Family of Stephen and Mary Richmond

[Under development.]

We start here with Mary settling in to her new life with Stephen on their farm at Leross, Saskatchewan, and conclude the chapter with their retirement to Vancouver, British Columbia. Focus is on my father, Leonard, and his four siblings and their early life on the family farm. Leonard and Ethel marry, live on the farm, and my sister and I start our lives here too. I describe some realities of early life on the Prairies including both farm work and social life. Finally, I express tributes to my grandparents as I have come to understand and appreciate them and conclude with a brief note on each of the children of Stephen and Mary Richmond.

Establishing a family in 1912

Stephen and Mary (Coburn) Richmond, were married December 26, 1912, in a rural church east of Ottawa, Ontario. They returned by train to Leross, Saskatchewan, and to the farm already established by Stephen just a mile or so north-west of the village. An account of the earlier life of Stephen can be found here.)

The farm would be home for them, my grandparents, for more than 40 years before their retirement.
Within a year of their marriage their first child was born, and four more filled out their family over the next ten years: our father Leonard (1913), Gwendolyn (1915), Stanley (1916), Harold (1920) and Kenneth (1923).

For my parents, Leonard and Ethel Richmond, the farm was their home for the first six years of their marriage, before our move to the nearby village of Punnichy. I was not yet age four, and my sister Joyce was not yet age two, when we left the farm.

Family records of these early days are sketchy. Unlike many early families that contributed to the a Leross district history book (1984), our family had long since left the community and our story missed being published. I have nevertheless gleaned some family details from this source, and have pieced them together with other notes and photos collected from surviving personal effects of grandparents and our parents.

Mary (Coburn) Richmond

Leonard Stephen Richmond was born October 19, 1913. It was many years before I would understand the significance of the name Leonard, a name also I would later inherit. Grandmother Mary named him, no doubt with fond memories, of her hometown of Leonard ON.

Possibly as early as February, 1914, Mary chose to return to Ontario, taking her new son with her, to visit her family. I first learned of this event when Dad and I visited his Coburn family in the Cumberland area just east of Ottawa in 1999. In the home of Dad’s cousin, Verna (Coburn) Cotton, a lovely studio photo commemorates this event. She and her firstborn appear in the photo with her mother, Esther (Melvin) Coburn, and her brother, William Henry Francis. The formal studio setting suggests it was, indeed, a special occasion. It would be another 40 years before Mary would make a return visit.

In 1999, Dad and I returned to the Coburn family for a visit. I was a second for Dad. He and Mom had motored down east, as we would say, to visit family in Toronto (Denniss sisters), the Ottawa area (Coburns), and eventually, Nova Scotia (Denniss relatives). Within a year of our first visit, Dad would be gone. It was, nevertheless, the start of a lovely family connection that has now continued for more than twenty years.

Much of what our family now knows of Mary’s early life emerged from these late-in-life contacts. Verna Cotton was a noted local historian for her home community. We met all the surviving Coburn cousins, Mildred Esther (Coburn) Wall (b 1916), Francis Weldon Coburn (b 1921), and Verna Mabel (Coburn) Cotton (b 1927). These were the surviving children of Mary’s younger brother, William Henry Coburn. (See links below for more photos and history of this family.)

Sixty years before Grandmother Mary married Stephen, her grandparents, Francis and Mary (Murphy) Coburn, emigrated to Canada from Wexford, Ireland. They acquired farmland south of Leonard in the Cumberland area of Ontario and built there the farmhouse that has continued to be occupied by family for 160 years. Their only child, William Henry Coburn (b 1853) married Esther Melvin (b 1851), but died of small-pox when Mary was a toddler and before her brother, William Henry Francis, was born. Esther, now widowed, moved into the Coburn family home where Mary and her brother were raised with support of her deceased husband’s family.

The Coburn farmhouse, most recently home to Francis and his wife Bertha (Divine) passes today as a modest, well-kept, farm home. We were amazed to learn that it is basically a log house now clad with modern siding. At the time of our visit, we enjoyed tea with this fine couple and confirmed the thickness of the log-constructed walls (most evident in the doorways).

