Welcome to Page 1 of Mom's Book
Our Family
Wilson George Hitchings…. Born March 13, 1906
Furners Farm, Near Stroud, Glocestershire, England.
Died April 21, 1987 (81 years Old)
Eleanor Margaret Mills Born July 20, 1917 Edson, Alberta
Married April 10, 1939 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Children
David Stewart Born May 8, 1940 Asquith, Saskatchewan
Arthur Philip Born June 27, 1942 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Evelyn Margaret Born July 26, 1944 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
George William Born July 22, 1950 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
To my Kids & Grandkids, etc. A Bit of Our Life Story….mixed up…a bit fun, and other stuff. With love from Mom, Grandma and Great-Grandma Eleanor (started) 1993.
FAMILY TREE - MILLS
As most of the family tree has been well documented by Cynthia and Bruce Wier, I will not waste too much time on duplicating it. I know very little about the Mills side of the family, but somewhere along the line, I will put in what I do have. So, to get in the dull statistics first:
My Parents: Thomas Wildman Mills Born, December 26, 1874, In the railway station at Callendar, Scotland, along with his twin brother, William. Died November 6, 1959.
Cynthia Laurena Whiteman, Born February 26, 1900 at Neepawa, Manitoba. Died December 9, 1963.
They were married January 19, 1915, at Edson, Alberta.
Eighteen children were born between the years 1915 to 1940. I was the third. I guess I might as well list them all here for the record:
George William born May 25, 1915 Killed in action, September 4, 1944, in Italy. He was a Trooper with the Lord Strathcona Light Horse Regiment. (He was awarded the Victoria Cross Posthumously)
Dorothy Ellen Mabel born August 15, 1916. Died in infancy. I think she lived two weeks.
Eleanor Margaret born July 20, 1917
Edith Jessica born August 1, 1919 Died at age 48 of a ruptured brain aneurysm, leaving 5 children
Kathleen Jean born September 15, 1920
Elizabeth Rose born March 26, 1922
Jessie Laurena Myrtle born March 6, 1924
Thomas David born June 13, 1925, died of cancer at age 48
Robert Stanley born January 2, 1927. He died (SID) at 4 weeks of age.
John Alfred (Jack) born March 13, 1928. Died of cancer at age 63.
Mona Phyllis born February 27, 1929
Ethel Beatrice Mary born April 6, 1931
Rosemary Eileen born August 5, 1932
Henry Donald born January 2, 1934 (don’t remember the exact date) Died shortly after birth.
Wilhemina Joan Agnes born June 9, 1935
Janet Lorraine born December 2, 1936
Patricia Anne born March 14, 1939
Mary Candace born November 5, 1940
I know very little of how Mom and Dad met, but piecing together the bits and pieces, it seems that Dad was boarding with the Whiteman family at Edson, and all I can say is that he was not a nice man. He was 40, she was not quite 15 when they were married, and she was 6 months pregnant.
The Whitemans had moved to Edson in 1910 from Manitoba. I think their plan was to go to Grande Prairie, which was a very rich-landed, wide-open homestead area at the time, and the starting point for the trek to Grande Prairie was Edson. But it took money to make that trip and they didn’t have any. My great-grand parents, James and Lorena Rose, took a homestead about ten miles from Edson, on the Grand Prairie Trail, and opened a stopping place for travelers making the trip to G.P. The distance from Edson was about all the oxen could do in one day.
There was still much of the old trail remaining when I left Edson in 1935, including sections of "corduroy". Corduroy road was built over swampy sections that could not support the weight of wagons, oxcarts, etc. Spruce and pine trees were cut and laid across the trail in successive layers. As they sank into the swamp, more were added, the mud seeped up and still more were added. When it was dry it was a sturdy road. Wet, you could stand on it, jump up and down and almost make it wave, but I am sure you could have driven a semi over it.
I don’t know when the other members of the Whiteman-Rose families left Edson, or even how many of them were there. (Lorne said he was six when they left, so that would be in 1917.) Great Grandpa and Grandma Rose had a large family, but I don’t know of anyone else besides my grandmother who ever lived there. Grandpa’s (Whiteman) brother, Archibald Whiteman, also had a homestead for a little while. I think it must have been a very grim time for my mother, only a child herself, to be left in a wild sort of frontier town with at least two babies, and a middle-aged, bombastic husband, and not a single other relative to talk to, or turn to for help.
