by Cathie Morgan

I have in my possession my late great Grandpa Matheson’s egg basket. According to family stories, he used it to gather eggs from the hen house he and my great Grandma had in their backyard at Stony Mountain.

Alexander Matheson's Egg Basket, used c. 1920. Photo: E. Campbell

by Elizabeth Campbell

An interesting article about Kildonan Church appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press this weekend. If you would like to read the online version of the article, please visit the Winnipeg Free Press website.

Thanks to Cathie for the heads up!

I picked up a Biblio Life reprint of this 1910 publication the other day. It is an interesting little booklet for anyone studying the settlers of the pre-1915 desertions. Essentially, it consists of copies of documents in the Selkirk Papers that help to identify exactly which people arrived as settlers in the 1811, 1812, 1813 and 1814 groups.

Again, I return to the AGM at the end of September this year. The newly elected Vice President of TLSARL, Roy McLeod, stopped me as I was entering the venue. He’d found some articles written by my great-aunt in a couple of old copies of Saskatchewan History, and kindly, he gave them to me. Imagine my excitement when I found her contributions were (an annotated copy of) a journal her aunt kept while on a canoe trip made in the 1920s!

Settlers came to Red River filled with hope, but some found only disappointment. In many cases, their names are remembered only in 200-year-old journal entries. Such an one was Helen Kennedy, a young Irish woman who sailed in 1813.

Christian Matheson & Angus Matheson, 1815 Group

The Digital Photo Archive is one of the projects I would like to see underway in the Genealogy department of TLSARL.

Many of the settlers, especially from the first two groups, left the RRS early in its history. By the time TLSARL was established 100 years ago, many of the relationships with those people had become so distant that the ties had dissolved. Some of those settlers left with very bad memories, and their descendants may not have wanted, in 1910, to have anything to do with remembering RRS history – who knows? In any case, their descendants often are not known to us at TLSARL.

I have so many things on my to do list in this job. I wish it was full-time and paid… then I could really go to town! But, like everyone else working behind the scenes at TLSARL, I am a volunteer. So I chip away at the mountains little by little. Other members help out a lot by sending in their family trees, discussing genealogical problems with Chloe and me, by sending in stories and photos for the quarterly Newsletter, and by sending in news of births, marriages and obituaries.

One of the functions of TLSARL in preserving the history of the Red River Settlers and their descendants, of course, is building and maintaining a genealogical record. Our database now contains over 18,000 individuals – names that have been supplied by members as their families have grown and changed over the last century.