Y Cyntaf:  the first

        Only in fiction does a story have a beginning, middle and end.  In real life every story is ongoing, the present being a sum of all the little incidents that led to that moment...and the future flows from there. I had to pick a point where to start my story and I decided that I would try to follow the tale from when our predecessors stepped off the boat.

    While I theoretically could cover any number of families from both the maternal and the paternal side,  I decided to just go with what I knew and what I could find on my paternal side.  It's not that mother's family is any less interesting; it's that her family history in North America goes back to before the American Revolutionary War and that would cover a lot of typing.  I just don't type that fast, nor am I creative enough to fill in all the big blanks in that tale.

    On the paternal side, we really only have three families of note: the Ramseys, the Flemings and the Thomas clan. Not being the most gregarious bunch, we have managed to misplace pretty much all of our extended family, so the track is quite simple. Many of the threads are broken now and most of the stories have been lost.  I will probably expand the stories I know a wee bit farther because nobody likes reading boring cow-fodder.

    Some of my siblings and cousins may know better than I, but they are not writing this, so I get to paint the picture I want.  I hope it's worthwhile.

The Ramsays of Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

    A little way north and east of Edinburgh is the small city of Aberdeen, a coastal port in what is probably still considered "the lowlands" of Scotland.  A wee bit north and west of that port city lays Fyvie Castle and the village of Fyvie.  From one record, William Marr Ramsay was born in Fyvie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland in 1872.  It's a good bet that the Ramsay family roots are anchored at Fyvie, Scotland.  (That name will recur later).

On the edge of the Highlands, but still Lowlands.
I'm not sure if they preferred Gaelic or Scots.  But they probably liked
Scotch.

Fyve Caste, just north of Fyvie Village

    The Ramsay family was quite a large one: it looks to me like four brothers and two sisters emigrated to Toronto Canada as a group, leaving behind their parents and one sister Barbara for unknown reasons.    I really have no idea when this happened, but sometime in the late 1880's would be a good bet. 

Doing some mental arithmetic, even if the emigration had been as late as 1888/ 89, that would put the eldest son, James, born in 1866 at the tender age of 22 when the family of 6 landed in Toronto.  His brother, William would have been 16 or possibly 17.

    The family leaders appeared to be William Marr Ramsay and James Ramsay.  From a letter written by Evelyn Ramsay dated 1979, it appears that William Ramsay was the instigator of the emigration.  I have no idea how a boy of 16 or 17 managed to convince the majority of his family to up and move to the colonies, but he must have been a person of iron will and stout heart to do so.

    Even if the dates are all wrong and the children were slightly older than their teens and twenties, the sheer audacity, ambition and bravery it would take to undertake that sort of upheaval makes pretty much anything us modern weaklings attempt laughable.

    Upon arrival in Toronto, through some untold means, James Ramsay managed to arrange a marriage for his young sister Nellie (Eleanor? Ellen? Helen?  or maybe just Nellie) to the second character in our tale, one James Orr Fleming, a good Scotsman from "the Clyde" with some training in naval architecture (ship building).  There is no record of how the marriage was arranged or if Nellie had much say in the matter.  

We'll circle back to James Orr Fleming and Nellie later.

    At some point, the intrepid boys James and William dragged the family out to Vancouver, the developing port on the west coast of Canada.  Evelyn's letter was short on details, so, again, dates are scant but it had to be sometime prior to 1891, because records have him opening a biscuit factory in Victoria (or Vancouver?) in 1891.

The factory thrived.

The warehouse got heritage protecton, then
 did a Jon Mtchell and was torn down.

    Biscuits you say?  What the hell?  Well, remember this was British Columbia during the Victorian age; High Tea was all the rage and cultured people had to have tea biscuits for High Tea.  A person, if they take leave of their senses and really want to empty their wallet, can still partake of "high tea" at the venerable old Empress Hotel in Victoria.  (Take a bus or a taxi; parking downtown amounts to a down-payment on a small house in the suburbs).   