All of this has given us better insight into the early life of Grandmother Mary who took up roles of wife and mother at the Richmond farm at Leross. My sister Joyce and I never really knew her since our grandparents moved to Vancouver when we were very young. Only later did we better understand Mary’s interests and the legacy she left for us as a family.

When cleaning up the family estate we become aware of Grandmother Mary’s interest in visual arts. A number of paintings bore the name of Mary Coburn. Some were clearly practice pieces, possibly done in art classes, but two others were beautifully framed and demonstrate quite good technique. More specific to her life on the farm, Mary arranged to have a Mason & Risch upright piano shipped out from Ontario. Leonard learned to play it reasonably well. He was also instructed in the rudiments of the violin which he continued to enjoy playing throughout his life.

Raised in a relatively prosperous farming community, we learned that Mary had become a teacher. Our mother also made reference to Mary’s skills in millinery (construction of ladies’ hats). Her family had lived a settled life for many years in the Cumberland area, east of Ottawa. As earlier recounted, she may have first met Stephen through a newspaper ad and would have learned more of him through letter-writing. At age 33, she was likely to be a “spinster” or an “old maid” if she could not soon commit to a life as wife and mother. Stephen, a full year older, a land owner, and an elected school trustee, seemed promising enough.

So it was that, following a decade or more of relative independence as a young single school teacher, Mary committed herself to the daily grind of heavy farm work and the birthing, nursing, and nurturing of children. She would be forty-three when she had her last child. Of the five children born to her, two would have learning difficulties and would need parental or institutional care. With the heavy demands of farm life of those times, the lives of both Stephen and Mary were full.

Farm life

As discussed in a previous article, the farm had come with a huge barn but we have only sketchy references to the house that was never included in any family photos. Our mother, Ethel, became part of this family and was known to lament that the Richmond farmhouse was of poor quality.

Many things can be confidently said about life on the Richmond farm. Work at this time was done with horses: heavy draft Clydesdales or Percherons to work the land plus lighter-weight, faster horses for transportation.

Leonard, as oldest son, was clearly a major help to his father. Farm life was labor-intensive and required constant attention to animals, crops, and the numerous tasks of family survival. Animals must be fed both summer and winter; barns cleaned; hay cut, raked, and forked onto wagons, then stored in the hayloft of the barn for animal feed over the long winter months. Horse-drawn implements were used for seeding, summer fallowing, and harvesting. Threshing each fall required additional labor, always done in cooperation with neighbours and often with the addition of hired men from Winnipeg or even from eastern Canada. Wood was the common fuel needed for cooking and heating. It was available nearby in the Touchwood Hills, but needed to be transported by sleighs in the winter, cut, stacked, then split for use.

Most every farm had a blacksmith shop where iron was worked, first by heat generated by a coal fire made exceedingly hot with the help of bellows (manual air blowers). Iron could be fashioned by heating it until red hot and soft, then hammered into shape on an anvil. For years I kept a number of items that had been created this way back on the farm including a set of tin snips, securely rivetted, well-sharpened, and still functional many decades later. Horseshoes would be shaped to match the hooves of horses and nailed into place. A great sandstone wheel, rotated by a peddle mechanism, was used to sharpen cutting blades. This would be just one shop where father would develop his skills and use his creativity even as a child.

In later life, Dad talked positively about the changes in farming over the years. As farms became more mechanized, he was keen to be on the leading edge.

But much work also fell to the women of the house. Feeding pigs and chickens, milking cows, gathering eggs, separating the cream from the milk in the farmhouse (where the cream would be first stored in an exterior underground ice house, before being transported weekly in cream cans by rail to the nearest creamery). Excess milk not needed for family would be fed back to the calves, pigs and kittens each morning and evening. Butter was produced in a churn, shaped, packaged, and stored. Eggs were cleaned, candled (inspected by light in a dark room to confirm quality), and again boxed appropriately for trips to town and shipment to market by rail. Then, of course, there was the gardening to be done, the work of preserving produce (such as potatoes, vegetables, or fruit) as needed for off-season consumption.

