Born Margaret Cummings, our mother married William Grover Henderson to live at Groveton on the farm and raise six children there. Below are pictures of her brothers and sisters, all born on the Ventnor road on a farm backing on the farm where she lived all her married life.
Hats 1918
Seated is our mother, Margaret Henderson at age 28.
Fiftieth Anniversary
The Groveton community organized a fiftieth wedding anniversary party for my parents. It was held in the school house and everybody came.
Two presents stand out: the vacuum cleaner, which we likely did not have, and the ash tray sporting a twin-engined airplane. This ash tray stand was very popular at that time, and I recall it in the living room for many years afterwards.
Inside
One of the very few indoor pictures that I can find shows our mother and father posing in front of the Marconi radio with the electric radio on top. This was obviously taken after the house was wired and someone had a flash camera.
Other farmers will recognize the farmer’s tan on my father –white forehead with the rest burned. This only comes from long hours in the sun wearing a cap.
Newton Henderson
My sister Madeline Knox is shown on a visit to the cemetery in France where Uncle Newt is buried.The gravestone reads
639624 Private N. Henderson
21st Bn. Canadian Inf.
2nd April 1918
My Uncle Newton was born on August 31, 1896 --dead at 19.
The Cummings Family
My mother was born Margaret Blanche Cummings in Ventnor in 1890. Her parents, George and Eleanor (maiden name Gray) had 8 children.Although I have very little information about them apart from what I remember, I have a picture with all of them in it. This photo was taken in our front yard at the farm on some occasion where everyone is dressed as for church. They are all there and no one else, so the photo was and is special.
In the back row from left to right are Charlie, my mother, Neil, Etta, Sarah, and Ralph with Bell and ? seated.
My sister Dorothy tells me that there was another member of the family, Jerry, who was killed in an accident at age 22. He worked on the railway and was scalded by steam.
All members of this family were born in the farm house on the Ventnor Road. While I was growing up, Charlie was living in the family home with his own family. I remember going out for the cows in the summer and finding them in the pasture at the extreme end of the farm. By looking over the fence, I could see the Cummings house where my mother was born. She was married from there and moved a little more than a mile to live her married life in Groveton. It is remarkable how both my parents were born, lived, loved and died within a ten mile radius.
The other members of the Cummings family also lived quite close to us. I recall visiting them with my mother. Aunt Bell was very strict with little boys. I remember sitting on a straight chair inside the front door with the Eatons’ catalogue to look at. In spite of that experience, I recall my aunts and uncles as warm and inviting.
How did they find each other when they were young? Improbably, my father met my mother at a meeting of The Union Literary Club, which was held at the Island School house on Dukelow Road. I wonder what happened at this Literary Club. Likely the literary part involved the reading of novels, but it also lead to the union of my parents and very likely to other unions as well.
One of the reasons for telling the story of the Hendersons and the Cummings is that, although I knew all of my aunts and uncles and therefore my cousins as well, my own children do not know members of their extended family. All of my aunts and uncles lived within a 10 mile radius, except for Uncle Joe in Syracuse and an Aunt in Vancouver, so we saw them at church and on many other occasions. That is not the case now. I hope my children and theirs will read this account with interest and, if it is long enough, learn about their relatives both past and present.
One of the customs in the rural community that I grew up in was to visit on Sunday afternoons. We had regular visitors who arrived by car to exchange the local gossip and then move on. These were strictly drop in visits with no formal invitations and, as I recall, no food or drink offered, although I am sure there were huge pots of tea around.
It was a closed community in many ways, without the benefit of television and daily newspapers to bring us the "bad" news from all over the world. There was lots of bad news from close around, of course, to keep everyone interested, but a good deal of the chat was of the good-natured sort: weather, crops, the price of eggs.
It was a warm community of people who knew each other well, where everyone had come from, a rooted place. Many young people actually stayed to work on the farm or get a job in the glove factory in Prescott or in a local business. My brothers and sisters left. There were opportunities in the cities and they took them.
But they always came back to visit until there was no family home to come back to. The Cummings family and the Henderson family were combined by our parents. They live on in us.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Uncle Joe
My father was born in 1887 on a farm on Buckwheat Row to Adam and Rebecca Henderson. He had six brothers and sisters: Joe, Newton, Wilfred, Eliza, Abigail and George.
Newton, or Newt as he was called, was born in 1896. In 1916, at the age of 19 he joined the army. Within the year he was killed in action in Europe. His attestation papers say that he was a farmer and had blue eyes and red hair.
Newt was not the only loss the family suffered. At the age of 26, Wilfrid died of TB. I do not have information about the others, except for Joe.
Of all my father’s siblings, I remember Uncle Joe best. Joseph Byron Henderson was born in Groveton in 1881. At 17, he moved to Syracuse and lived there the rest of his life.
What I recall most about Uncle Joe was his arrival in a big black sedan with his wife Daisy with a big bag of oranges from Florida on the back seat. At a time when there was very little money around, and certainly no oranges except at Christmas, he always seemed to have cash in his pockets for treats. Since he didn’t have any children, he was very generous to me and I am sure to my sisters and brothers. We loved to see him roar into the yard and we ran to see what he had brought this time. The picture on the right shows Aunt Daisy with Dorothy.
I remember driving back from the candy store in Spencerville with him and he showed me how to cut corners on the highway to "straighten out the road." He came quite often, always in the summer time, because he wintered in Miami.
I always imagined that he had a great job that allowed him to own a big car and sport a well-dressed wife. Later I found out that he worked as a bar tender in Syracuse in the summer and at the same job in Miami in the winter.
I think we all loved Uncle Joe best, because of his generosity and his spirit, and because there was a touch of romanticism attached to his life style. He picked up the American accent so that he pronounced "roof" to rhyme with "hoof". We laughed at that. He used to talk about the great American heroes such as Joe Louis and Babe Ruth. "He was a great guy!" he would say.
I wonder why he was called Byron. I don’t suppose he read poetry, but possibly just carrying around the name gave him style and pizzazz.
He was a great guy.
