In July, Carol Ewing arrived in Ottawa, three years after her last trip, to visit her daughter Cyn, Cec, Linda, and meet her grandson for the first time. But hers was not the only visit. Cec got his camera out to record the meeting of the in-laws: his Aunt Lily came up from Toronto- she hadn’t seen them since Linda was 6 weeks old- and Cec’s sister Merle and her husband Dix came from Port Arthur, and they met Carol and the children for the first time. As they were all lovely people, they got on well!
Lea, Cec’s second sister, had been staying with Merle and Dix with her son because of her health, but has returned to her husband Wendell who was working in Ottawa. So in these family photographs the only one missing is Cec, who is behind the camera.
Both Merle and Dix had university degrees, but at some point decided to get teacher’s qualifications by going to Teacher’s College in the summer in Toronto for a couple of summers. I assume their three sons went to their grandparents in Saskatoon while their parents took courses. We would meet those cousins a few years later. Meanwhile, Cyn took the camera.
A Family History in Letters 
I am often haunted by photographs such as those you have included here of the family- people I can never know, frozen in a moment of time rather long ago… its funny how one can’t help but look at their faces and wonder who they were, what they were like. I guess the imagination is far different to any reality, but its quite a bewitching thing in its own way.
Thankyou for your series of posts, I find them endlessly fascinating. Often the letters offer me glimpses of another world and people and places I will never know, and are really quite absorbing.
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