My grandmother, in that first decade of family life, was frequently saddled with child care while attending to most all the other family needs and farm tasks. She cooked, sewed, laundered, bathed, and dressed the family. Yes, there were no Pampers in those days. Rather, soiled diapers, as with all laundry, was washed by hand most often with the help of washboard in a tub. Clothes were then hung out to dry on a line behind the house to be followed when necessary by ironing with heavy boat-shaped flat-irons that would be first heated on the wood-fired kitchen stove. And, yes, the ashes from the wood burned in the cookstove were periodically used to make lye soap, an essential part of the laundry routine.

Sunday outings to church or to visit friends demanded that all family members should be neat and cleanly dressed. At such times, her competence as wife and mother would be on public display. As was common then, my grandmother would have the help of a hired girl who would also live in with the family and would receive only minimal cash per month beyond her room and board. (My mother told of receiving only six dollars per month for such work herself during the years of The Depression prior to her marriage in 1939.)

Having many children was not necessarily a plan, but their help on a farm had practical benefits. Each child would have chores to do. It was a good life for learning responsibility since the needs and effects of diligence were easily seen. In many respects, farm life was basically a struggle for survival where food for the table and even the small delights to be enjoyed were the result of good organization and personal discipline.

Chickens, pigs, and steers (neutered male bulls) would be slaughtered, butchered, and their cuts preserved for home use with excess most often shared with neighbors (who often gathered to help with the butchering). Since no mechanical refrigeration existed, meat was preserved by hanging for a time in a smoke house or salted and stored in barrels. Dad also talked of the many beehives that they maintained on the farm, which also involved the harvesting of honey through a fascinating process in the fall. (As a child, one of my earliest memories involved the extraction of honey from beehive frames with a mechanical spinner mounted in a large tin barrel.)

Each farm had an ice house which was both highly important in the absence of mechanical refrigerators, but also a great place for a child to visit. Consisting of a pit dug 4-5 feet down, with a roof just above ground level, it was stocked each winter with ice blocks cut from a local slough, then covered with straw to provide a bit more insulation. A small door, more convenient for access by children than adults, would be at a gable end. The ice provided adequate refrigeration especially for milk and cream and would last through the summer. Of more fun to children, who would run the errands, were the mice that would scurry when the door opened.

Schooling

All five children, including Gwendolyn, appear on the records of the Leross School. My father, Leonard, finished Grade 10. Stanley, the second son, may have done reasonably well in school, but there are indications he left home relatively early. In addition to Gwendolyn’s disability (Down’s syndrome), Harold had significant learning difficulties but was no doubt a good help on the farm. The youngest, Kenneth, was a bright and capable child and may well have completed studies to at least grade 11. (His story deserves fuller treatment and can be accessed in another article. See below.)

Having served a four-year term as trustee when Leross School was first organized (1909), Stephen served another seven years (1924-31) when his own children were in school.

Leonard’s speech impediment

From his earliest years, Leonard suffered from a debilitating stutter. After finishing his tenth grade, arrangements were made for speech therapy in Toronto where he lived for some months, possibly over the winter of 1929/30. With the support perhaps of Owen Sound family connections, he clearly had some interesting experiences. For instance, he told of attending radical political rallies organized by the Communist Party of Canada when Tim Buck was the newly-elected, fiery leader of the party. Years later he never ceased to decry left-wing political views, be they communism or milder forms of socialism.

Attempts to correct his speech impediment, however, were largely unsuccessful and he continued to struggle with the disability throughout his life. Fortunately, he had an outgoing and confident personality that seldom caused him to back away from social engagement.

Community life

Life on farms in these early years was not entirely filled with work. From time to time, social events were organized that brought neighbors together for picnics, dances, and sporting events.

