went to save the farm. When we topped the hill you could see the whole bush lit up brightly. Sort of flashing between bright and dim It didn’t really look like a fire. When we got closer you could see it was coming from a broken power line that was laying on the ground and arcing at one spot. He told me to stay back by the tractor. Dad put out a small fire on a log by shoveling some dirt on it (being very careful to stay away from the power line). We returned home and dad called the electrcal guys to cut the power to the line and repair it. After everything was back to normal I went out to the site to take a look at the ground where the arcing was going on. What I found was a puddle of green glass. The arc hadturned the clay into glass.
Lightning rods were installed on some of our barns and on the house. They must have worked because we never got hit.
(Wayne’s Storyworth)
Before the government decided that only their supporters could sell milk , farmers had a way of making a few dollars by selling milk, cream and butter.(More on this in a future story about Chester).
We had many chores on the farm in the 60’s . I was six years old in 1960 and was expected to contribute to the vast enterprise of dads farm when I was able to walk and carry something. Often what I had gladly done to be more like dad quickly turned into something that I wished I had never learned how to do. Things like ,bringing in the wood , slopping the pigs, gathering eggs, shoveling shit, milking cows, and making butter.
I liked running the separator cause you just had to pour raw milk into it, turn the crank and watch the cream go into one pail and the milk go into another (there was a fly wheel in the separator so you didn’t need to turn the crank forever). You used a clean rag to strain the shit and flys out of the raw milk as you poured it into the separator (see the video on facebook.com/watch/?v=695736686004977).
The cream was carefully carried to the milk house and saved for a few days until you had enough to make some butter (The milk house was close to the farm house and was dug into the ground to keep the milk cooler than in the farm house).
We had all the things you needed to make butter. The wooden butter mold must have been made by somebodies great, great, grandpa. Once the butter was churned you would add salt to it and kneed the butter with your sterile hands and then pack it into the sterile wooden butter mold.
Yes of course we had a butter churn. The churn was a little bigger than a 5 gallon pail and like the separator it had a crank on it. Inside the churn was two wooden paddles with holes in them. There was nothing modern like a fly wheel on the churn so you had to churn the crank continuously (hard to believe I found a picture of a churn just like it). Dad and mom both hated sitting there and churning that crank. They had better things to do and it was really boring. Of course they could delegate this job to the boy that was sitting there watching them work up a sweat. It seemed like you had to turn the crank for ever. As the milk thickened it became harder and harder to turn the crank. You would switch arms as one got tired. I really hated making butter. You could try to tell your little sister how much fun it was but that only worked once.
So what was I to do. I started crying and begged mom to not make me churn butter any more. Well mom always had my back. She pushed the request up the food chain to the wizard of the family, dad.
Dad got out his best haywire but couldn’t figure out how to do it with just haywire. This required something more hi-tech. The baler had a gas motor and some belts on it and that may have been his inspiration. Dad had an electric motor he has savaged from an old cloths dryer and some used fan belts from the tractor.
He attached the churn and the electric motor to a board about four feet long (used his best haywire). He hack sawed off the churns crank handle and replaced it with a pulley he found that fit the used belt. He had to buy the pulley to go on the electric motor because he couldn’t find one in the garage or granary that fit.
I know dad was afraid something might go wrong so we both moved as far away as we could get in the porch where the contraption was being tested and he had me stand behind him.. Dad filled the churn with fresh cream and plugged the electric motor into the wall .
Now for some basic engineering . The motor was most likely 1800 rpm since that is the most common speed used in cloths dryers . The two pulleys were pretty much the same diameter. This meant there was no speed reduction between the churn and the electric motor. So the old churn tried to spin up to 1800 rpm too.
As it accelerated some of the hay wire on the board let go. The wooden paddles in the churn went flying out of the top. The cream plastered the ceiling and the walls and us. Thank god the belt came off.
Dad put the project on hold for a while. But the cows kept making cream and now we had no handle to turn on the churn ( I was happy about this).
Dad patched up the churn (one wooden paddle was broken and the bottom a little dented). Dad figured out the need for some speed reduction between the electric motor and the churn. Looking at the clothes dryer you could see that the pulley on the churn needed to be much larger , like the size of the drum on the clothes dryer.
Where was he going to get a pulley this big. Well in the milk house loft there was an old spinning wheel. The wheel on spinning wheel might be just the size he needed.
Some how dad managed to mount the spinning wheel wheel on the churn where the crank had been.
For the next test we both stood outside the porch with me behind him (buster too) and the porch door closed. He used an extension cord and plugged it in (with just water in the churn this time).