My Grandfather was, apparently, a "jack-of-all-trades". In Manitoba, he was a farmer. I suppose it was his intent to go on farming when he started out on the trip to Grande Prairie, but, having run out of money, he turned to carpentry in Edson. He helped to build the first Edson Hotel, among other buildings in Edson. I don’t know if he built the house we lived in, but it’s possible that that is how Dad acquired it. That little house had outside dimensions of 13 by 20 feet. The front room was exactly 9’ by 12’—a congoleum rug fitted without any trimming. The kitchen was 9’ by 9’, the other 3 feet were used for the stairway to the two little bedrooms, one of which was occupied by Dad and Mom, and the last baby or two, and the other by all the rest of the kids. We had two double beds and sometimes slept 4 crosswise. When George was 6 or 7 he was given a cot in the front room downstairs.
One odd thing about our family—we were never, ever, all together at any time in the family history after 1927. George left home when he was 12 and was not back to Edson until he was 19. By that time, I was on my own, and when I did get back, George was gone again, and 2 or 3 of the youngest (or maybe more) were still not born. The first time we were together after Candy was born was for George’s memorial after he was killed, and even then there was one missing. Tom was home on embarkation and compassionate leave, but Jack took off to Edmonton to join up. He was "going to get a few Germans" to avenge George’s death. But he didn’t look quite as old as he thought he did and the army turned him down. He was 15. They told him to come back after he started shaving.
Most of my earliest memories involve disasters—fires, train wrecks, even a suspected murder! Runaway horses, accidental death, and so on. I still have a horror of fires. In the picture I have pasted in the front of this book, you can see a building behind and a bit to the left of our house. That was a home and a bakery. The bakery operation was in the lean-to part of the building. It went up in flames when I was 4 or 5 and that started my fear of fires. The wind must have been blowing from the southeast because smoke, sparks and bits of flying ash were going over and around our house. Dad was at work and Mom had us stamping out sparks and beating at them with wet rags. She was sure we were going to get burned out. The town had only a volunteer fire department which was called out by a big, bonging old bell which sent my insides plummeting down to my toes every time I heard it. And I swear that I sensed it was going to ring sometimes before it started.
Then there were the train wrecks. Edson was a divisional point on the CNR, and there was a big roundhouse where the engines were turned around to go back in the opposite direction, and whatever else roundhouses were used for. Dad worked there, shoveling coal into the furnaces, eight of them in a row, I think, to build up the steam that powered the engines, and after about 1923, provided electricity for the town. That’s not the railway engines, just the motors in the roundhouse. It also provided the steam for the roundhouse whistle, which called the town workers to their jobs. It blew 3 times at the quarter to, twice at 5 minutes to and once on the hour--this at 7 and 8 a.m., 12 noon, and 4 and 5 p.m. The midnight shift had to fend for itself.
Now about the wrecks. Whenever that whistle blew after 5 p.m., the whole town and countryside knew there was a train wreck. Twelve long blasts on that whistle called out the wrecking crews, alerted the hospital, and, of course, every family in town who had anybody out on the line. Nobody slept until it was known how bad it was. At the time Ethel was born (April 1931) was the worst one I ever heard of. The passenger train went off the bridge at the Big Eddy about 8 miles west of Edson, and the town was packed with injured people. There were many deaths—about 12, I think, and the little hospital was jammed. Mom was in at the time. I think Ethel was the first baby she had in the hospital. They sent her home so they could have her bed for a train wreck victim. Most of the wrecks were up the coal branch, trains bringing coal down from the mines, but the mainline had its fair share.