Leonard was of a slim, athletic build and excelled for some years as catcher of the local ball team. For both baseball and hockey, local teams would compete with neighboring towns. Summer sports days were big events, organized after seeding was completed (and often scheduled for July 1, Canada’s National Day). In addition to ball games, horse racing was a highlight. Later in the summer, a local agricultural fair gave opportunity for farm families to compete for prizes with quality grains, livestock, and the domestic skills of cooking, canning, and needlework.

Church attendance was common for most families of these early communities where meetings were often in homes when buildings were not yet established. Methodists were known for their itinerant horse-riding lay teachers who would organize home-based study groups. There are records of a Railway Mission providing some form of pastoral care to communities in the early days. The first Anglican church in Leross was not established until 1930. About this time, the Leggett Family arrived in Leross and, according to their family history, found no organized Sunday School. They set about recruiting staff and named, most specifically, Stephen Richmond as a teacher and his son Leonard as pianist.

Other historical write-ups identify Stephen some years later arranging Sunday School picnics to an “alkali lake” north of Leross. A family photo, annotated by my mother, shows father with a team and wagon providing transportation for the event.
The Richmond home was also known as a place where friends gathered for visiting and sing-songs. It suggests my grandmother might have led the singing around the family piano, maybe also with opportunities for her son Leonard and others to demonstrate their own developing musical abilities.

Other community organizations

A women’s group was organized at one point and we have a photo of Grandmother Mary participating. Her name does not appear, however, as an active member of the group. We can only imagine that family responsibilities, especially the extra care needed for daughter Gwendolyn, prevented her from assuming many outside activities. This would have been the years of the suffragettes (where women lobbied for the right to vote in elections), and the time of the Temperance Movement (when women, again, successfully lobbied for the banning of alcohol because of the devastation that drunkenness of men was having on families and finances)
In addition to Stephen’s service as a school trustee the local history lists him among organizers of the Chautauqua Show events organized in 1921 and later. Long before mass communication provided people with entertainment, these itinerant groups would travel from town to town with one or more big-top tents for shows. Programs commonly provided a mix of lectures, often with a Christian or similar inspirational theme. Good entertainment commonly included music, dance and acrobatics. It was a top social and cultural event for any community lucky enough to be on the circuit. Attendees would come from miles around.

Courtship: Leonard and Ethel

At about age 23, Leonard starting courting Ethel Denniss who was working as a hired girl in the established farming communities of Kutawa and Round Plain, about eight miles or so north and west of Leross. With no family car yet at his disposal, Leonard peddled his bicycle over dirt trails to meet Ethel on Sundays. No doubt they attended together the well-built Stone Church which was constructed in 1888 and is still attractively maintained to the present.

Mother’s connection with the community became quite strong over her time working there. It was in this community where Ethel first came to understand and affirm her Christian faith. Her primary influences were people of the Plymouth Brethren and similar evangelical traditions. (A number of these families later played a significant role in our family as many moved to the village of Punnichy, where Dad and others founded a new church known at the Gospel Chapel.)

As courtship progressed, Leonard chose to build a house for his future wife in the yard of the family farm. In spite of the depression, farming in the Leross community fared better than in many parts of the province. This has been attributed to the higher elevation of the adjacent Touchwood Hills and the resulting higher rainfall. By the time of his marriage at age 25, Leonard had already gained much practical life experience on the farm and now had a house more or less habitable for his new bride.

On July 15, 1939, Leonard and Ethel were married in Regina by a radio preacher affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Ethel moved in as wife and significant farm helper. Having been raised as a farm girl about 50 miles west, near Tate, she had been employed as a hired girl to different families for more than a decade. She now faced the challenge of fitting into the dynamics of another established farm family, this time with her in-laws.

Family adjustments

By the time Ethel married Leonard, she had made up her own mind about many things, including a commitment to Christianity that was significantly more intense and meaningful than that of her birth family. In many respects, her life experiences were also significantly broader than Leonard’s. In diary entries dated more than 18 months prior to their wedding, Ethel was carefully assessing his Christian convictions. It was clear that if she was to have a husband, he needed to be supportive of her commitments.