    Either way, the entire family had a stake in the firm. George, one of the younger brothers did his own "start up" in Montreal and managed to thrive, but sold the business after only two years to meet the rest of the clan out in Vancouver.   It's a possibility that George had run out of bars to be ejected from; rumor has it that he rather enjoyed the dead man's hand: drinking, loose women and good cigars.  Mance, the youngest of the boys filled out the pack by....being relegated to the factory furnace room and living and dying as a lone wolf in some unknown bachelor pad downtown.

    Mary, the other sister, was eventually married off to an accountant by the name of Bruce Milne. Hers was a tragic story; married late in life, had one child and was rendered bedridden for the remainder of her short life due to the hard birth.  

    Bruce Milne, the husband, was an accountant.  He eventually was implicated in a scandal involving the accounts of the Sylvia Hotel down on the waterfront.  He was cleared, but there was some suggestion that the investigation had been very limited in scope.  

    George, the son, was known as a gifted but difficult child.  As an adult he was a locally renowned bowler and could play some outstanding piano jazz.  George was last seen by the two younger Fleming boys, Bryce and Ormond, in a bar down at the old Georgia hotel: a tall, handsome, sharply dressed man who dominated the room.  Unfortunately, tragedy seemed to follow that branch of the family and George ended his life a raging and possibly violent alcoholic permanently institutionalized.

    The real mover and shaker of the family was James Ramsay.  A person can actually "google" James Ramsay and, after skipping over the MLB player and focusing on Vancouver BC, you can find a short biography and even locate his grave.  Besides establishing a thriving biscuit company, he served as a Vancouver alderman, a member of the School board, a board-member of the VGH and as a MLA over in Victoria.  Back in his day, this all amounted to being "connected" and, no doubt, helped his business thrive.

    The Ramsay Biscuit Company had some very good years; James managed to afford a mansion down on west 59th.  He named it, (drum roll and trumpet flourish), "Fyvie", after his old home town back in Scotland.  (I told you that name would come up again). My own uncle Ormond  fondly remembered visiting the family estate and the large sampler box of treats from the Ramsay biscuit company gifted every Christmas.

The interior of the protected warehouse right before they 
stripped her for parts.  Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.

A not so famous veterinarian one has been frequently heard to say that there is no such thing as a bad cookie.

No such thing as a bad cookie.

    The Ramsay biscuit company is not around anymore, but the Ramsay warehouse in downtown Vancouver stood for decades after, eventually being declared a heritage site. And then, having being designated as such, it was demolished to make way for more roads.  There is something a little ironic there; like the old man who wins the lottery and dies the very next day.

    Fyvie is gone, the warehouse is gone and the factory is gone.  The glory days of English High Tea are not coming back and Starbucks doesn't do cookies very well (I know ALL their cookies intimately). I would bet that there are still quite a few Ramsay descendants around; the first generation appeared to be a prolific bunch.  Unfortunately, when I am looking at the Fleming family tree, the leaves are a bit sparse these days. 

I would guess that us modern descendants are planning on living forever and thus see no point in reproducing.  Why bother breeding when you are immortal? 

James Orr Fleming, from "the Clyde"

    When I first started looking at my great-grandfather, I thought I had uncovered a scandal over a hundred years in the making: the only James Orr Fleming I could find was married  to the renowned Harvard astronomer Wilhelmina Fleming;  he had abandoned his pregnant wife in 1888.  His abandonment was the trigger that launched Ms. Fleming into her profession and later fame.  I could just see it: abandoned a wife in Boston, made a run for the border and married illegally in Toronto in 1890/ 91.  

    Then I came across a note to the effect that OUR James Orr Fleming was originally from "the Clyde" and was likely born in 1866.  That would have ruled him out as the runaway groom of Wilhelmina Fleming, since that James Orr was an older man originally from Dundee, a port city south of Aberdeen and right on the Scots-English border.

No scandal for me.  Damn.

East of Glasgow, and a river runs through it.

    In the end, the sum total of information we really have on our James Orr Fleming is that he was a naval architect from the area of the Firth of Clyde, just east of Glasgow.  James Orr Fleming basically came from the very heart of the territory traditionally controlled by the Clan Fleming;  Lanarkshire.

