A letter, a church, and a heritage

“I wish I had more to tell of my grandmothers. … remembering seems a holy thing.” - Dinah, in The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

My ancestors come to life in a letter about a death.

My great-grandfather, Henry, died in 1908, leaving Harriet far from home with 11 children. The youngest was five. The letter from Harriet’s brother Joshua confirms that they were devout. Their hope was in the Lord who had, Joshua writes,

reserved to Himself, and Himself alone, the right to part man and wife, and when he does it we are so constituted that the affliction is severe and rightly so, for love is the mightiest influence in all the World, for God is love, and the love that links us together here had its source in the Divine.

The family emerges as Joshua thinks he will run up and see his sister, Mary Ann. The first thing he sees is the death card Harriet has sent. Everyone knew that Henry was ill, but who could imagine his going so soon? Joshua’s handwriting continues: “Day after day brings something to press home the warning”—life is fleeting. “The years are swiftly passing and they are bearing away our relatives one by one.” Ike, now Harry, “and we are left for further development and work.”

Joshua thinks of Harriet and her family:

… many times a day, alone in life’s journey with great responsibilities. That God guide you and keep you, and cause this affliction to work out for you and yours a far more exceeding and eternal weight of Glory. It seems to me that to those who are ready, death is but a deliverance, and many a time, I have almost wished to be relieved from life, but to those who are left to mourn comes the sorrow and the loneliness. But earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal.

Suddenly the letter turns from sublime to mundane, from pastoral to pedestrian: Annie visiting father, taking him some butter that evening: “he keeps wonderfully well. … Grandma is able to be around as usual.” Painting the house, fixing up a little, shingling. Crops looking well. Signing off with best wishes and affection.

Then a heartbreaking postscript:

Father told Annie to tell you that he felt when you were down last winter that Harry’s time was short and that you would be a widow before long. He hoped the business was left in good shape so you would not have a great deal of trouble.

Joshua opens the letter confessing that he felt like “a failure at offering sympathy to anyone in trouble,” yet he joins the great, heavenly cloud of witnesses as his tender, hopeful writing continues to shine light for his family one hundred and fourteen years later.

I have an old picture of Harriet’s mother. My great-great-grandmother Eliza, looks prim in the old, sepia-tone photograph: dark dress, white collar, dark bonnet tied under her chin, tiny round glasses, hand to her face, fingers loosely resting against her jaw, pinky lifted to the corner of her downturned lip. In her frown I see family resemblance. Separated by nearly two centuries, the curve of her mouth is much like my own and many of my cousins.

Eliza (nee Whitlock) and Richard Johns | late 1800s

Who is this ancestor: Eliza Johns? Born November 15, 1824 in Langtree, Devon, England. Died January 7, 1904 in Elimville, Huron County, Ontario, Canada. Wife of Richard, mother of 10 children: John, Elizabeth, Caleb, Silas, Henry, Sarah Jane, Harriet Keziah, Joshua, Richard, and Mary Ann.

History tells me the Devon economy in England was poor and that many Bible Christians from that area emigrated to southern Ontario.[1] The Johns family was among them. Later, young Harriet and her husband Henry would donate a corner of their land in Saskatchewan and, together with another couple and a bachelor, establish a Holiness Movement Church. After the original church building was replaced, it was moved to our farm and used as a granary. My brothers and I remember playing in there. The second church building was moved to Wawota, Saskatchewan and became the Free Methodist Church I grew up in.[2] I’d had a vague awareness that the granary had been a church but did not know any of the other connections until my 50s.

Left: little white church-turned-granary. Photo of the farm where I grew up from Taylor Grains Ltd., 2009

So, my great-uncle Joshua’s letter to his grieving sister is just one piece of evidence in the middle of a long legacy of my family’s faith, which continues to this day. Why was my branch of the tree preserved in this way, while other branches had not remained in the faith? Perhaps that question may never be answered. Today it is enough to be grateful for these testaments to the gift of faith that I have inherited.

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[1] Shebbear Village - Bible Christians

[2] Learned in conversation with my own father, Martin John Taylor, June 2019.

Cross-posted on Substack: A Letter, a church, and a heritage - by Colleen McCubbin