Not surprisingly, a mother and daughter-in-law can have problems. A “mother’s boy” was now a husband and, theoretically at least, head of a new family. As conflicts arose Leonard proved not to be very adept at resolving them. A daughter-in-law was now assuming roles of past hired girls. Adjustments may not have come easily for either Grandmother Mary or Ethel.

I was born March 11, 1942 at St Joseph’s Hospital in the nearby village of Lestock. The billing issued for services rendered, and the hospital stay of some days, amounted to $6.50. Interestingly, my father arranged to pay off this amount by installments! Joyce was born two years later, May 27, 1944. Within a year the family farm was sold and our family moved to Punnichy. The house father had built came with us, on wheels, to be set down on a new concrete foundation in what would be my hometown through to the end of high school.

Our birthdays were celebrated with invitations to children of neighboring families. Some of these Leross families also moved later to Punnichy and many continued to be important family friends.

We have just a couple photos of Kenneth and me. As the youngest of Dad’s siblings, he clearly took an interest in the new baby of the family. Photos taken of the two of us was during his time of recruitment and not long before his departure to Britain for training with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He never returned.

Dad failed to talk much of his parents or of his early life on the farm. This would have been due in part to his speech impediment but also to the dominance of Mother’s perspective on most family matters. Since we lost physical contact with grandparents with their retirement to Vancouver, much of this early history of the Stephen Richmond family has been pieced together only recently.

Assembling such details has revealed a number of new appreciations of my grandparents. I’ve come to better understand the personal resilience needed to survive in those early times. While life was generally tough for pioneer families, my grandmother had to cope with more stresses than many. Her first disappointments may have been the state of a prairie farm itself, but she also had children with disabilities. In the midst of this she, nevertheless, held onto dreams of providing them with opportunities.

Closing out the farm at Leross

By 1945, my grandparents were ready for a simpler life. Just two years earlier their bright capable youngest son, Kenneth, died in a military training exercise overseas. With his passing, any future hopes of maintaining the farm collapsed. Friends from Leross had moved to Vancouver and my grandparents chose to follow. The climate was reputed to be better for Stephen’s rheumatism. Meanwhile, my own parents were looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Dad initially took employment as a mechanic with Motherwell and Swan in Punnichy, just 20 miles farther west along the CNR. By the spring of 1946, the house built by my father had been moved to its new location in Punnichy. (Of surprise to those living elsewhere, houses built on the the Canadian Prairies, were of wood-frame house construction. Consequently, a house was light enough to be raised, placed on timbers and many wheels, and then towed by truck on the highways to new location.)

The garage business showed considerable promise. Post-war manufacturing was starting to take off, and the purchase of vehicles and farm implement sales were expanding. Within another year, Dad had secured a partner and found the means to purchase equal shares of the garage business. It was known as the Larson and Richmond partnership.

Now settled in Punnichy, our family took the train to Vancouver for Christmas of 1946. We came to celebrate with grandparents, Stephen and Mary (and their grown children, Gwendolyn and Harold). Mother’s younger sister, Kathleen (Denniss), also lived in Vancouver and she had just a few weeks before married a returned WW II service man, Ralph Patmore.

Some of my earliest childhood recollections are of this travel adventure: taking the train through the Rockies, sleeping with my father in a top berth, getting drinks from a water cooler supplied from time to time by ice blocks brought into the carriage at major stops. I do have some memories of my grandparent’s Vancouver home, but much clearer memories of taking steps with my father on the famous Capilano Suspension (swinging) Bridge.

This visit, when I was only age four was the last time I would see my paternal grandparents face to face. My sister and I were the only Richmond grandchildren at that time and, as events unfolded, we would be the only Richmond children of the next generation.

Retirement years in Vancouver

My grandparents lived for many years in a large house on 12th Avenue, just a few blocks east from Vancouver City Hall.