    Having had a couple of friends who originated from Glasgow, I have no doubt that my great grandfather had a Scottish accent so thick you could cut it with a knife.  When my old friend Douglas was excited about something, you were lucky to catch half of what he said.  Luckily  the context was often obvious since he was usually gesturing toward some amazing carpentry project he had completed.

    The Fleming clan has some interesting high points.  Perhaps the origin of our clan motto is the most interesting if you find dark and sinister to be exhilarating. 

    

     The motto goes "Let the Deed Shaw.  Most sources translate to mean "deeds speak louder than words".  And I would suggest that my own father Kelvin Orr Fleming was exemplary of that statement; dad was always short of words and long on action (and manual labor was his favored form of punishment versus lectures; I split and stacked lots of firewood...after digging more than a few holes and trenches for any number of gardening projects).

History has it that Robert Fleming, a minor noble, was allied with the pretender to the Scottish throne,  Robert the Bruce (despite having signed the Ragman Rolls in loyalty to Edward the Second,  "Longshanks",  of England).  Ether way, Robert the Bruce was in conflict with one John Comyn, another pretender to the throne and probably a distant cousin.

    The Bruce chased John Comyn and cornered him at Greyfriars Kirk (church) near Dumfries.  He perforated him with a sword and suddenly he had a clean shot at the throne,

    At this point, the blood spreading across the church floor, his faithful side kick Robert Fleming cut off the head of the freshly deceased Comyn and held it up as proof of their actions.

As he held aloft the gory ball, he said "Let the Deed Shaw" and thus the legendary motto was coined.

I guess we can all hope that what he meant was "deeds speak louder than words",  but being a cynical git, I believe, as his boots soaked up the pooling blood, having just desecrated a church and killed another noble, Robert Fleming more likely meant "Look at the shit we just did. We are deep into it now...."

Of all the majestic animals in the world, the Flemings went 
with a goat.  Have you ever actually smelled a Billy goat? 

We really don't have a lot of information on James Orr Fleming;  a few scant photos and a few anecdotes based on vague memories by elderly family members.  We do know that James Orr had a great mustache, if that is important to anyone.

    From a letter written by Eleanor Ramsay, James Orr was remembered as a quiet, gentle man that treated most everyone fairly and doted on his sons.  From photos of the day, James was on the spare side in every way: likely less than 5'5" and I would be surprised if he broke 150 pounds wet.  He did have a lovely mustache; hence my suspicion for years that he was a Godfather of the Scottish Mob in Vancouver.  

    Yeah, no. 

     I don't even know if there is such thing as a Scottish Mob anywhere.  I just picture thugs in kilts, threatening random grannies with their sgian dubh (small knife hidden in their wooly socks)

    The overall impression that James Orr left with Eleanor was that he was a quiet but exceedingly lazy man who preferred to hold court in his favorite rocking chair or at the head of the dining table.  He would smoke a pipe pretty much continually, surrounding himself in a tobacco haze for most of the day.  James also had a great love of cats.

    The net result is that the house always smelled a wee bit of old tobacco and cat pee, despite Nellie's best efforts at keeping the house spotless.

    Nellie, nee Ramsay, was a small, shy woman who was rarely ever seen outside the home.  By all accounts both of the Ramsay sisters (Nellie and Mary) were illiterate on arrival from Scotland, and there is nothing to suggest that Nellie ever learned anything beyond the basics of her own name.  The only time anyone remembers seeing Nellie out in public was when her son James shipped out to WWI in 1914. It was said that Nellie ran weeping alongside the streetcar as James left for basic training.

    I basically have nothing else on these two except for a few photos.

    

  

    I'll have to come back to these photos later, because that's all we have on James Orr and Nellie.

NAMES

    There was a thread to many of the names.  I'm not completely sure if there really is a custom of making the mother's maiden name into the middle name of the male  children, but it certainly seems to be the fact.

    An example would be William Marr Ramsay: I found one record that mentioned his mother was from clan Marr.

   I would suggest that James Orr Fleming had a mother that was from Clan Orr.   Orr is an extremely common last name for Scotsmen to this day.

