In my search to find answers to my grandfather’s heritage, I became somewhat of a “penpal” with Hazel Eady. She became my spy into the Eady clan of Horton Township. So Hazel set about attempting to find out information about Leah and my grandfather.
The mystery continues to this day – where did the nickname “Nide” come from?
There are a couple of different accounts of Grampa’s passing. Hazel Eady passed along, in a 1992 letter, that the gossip was out there, that Grampa confessed on his death bed that he did not have his “proper name”.
So while the “death bed” confession as been de-bunked, a confession did take place on the eve of Aunt Edna’s and Uncle Cliff’s wedding.
Then there’s my brother’s memory of what he heard:
Grandpa died with his pants halfway pulled up. He was getting dressed in the morning and didn’t finish. (Guess it could have been when he went to bed or in the middle of the night too) So he was sitting on the edge of his bed and fell backwards on the bed. Didn’t even bump his head. Edna went up to see why he had not come down at his usual time. She found him dead laying on his back halfway in the bed with his pants half way on. I think Edna already knew something wasn’t right anyway.
This picture is one that I had developed from a box of negatives that I found in the old Pennell home in Rutherglen. This clothesline stand is a big memory for me and was still there beside the porch door when we moved from house in 1968. Although I can’t make out her face well, I’m assuming this is my grandmother, Alice Pennell. This stand was Buster’s (our family dog) summer home. Off to the left, you can see someone on a ladder, likely picking apples from the small crab apple tree that was beside the house. It was to become a beautiful huge tree, flowering in the spring and giving us crab apples in the summer.
As I looked at this picture, I was puzzled that the clothes were not hung on a line-and-pulley, but on lines attached to the wooden crossbars. So I researched the line-and-pulley clothesline and found that it was patented until 1939.
Here is the clothesline stand again taken during the winter of 1956-1957. The crossbars are gone and the huge pole on the left is likely topped with a wheel and pulley.