The transition into retirement did have potential for meaningful contacts with my grandfather Stephen. Unfortunately, as a child I failed to adequately appreciate his attempts to keep in touch.

I never did get any personal mail or greeting cards from my grandmother. She was no doubt preoccupied with her continuing role as wife and mother. Two grown children were continuing dependents and lived with them for most of those retirement years.

But Grandfather would send me cards, letters, some small paintings he had done and poems he had written. I had also been named after both him and my father, of course, with “the family tree” firmly planted on my birth certificate: Leonard Ronald Stephen Richmond.

Much later, the family moved to a smaller house on East 23rd Avenue. This would would have occurred about the time Gwendolyn was placed into a group home suitable for her disability. She had been in her mother’s care for 38 years and, as it turned out, she would live for another 48 in group-home settings. Father had made a couple trips out to see his parents in the early 50s and no doubt helped with this move. Harold, meanwhile, continued to live at home with his parents.

By the summer of 1954, now free for the first time from providing daily care for Gwendolyn, Mary took the train back home to see her brother and family in Ontario. We have only a grainy photo of her and her brother from that visit, passed on to us from the Coburn family only in recent years.

Less than two years after this trip, Grandmother Mary passed away on February 14, 1956. She was buried in the beautiful Forest Lawn Cemetery in Burnaby, later to be joined by both Stephen and their daughter Gwendolyn.

My grandfather, now widowed, continued to fill his days by writing poetry, doing some simple oil paintings, and keeping in touch with family and friends. One letter I received in my final year of high school describes his days filled with matters that were mostly of interest to my parents, but it was addressed to me. He makes mention of families that came originally from the Leross farm district and his continuing contacts with the Patmore family. (I’ve assembled a file of his poetry, some photos and other related family documents of these years. See links below.)

Dad, as oldest of the family, made trips periodically to Vancouver and attended to their estates at the time of their passing. Later, both Dad and Mother would also make trips out to the coast, as we called it, to visit Harold and Gwendolyn.

Gwendolyn was a happy person in spite of her mental handicap. She, and another member of the group home, sensed it was proper and meaningful to attend church which they faithfully did year after year. Mom and Dad kept in close touch with the staff of the group home and many cards, letters, and photos were exchanged over the years. Years later, when I was in Vancouver more frequently than my parents, I accompanied Gwendolyn and her good friend to the the local community church one Sunday in White Rock. Following the service, I met the pastor and a number of other friends who stopped to greet her. It was quite beautiful to see how the church had accommodated these handicapped people into their church fellowship over the years.

More of Grandmother Mary

Years later when attending to the estates of Harold and Gwendolyn, I started to become more aware of how my grandmother had managed family affairs. In her will, she had bequeathed the family home to her son, Harold, thus assuring him of housing after her own passing. Yes, this meant that the title to their Vancouver residence had been in her name, and her widowed husband would now be living in the home of their son.

But there was more. In the final years of my own father’s life, I learned that it was his mother who had financed Dad’s entry into the Punnichy business. The money was a loan, and my father systematically repaid his mother over those early years as the business prospered. She was no doubt risking their retirement money on this business venture, and it may indicate why my father worked long hours, often into late evenings, to ensure that the business succeeded. How it was, exactly, that this was my grandmother’s money and not my grandfather’s we will never know. Was it money from Ontario? That was highly unlikely since Mary was raised from infancy by a widowed mother and her mother’s brother had his own family to care for. Perhaps she simply declared, as an early suffragette feminist, that she would manage farm finances better than her husband—maybe as payback, too, for seducing her out to farm life on the harsh prairies.

However it was, I recognize now that my father’s chance to be a small-town businessman was due in large part to the tenacity of Grandmother Mary. In turn, much of my life also unfolded as it did because of the economic stability of my father’s career. Mary Richmond may not have fully understood what life would bring her when she married Stephen in 1912. Of the five children she brought into the world, only my father had a stable marriage and only the two of us, my sister and me, were to be her grandchildren.