Amazing . It worked perfectly. Now churning butter became a fun job and dad and mom could get back to farming.
Because of the milk laws there wasn’t any money to be made in milking ten cows. As time went by we ended up just milking one cow and there wasn’t enough cream to justify making butter any more.
The enemy
I would say I’ve done an above average amount of reading about ancient history. I do wish I had studied this in post-secondary school however that’s a whole other topic. Two things I remember reading about that just seemed weird and creepy were how in the Jewish culture, you were only considered Jewish IF your mother was Jewish and pharaohs married their sisters to keep the blood-line pure which researchers believe lead to genetic problems.
My DNA has been with Ancestry for quite some time and I also sent my DNA into 23andMe. Because I could download my raw DNA data from Ancestry, I also sent the raw file into FamilyTreeDNA and MyHeritage. (I may have sent it into Gene too, I’ll check this later). In 2007, I sent my DNA into the Genographic Project which was part of National Geographic.
It’s expensive to belong to all these 3rd party genealogy companies, so I chose Ancestry and 23andMe to maintain my membership, while also paying FamilyTreeDNA $10 to get some extra detail.
Recently I’ve been trying to get my head around genetics and genealogical DNA and I just finished The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy (2nd Ed.) by Blaine T. Bettinger. It was very interesting as the author lays out the differences in all the 3rd party companies, what they offer and reveal, most of which is WAY over my head.
What I gleaned from the book is that all the 3rd party companies have their pros and cons, but 23andMe seems to come out on top for lay-person level data analysis while FamilyTreeDNA is a step above lay-person, hovering almost out of touch for me.
But following is a summary of what I learned about DNA and I write all the below in an effort to galvanize the information into my own brain.
A cell has 23 pairs of chromosomes: 22 autosomal pairs plus a “sex” pair (either a XX pair for females or a XY pair for males). These chromosomes are all INSIDE the nucleus of the cell.
The mother passes along her X-DNA to ALL her children, either pure from her mother or by jumbling up her father’s X with her mother’s X. There is an 85% chance that it’s jumbled.
The father’s X-DNA (either pure or jumbled from his mother) is passed to his daughters who cannot pass it on to their children.
The father’s Y-DNA (chromosome) is only passed down from father to son, unchanged, exactly as it was going back eons. Meaning a man’s Y-DNA is the same as his father’s, grandfather’s, great-grandfather’s, all the way back to “Adam”. Also meaning you can’t tell which genealogical level it comes from. Example: Two men have the same Y-DNA. I can’t tell if its because they are brothers, first cousins, nephew/uncle, etc. Women do NOT have a Y-DNA so cannot pass a Y-DNA down to her children. Therefore, the Y-DNA will disappear in the line IF there are no sons, or said to have “daughtered out”.
The mt-DNA (mitochondrial), which is found OUTSIDE the nucleus of the cell, is only passed down from the mother to ALL her children and like the Y-DNA, it is passed down unchanged, and like the Y-DNA you cannot determine genealogical level, all the way back to “Eve”. Even though a man will receive his mother’s mt-DNA, he cannot pass it down to any of his children. Therefore, the mt-DNA will disappear in the line IF there are no sons, in essence “sonned out”.
This leaves the 22 autosomal chromosomes (or at-DNA). 50% of one’s autosomal DNA comes from the mother and 50% comes from the father. With every generation, the autosomal DNA matching gets halved. Therefore, autosomal disappears over time, meaning, the further away a match is shown on Ancestry or 23andMe, the less sure it is. Once you get past the 3rd or 4th cousin, there’s only a small percentage of matching DNA. Example: Siblings will show a 50% match. First cousins will show a 25% match. Second cousins will show a 12.5% match and third cousins will show a 6.25% match.
That being said its the autosomal DNA that reveals loads about the full ancestry of a person, because you potentially have a little bit from every ancestor in your tree, or potentially have nothing from an ancestor because it got filtered right out.
Example:
My life-partner, Lorne, is 100% Ashkenazi Jew. Our daughter, Meghan, is 50% Ashkenazi Jew. But Lorne would not have passed down his Y-DNA to her nor any of his mt-DNA from his mother. Therefore, Meghan shows 50% Jew solely from Lorne’s at-DNA and from his X-DNA (jumbled or pure).
Now for my conspiracy theory. Is it just a coincidence that the ancient Jewish people and the pharaohs set up rules surrounding the pureness of their children’s bloodline?
If a pharaoh had to have children with his sister, than would mean the Y-DNA, X-DNA, mt-DNA and at-DNA would all be 100% and pure.
