I grew up knowing my maternal great-grandparents were Canadian. And like a lot of Americans, my family had a history of physical movement and family problems resulting in quite a dysfunctional path to get to me. My maternal grandmother didn’t share a lot of stories, but the thing that really stuck out in her storytelling was that fact her mother had put her in an orphanage twice when she was a young child. It was something that never made much sense to me, and I never knew my grandmother’s two older brothers who might have shed some light on matter. I have a brief history of what my great grandfather did for work, but I don’t know if where he and my great grandmother got married in Canada had little in the way of work opportunities that resulted in their move to the United States or if other issues were a factor. Given the fact my grandmother was born in 1935, it is easy to surmise my great-grandmother might have, if she had been a woman in another era, opted for an abortion rather than bring another child into this world she didn’t want or let that child be adopted by another family. We will never know. I don’t have any of her documents that might provide some clues. From what has been shared, my great-grandfather was the one who protected my grandmother. Her brief life with the Catholic nuns at the orphanage who greatly shaped her faith was interrupted by a man whose duties as a father brought her back under his household.
My grandmother shared parts of life from her teenage years onward also in limited fashion. She married young, bearing her first child when she was sixteen. The details of how long the marriage lasted either lost to time or never shared, but she relayed to us that she had discovered he was already legally married to someone else. Yet another story of disappointment for her to bear. If my memory serves me correctly, her first two sons were born of this marriage. Her second marriage–if the brief tidbits of info I found online are accurate–began when she was eighteen and it lasted until my maternal grandfather passed away in 1992 when my grandmother was 57. My grandma and grandpa added four more kids to their family before his passing. (Sadly, most of their kids have since passed: my uncle Roger died first at 17 due to alcohol poisoning before he could serve in the U.S. Navy; my mom died at 34 from lung cancer when I was in high school; my uncle Paul, a Vietnam Veteran, died in 2011 at 60 years of age; my uncle Dennis was 68 years old when passed away from a short battle with stomach cancer in 2023; my uncle Michael passed unexpectedly in 2024 at 62 although we are all fairly certain the heart failure he experienced was directly related to continuing to cope with the death of his wife, Judy, who passed less than a year prior. It is a big weight to bear for my surviving aunt to not have her parents or siblings and her own spouse, my Uncle Duke, passed away 22 years ago. We do what we can to bring joy into her life, but the relationship with her kids, grandkids, and nieces like me is not of the same depth as the relationships she lost.)
For anyone wondering where these thoughts were going, I want to reiterate how much my family did not leave behind good records for me to trace our history. I don’t know that any of us ever thought much of genealogy and what it might mean to us or our descendants. So, and not feeling sorry for myself here, I’d have to say the short version of my family history is it’s full of a few broken branches (two marriages each for my grandmother and mother), young entries into motherhood (true of my great-grandmother who had her first kid at 21, my grandma at 16, and my mother a few months shy of her 18th birthday), and early deaths: factors that all complicate my quest to understand where I come from. We’ve just been people living life while we can, and none of us likely ever anticipated that Canada would pass Bill C-3 expanding citizenship by descent past the first generation. I missed this in the news last year as I struggled to keep up with all the crap going on in the United States and abroad related to Trump’s unfortunate second round as President.
Now, I am being realistic with myself. I have limited time right now to do my research and when my schedule opens up as we near summer, I may still struggle to unpack my family’s history. The other part of this process is considering the financial costs associated with records requests; I am in a better financial situation than others who may want to get proof of their Canadian citizenship. My quest to tackle this process for my family history is not time sensitive. While I will fly through Canada later this year for a trip abroad, I don’t consider that a proper visit to Canada. (I’ve wanted to visit Nova Scotia after reading a book in late elementary school/early middle school that included it as a setting.)
I do want to be clear this option is not to escape the United States as other Americans are considering now. For me, this is about something that I feel would make my grandmother happy. Ultimately, our family deserves to have a better collection of family birth records. If, in this process, we secure everything we need for my daughter and I to have Canadian citizenship certificates, we’ll have a new chapter in our family history and who knows what the future might hold because of it. (Note: My husband isn’t eligible unless he’s got some Canadian history on either side of his family we don’t know about it.)
~Cheryl
She Wears Dogtags 