More on Grandfather Stephen

Grandfather Stephen, had a rather different style. When I was still only five, he wrote me a letter, all printed-out in block letters, with the apparent expectation that I might be able to read it. Year after year he would send me birthday and Christmas greetings, often accompanied by some small piece of artwork, poetry, or as I got older, some money. I remember his handwriting to be impeccable, something that my father attempted to emulate.

Reflecting on the loss of Kenneth he wrote a poem that captured much of his personal feelings. He also once wrote another, simply titled, Life. We printed and distributed it at the time of my father’s funeral a generation later. Copies of some of these poems and memorabilia can be found by following the links below.

Stephen Richmond passed away on October 23, 1962. I was 20 at the time, and busy in my first teaching job. It was my father, only, that was free to make the trip out to Vancouver for the funeral. It would be in 1967 when I would first visit the lovely grave site at the Forest Lawn Cemetery in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.

Children of Stephen and Mary Richmond

To summarize, Leonard Stephen Richmond was born October 19, 1913, on the farm near Leross, Saskatchewan. He married Ethel Denniss (b 1910 08 12) on July 15, 1939 and they moved to the nearby town of Punnichy (1945). After 25 years in business, Mom and Dad moved to Kipling SK where Dad assumed management responsibilities for the Beke family farm (family of my sister’s husband). Our parents are buried in the Kipling Cemetery just a mile or so south of Kipling. More details of the life of our family, including Dad and Mom will follow in another article.

Gwendolyn Esther Richmond was born February 19, 1916. She suffered from Down’s syndrome and was in the care of her parents until maybe 1953 at which time she was placed in a group home. On the final passing of her parents she became a ward of the British Columbia Public Trustee. She passed away on March 3, 2002 in her 87th year, outliving all of her siblings, and was buried in space reserved for her in the cemetery plot of her parents.

Stanley Douglas Richmond was born October 16, 1916. By the late 40s, Stanley was working in the oil fields of Alberta and for many years was an operator of heavy equipment. He married Mazie (maiden name unknown) and they adopted a daughter, Heather. Our family visited Stanley and Mazie on one occasion when they were living in Drayton Valley. Later divorced, Stanley lived and worked for a time in Osoyoos, BC. He lived his final years in Victoria in Victoria Park Manor, a senior’s residence next to First Baptist Church in Victoria BC. He died August 27, 1991 in his 75th year.

Harold Coburn Richmond was born February 27, 1920. Harold Coburn Richmond was born February 27, 1920. Harold suffered from some mental impairment and always lived with his parents for most of their retirement years in Vancouver. For a time, Harold worked in a furniture factory. His mother, in her will, ensured that he would inherit the family home which provided a measure of security for him for the rest of his life. Our family kept in contact over the years. At age 74 he chose to sell his home and move into a Salvation Army assisted living home for men. A neighbour of Harold called me in Regina one day to explain about the For Sale sign. Later, after the sale, the same neighbour chose to go through the house to collect photos and momentoes on our behalf before the bulldozer destroyed the house. It is for the kindness of this neighbour that many the photos and paintings from my grandparents are in our possession today. In July of 1995, our family motored out to Vancouver to visit family. On arrival in Vancouver, I learned that Harold had just been hospitalized the day before for a heart attack. I spent time with him that evening, prayed with him, and was clearly so pleased I was with him. He passed away that night, July 20, 1995, in his 76th year.

Kenneth Lyle Richmond was born April 16, 1923. He attended school in Leross and appears as a senior student in a school photo dated 1940 (age 17). There are many reasons to believe Kenneth was a very capable young man with a promising future. Like so many others, he enlisted, went overseas and did not return. His Canadian Air Force death certificate names a young woman, D. Stevenson, as his fiancée. He is buried in a beautiful cemetery in a small church yard in Stratford-on-Avon. I’ve created a separate file of photos, documents, and information about Kenneth. (See links below.)

 
First published: 2020/09/11
Latest revision: 2020/12/08