Then the bush fires. Edson at that time was a small town (maybe not so small, about 2,000 people), carved out of the Great Northern Forest. The town was completely surrounded by forest, which had the nasty habit of catching fire every summer. Lightning strikes, careless bonfires, sparks from locomotives, almost anything could produce a big bush fire. The worst one I remember was when I was 8 or 9. George was still at home, so he would have been 10 or 11. The whole town was called out to fight the fires, including boys his age, who were passing buckets of water, helping to dig trenches, and all sorts of other work. Women were making sandwiches, coffee, soup, etc., to feed the firefighters, and the kids were imagining all sorts of horrors. Mine was that George would be burned up and we’d never see him again. Dad was exempted from bush firefighting—he had his own fires to tend to. Then came the day when the Edmonton Journal came to town with a headline 4 inches high declaring: "EDSON THREATENED—TOWN TO BE EVACUATED" in bright red letters. I never saw a red headline before. The front page story said box cars were being lined up in the town yards to carry people out if the fire reached the town. Well, that scared me even more than the fire did, because I knew the boxcars were made of dry wood, and that the rail lines ran through the bush, and that the bush was burning and for sure the cars would burn and we would all be roasted in the cars! I think that must have been when I started biting my fingernails! Well, rain saved the town, and we were not evacuated. But to this day I have not got over my fear of fires.
The suspected murder—a woman disappeared, mother of several children, one of whom was my classmate. She was missing for two weeks, and the speculation was that she had run away because her husband was so mean to her. Her body was found in a community well—people had been using water from it all along, and were complaining about the weird taste. It was one of those wells with a pail on a winched rope to bring up the water. So it was thought there might be a dead animal down there and someone climbed down the crib ladder and found the body. Then the rumors changed. Now the rumors were that he had tossed her in there to get rid of her. There was an inquest and investigation, with no final decision on what did happen.—open verdict. Possibilities were that she had done herself in, or had accidentally fallen in. He was not cleared of suspicion, but since he had been using water from the well for himself and his children, they felt it was highly unlikely that he knew his wife’s body was there.
Well, that’s enough of small town disasters for now. I’ll try to think of some of the good things for a change. Well, maybe not, there’s still the runaway horse and the accidental death to deal with. In those early years, our milk was delivered fresh from the cows, brought into town in large milk cans, and measured into our own containers at the door. The milk lady drove a horse and buggy with the milk cans in the back. She sometimes took George and me up for a ride, usually the length of the back lane. We were told never to touch the reins while she was delivering the mil. But one day George got bold and picked up the reins—the signal for the horse to go, and go he went. I don’t know what George did to scare the horse, but it started running, not fast, but enough to upset one of the milk cans. Sophie Sliva (the name was really Silva, but it got transposed and stayed that way. There are still Slivas in Edson in 1998), the milk lady, came screeching down the lane, the neighbors popped out and joined the chase, all hollering at the horse. I was bawling, even George was scared and kept flapping the lines and yelling for the horse to stop, which naturally scared it more. Well, about a block and a half later, somebody stopped it, both of us were spanked on the spot. I remember how unfair that was, because I had nothing to do with the misbehavior, but I think I got more whacks than George did, and I don’t even know who did the spanking. We never got any more rides and dad never let us forget that he had to pay for the spilt milk.
The accidental death—The Cicarelli family lived next door to us. They were Italian, with a fairly large family, seven I think. The youngest was born about the same time as our Betty. When Freddy was about one year old (that would be when I was nearly six) Mr. Cicarelli decided to dig a well in his own backyard, so they wouldn’t have to depend on the community well. He hit some rock about 20 feet down, and set off some dynamite to break it up. Then he went back down for more digging some hours later, and was overcome by gas fumes, and when Mrs. C went to call him for a meal, he didn’t answer and she started screeching. The neighbors, including our dad, went running, some went down, dad too, and then there were four unconscious men. A guy named Fred Foley who had been in the war (World War 1) came rushing in to our house and yelled for a cloth and some vinegar. Mom supplied a baby diaper and the vinegar which he used to soak the diaper and tied it around his face. Then he went down and tied ropes around the fellows who were hauled up one by one and worked on at the top. The town doc was there by then and a couple of nurses from the hospital. Our dad was the last down and the first up, so he was the least affected, but he was pretty sick for a day or two. The next two took longer to recover, but Frank C, was dead. That left Mrs. C with seven kids and no support. She screamed her way through that whole summer. But she did send to Italy for Frank’s nephew, Giovanni, to come to help. He came and bossed those kids unmercifully for years. I don’t remember if the well was ever finished. This would have been about one year after the bakery fire.
Thinking back now, I wonder why my clearest memories of the disaster-type are from my earliest years. There must have been more of the same later on, but if so, they are gone as memories.