By my calculations, if siblings always have a son and a daughter, who marry, and then the incest continues:
In royalty, the daughters are often married to male cousins, when INCEST became scandalous and a very bad idea.
In the Jewish faith, the mother needing to be of Jewish blood before you can say you’re Jewish because the mother passed down the mt-DNA 100% and the mother’s X-DNA (which can be a jumble of mom’s X and dad’s X) is passed down to daughters 100%.
My question, why would the female DNA be more important than the male DNA which holds the all-important Y??
Answer: Because in the Jewish faith, its the man who chooses a wife to bare his children. The man is Jewish and Y chromosome will be passed. But he MUST choose a Jewish wife for mt-DNA and the X-DNA to be passed. The Y-DNA will lead back to Adam and the mt-DNA will lead back to Eve.
This comes back to my initial conspiracy theory/question: How did they know? I cannot believe these traditions just came out of no where. Is it in the bible?
Answering the question, “What motivated you to go to graduate school?”
Well it is the 60’s . It’s Christmas. I wake up and wait for dad to light the fire in the wood stoves. There was one in the kitchen and one in the living room . An annex and a box stove. After the down stairs warmed up a bit we were allowed down stairs to see what Santa had brought. Dad had to wait for Santa to come down the chimney before he lit the stoves or Santa wouldn’t come.
There it was – an electric train set. I couldn’t believe it. It went around and around and you had to plug it into the wall to get electricity. It made smoke that smelled wonderful like diesel fuel. It had an electric head light and a transformer. The transformer converted the 120vac from the wall into 16vac for the train engine, the light, and the heater for the smoke. The transformer had a knob on it that you could turn to vary the voltage from 0 to 16 vac. This would slow the train to a stop or make it go faster. I had a great time with this train and played with it till I wore it out and it wouldn’t work any more. I tried everything to make it run again. Even stole a light bulb from Uncle Chester for it. Dad found out and made me give it back to Chester and say I was sorry. I was in deep shit. They made a big deal out of it. Going to teach me a lesson. Chester let me keep the light bulb in the end.
All of this fooling around with the train introduced me to electricity . I learned a lot from that train. I used what I learned to go on to wiring up flash lights . Fixing can openers . Fixing radio’s . Fixing just about anything that ran on electricity. I even started wiring houses after I took the electrical classes in high school. I was way ahead of the other guys in the class. Guess they never got an electric train for Christmas.
In grade 13 I decided to quit school. I was bored and tired of being broke. I tried to get a job at Vance Refuses TV repair shop. He said no and told me to stay in school. The guidance teacher wasn’t any help. They gave me a test and said I should be a watch repair man or a Forester. He did give me a University of Waterloo course book to look at. I read the whole thing. I came across the course that described how to become an electrical engineer. I read it over and over. It was exactley what I wanted to be.
I quickly reversed my work at school and went from F to A+ on most of my courses . I typically got one F and three A+ . I missed the Ontario scholarship by one mark I got a 74 but needed a 75 average. I was accepted at Waterloo, Queens and U of T. The Co-op course at Waterloo was what I wanted anyway. We could afford it. (We being Mom, Dad and me)
I quit University twice but ended up going back both times. The last time I had a good job as an electrical apprentice at the Kidd Creek Metsite. It was so nice to have some money. The crew I was with was wonderful. They kept telling me I was stupid to not go back to school. I had one year left to do out of the four. My boss even said if I went back I would probably end up being his boss.
So I got married and headed back to school. We used Rita’s Canada Savings Bond to pay the rent at the University married students’ residence. Dad had sold me his car for a dollar the last time I went back so we had that.
Aunty Joe used to send me $50 bucks a month. Mom and dad sent me money when ever I ran out. I had some savings from working so we didn’t need much.
After I graduated, Kidd Creek hired me back as an Electrical Engineer and I was my old boss’s Boss.
The first project they gave me was to get Engine 052, one of their three diesel electric engines, running again. It had been sabotaged by a pissed off electrician that I had worked with in the past as an apprentice. He told me I would never figure out what he had done. It took me a month but I found the little wire he had removed and got 052 running again. During the trouble shooting, we lit the engine on fire twice . The second time the train operator jumped out of the engine. But we were ready with our fire extinguishers. We had walky-talkies.
“053, 053. This is 052 come in please.”
”052. This is 053. What’s your problem?”
“053 this is 052. We need you to tow us back to the shop again.”
“10-4.”
It was pretty embarrassing stuff.
So my little electric train set got me on the rigth track to be able to fix a real 1000 hp “Montreal Locomotive Works” Engine.
The electrician (Benny) that removed the little wire bought me a beer and saluted me.