  Of course, both of the offspring of James Orr bore the middle name Ramsay, in honor of their mother Nellie.  James Ramsay Fleming and William Ramsay Fleming certainly fit the tradition.

My grandfather skipped that tradition,  skipping back one generation to pass on the Orr moniker to my own father Kelvin Orr Fleming.  (to this day I still find myself quietly whispering to my self  "or what")  On the other hand, my own father returned to that tradition by naming my eldest brother Craig William Fleming.  My mother was a Williams of Nova Scotia.

    I personally did not rank any tradition and managed to score "Ian" as my middle name.  Either my mother had a James Bond fetish, or they just thought the school yard chants of "BIF BIF biffy. would toughen me in.  The James Bond fetish is a hard pill to swallow, but you need to look at other weird things: Ian Fleming authored all the Bond books. Ivar Bryce was his best friend and Dana Broccoli produced nearly all the early Bond movies.  Right there we have managed to cover three out of four of the male siblings without leaving James Bonds' side.

THE THOMAS FAMILY OF TREHERBERT, WALES

    

Well that pretty much covers this section if you want to skip reading it.

    

    I can't say that I recognized my family's Welsh nature until, well, now that I am old and seeing the sun go down. As far as our origins, I always assumed Scottish but in retrospect, my family was a lot closer to the Thomas family from Wales than anyone else.  From that list above, I personally knew three of the people on that  list when they were alive: Ivor, Gwendolyn and Olive (my grandmother).  That gives the history a deep sense of reality.

    And, seriously, one Christmas holiday at our house and I can guarantee a person that they will have survived a true "Dickens" Christmas or, more likely, a reality show based on Dylan Thomas' book "A Childs Christmas in Wales".  We had it all; it was no bloody wonder all of the family entered January ten pounds and two sizes heavier.

    Preparations for Christmas started as early as September.  Christmas pudding (have not eaten it since I left home), Christmas fruit cake (could be used as a self-defense weapon or a door stop), Cherry Pound Cake, Shortbread by the kilogram, great rounds of Aged cheddar and the obligatory bowls of nuts at every turn.  Our basement pantry was a virtual cornucopia of gluttony.

    We always had a real Christmas tree, but truthfully, the greater majority of our trees would have disappointed Charlie Brown.  Unfortunately, I was the last of my siblings who really appreciated Christmas trees, so once I reached 11 or 12 I was always detailed to go find "the tree".  Dad, never one to skip a chance for manual labor from his youngest son, usually had me shinny up one of the pine trees on the property and top it. We had a line of scrubby looking pines along the top of the acreage in Vernon;  I managed to butcher about half of them before I aged out of family Christmas.

    Luckily we never really threw any Christmas ornaments away, so we had boxes and boxes of garlands, glass bobbles and holiday adjacent paraphernalia, so I could always managed to bury the spindly tree-top in shiny distractions; the holes filled nicely with several handfuls of  cheap tinsel.

    And then there was the turkey.

    To this day I really don't care for turkey.  I go for ham most holidays and that has saved me from food poisoning at least once. It should be needless to say that if the power goes out for two hours half way through cooking the turkey....eat the ham instead.

    Either way, darling Dad always had to have the biggest turkey he could find.  I'm pretty sure that Ostriches were nervous at Christmas if they knew my Dad was looking for Christmas dinner.  I know for a fact that there were times that the Christmas turkey HAD to be cooked on the big Weber barbecue simply because the little dinosaur would never actually fit in the stove. 

    Of course, we all had to have left-over turkey for at least a week after Christmas.  Hot turkey sandwiches swimming in gravy, cold turkey sandwiches for lunch and several variations on turkey casserole.

    We also always had to endure the Christmas pudding.  Dad kept some over-proof rum around, so each year we would douse that little loaf of Christmas pudding and light that sucker up. The blue flame would twinkle down at the end of the table next to dad and then we would all claim to be anticipating the delicious treat.  Personally, I never really got the thrill of it all, but I did love the "hard sauce" that accompanied the pudding.  Basically sugar frosting.

