Every week, I share an excerpt from my Great Aunt’s book, As the Story is Told: A History of Morpeth and Community, which was printed in 1986. Note, this is a historical text and I don’t necessarily agree with all of the authours’ views or turns of phrase. This week’s chapter is about the settlement…
An idyllic vintage hunting scene for a November day. This was sent to my great grandmother in June 1907 from her brother.
I wonder how much time my great-grandfather spent making calculations like these, below? Do you suppose this method is still used for weighing cattle ;)? Miscellaneous Rules. (page 122) Rules for Ascertaining the Number of Tons of Hay in a Stack. – Measure around the stack in the largest place, multiply the number of feet…
My great great uncle and his wife had a lot of photographs of their pets from the 1900s (these three from 1915-1919). They lived in “The Old House” close to “The Shed”, which was very close to where my childhood house was. The house was still standing when I was a very young child, and…
When my dad was 10 years old, he was hit by a car. I remember asking him about it fairly often as a child, though it is hard for him to remember very many details of that day. I do have his grandmother’s account of the day from this journal on April 30, 1956: “Allan…
My Grandmother was diabetic. She had this tiny dish with a little bell in the lid to hold artificial sweetener pills. She had another one that looked like a mother hen, with a tiny spoon sticking out that looked like a chick. Here is another sweet heirloom I received from my great aunt. She left…
On Sundays, I share some of my memories of living on our heritage farm as a child. The reason I started The Farmhouse Chronicles is my connection to the land of my parents and ancestors, so this series is dedicated to sharing these stories. The well house stands adjacent to a laneway that ran along…
As a child, my siblings and I spent hours visiting our Great Aunt Helene at Hillcrest Cottage, my great grandparents home just a short walk away, across the field, over the creek banked in cement bags and up a driveway we knew we knew well from having picked the gravel out of the grass to…
I wonder who these two women were, and where this photo was taken. One guess is that it is along the lakeshore in late fall – there are leaves on the ground but not on the vine or tree. It must have been taken in the late 1800s.
Old books have all kinds of useful tidbits in them, which I suppose was very helpful when you couldn’t simply google a topic such as “Hints on Humanity to Animals.” The Farm Account Book of 1883 highlighted 17 such “hints” on page 127: 1. – In frosty weather warm the bit before putting it into…
