Woodstock, Ontario, December 1956

We often visited my mother's cousins who lived in Woodstock, Ontario. They had emigrated here from England in the late teens or early 1920s. This is a photograph of their family home. When most of the daughters, and one son, had married and moved away, and the elderly parents (Alice and Bill Holden) had died, there was only the one daughter left at home, that was Annie Holden, and she never married, so it became her home. Annie died the year she retired, I believe in her lawyer's office, of a stroke. My mother was with her at the time. Annie was always very nice to us, a truly kind person who attended a Baptist church, sang in the choir, and worked much of her life at Harvey Woods in Woodstock.



This is December 1956, just after our father died. Two boys, age ten and six, who have lost their father.

Here is my brother, my mother, and I, at Annie's.

Woodstock, December 1956.

The two photos above and the photo below, probably taken at Bud Karn's farm. Bud's wife was Bertha Karn, one of Annie's sisters, their daughters Katherine and Patty. That's my brother, Bertha's daughter Kathryn Karn (KK), myself in the hood, and Michael or Billy Davis (the sons of Jennie and Arnold Davis, another sister of Annie's).

Here is Annie's house, in Woodstock, perhaps spring 1957.

A few years pass and we're still visiting Woodstock, now it's 1962-1963.

Woodstock, Ontario

Here is my brother with our mother's uncle, Bill Holden; Uncle Bill is the father of Annie Holden, Gertie Brown, Bertha Karn, Hartley Holden, and Jennie Davis (all are now deceased). Bill Holden married Alice Chew who was Bertha Chew's (my maternal grandmother's) sister. In the late teens or early 1920s Uncle Bill came to Canada, accompanied (I believe) by his daughter Gertie to find a new home for the family; they were moving from Blackburn, Lancashire, England to Canada. I think all Alice and Bill Holden's children were born by then and Gertie was possibly already married to Fred Brown, who had served in World War One and then, in Canada, he worked for the post office. They decided to settle in Woodstock, Ontario, perhaps because it had factories, like Harvey Woods, which cobined both a small town setting and factory work they were used to doing. When I was young, to my early twenties, we visited them in Woodstock quite often during the different holidays. When the Holdens all arrived in Montreal, en route to Woodstock, they stayed at my mother's parents' home on, I believe, Irene Avenue in Montreal's St. Henry neighbourhood. However, later, when they arrived in Woodstock, I believe they learned that the factory where they had planed to work had closed. I don't think Uncle Bill worked again, but he gardened, he was a property owner (they must have had eight acres of land) and he did things like grafting different types of apples onto the same tree. I also remember a big pear tree near their house that he probably planted. My mother was very close to her cousins who were like sisters and a brother to her. This photo was taken around 1947. It is one of the earliest photographs of my brother.