    We had an annual "Yule Log": if we were lucky it would be an  immense ancient chunk of apple-wood that Dad tracked down somewhere.  Dad would light it up early in the afternoon of Christmas Day and I swear that sucker would still be smoldering Boxing Day morning.  To this day I'm not sure how most of us did not get some degree of superficial burns from basking in front of the massive brick fireplace that filled the family room of the Vernon estate.

    This is a long way of saying that my family didn't just read about traditional Christmas celebrations, we immersed ourselves in them.

    My mother barely survived those Christmas celebrations; the sheer amount of work to orchestrate that entire mess had to be exhausting.

    I have to believe that it was the Thomas family that instilled most of those deeply held traditions.

    We know that the Thomas clan arrived in Canada sometime between 1874 and 1876.  That is based completely on Anne's notation in the Beible that her second born child, Catherine, was born in Treherbert in 1874 while her third born child Gwilym was born in Nanaimo BC in 1876.  

    Treherbert is a tiny village that lays north and east of Swansea (Abertawe) and north and west of Cardiff (Gaerdydd).  It is in one of the shallow valleys that lay on the flanks of the Bannau Brecheiniog (Brecon Beacons).  

    

    In the 1870's  Treherbert would have been a dreary little company town that existed only as long as the coal seam held out.  These towns were basically hell on Earth: the miners were all relegated to a relatively short life, either dying quickly from the inevitable industrial accident or dying slowly from black lung.  (who needs to smoke when you can suck in toxic coal dust instead.)  Then, of course, there was the ongoing problem of the tailings from the collier: you always eventually run out of space to stack that garbage, and then things start getting dicey.

If you look long and hard, somewhere east of Abertawe and north of Gaerdydd, you will find
Treherbert.   I think that actually translates to Herbert's town.  No idea who Herbert was.

    Just a passing note: research "Trychineb Aberfan", or the Aberfan disaster.  Through a perfect storm of circumstances, the entire top of the spoil pile collapsed and engulfed the village school, killing 116 children and 28 adults.  Pretty much everyone in the entire village lost at least one child and some of those families lost all their children at one time.  There is a sad little graveyard and memorial there now; sponsored and visited by Queen Elizabeth herself.  I doubt the royal visit was much consolation.

    Aberlan is just two valley's away from Treherbert. I have no doubt that unstable tailings piles were a huge risk in most mining villages.

    As I said before: my Welsh ancestors were more like refugees escaping inevitable death than colonists invading the wilds of British Columbia.  

    Now, as I understand it, the family originally disembarked in Port Vancouver, Washington, USA, but, upon hearing that there were coal mines up near a former Hudson's Bay outpost, Nanaimo, they headed north.  I guess, even when you are escaping the horrors of coal mining, you still would tend to run toward something you actually understand.  Thankfully, the coal seams at Nanaimo are of such poor quality that they never really were financially viable, and thus my ancestors finally escaped the black doom of the collier.

    The family, headed by John and Anne Thomas, finally settled just South of Nanaimo, in a woody area called Cedar District.  It still is called that to this day and, indeed, the Thomas family is considered one of the founding families of the area. 

  

Cedar District

Caption by Kelvin Orr Fleming

Ann Fleming: I was sure this was a 
photo of my grandmother Olive.  Apple 
fell really close to that tree.  I remember that 
complete lack of smile very well.

 

    I promise things get a lot more interesting after this generation: mostly because we actually have some records.

    Just think about it: the vast majority of us, all our ancestors, close relatives and distant descendants are going to be born, live and die unremarked and unremembered by the pretty much the entire universe.  Only the famous and the infamous ever make a mark in life and to enter the history books.

    If Banksy is right, that all of us die twice: once when we stop breathing and once when our name is said for the last time, then it is really only heroes and villains that live long.  The second generation here in Canada is where things get interesting.

The forest near Uncle David's cabin. David died before I was born
but my siblings remember clearing out the minimalist log cabin he lived in
at the end of his life.

Views of Lake Quesnell, circa early 20th century.

The original Thomas homestead on Quennel Lake in Cedar District.  I have no idea where the house is
or if it still exists.