She was born in October 1901. Baptized Bessie Laura, she was one of five children born to Thomas and Eveline Earle. She was born in Farmer's Arm, Twillingate in a winter's tilt, a one room wooden cabin that served as a winter home. However Bessie grew up in Durrell's, Twillingate, Newfoundland. She is my husband's paternal grandmother.
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In the summer, the fishermen and their families lived in exposed areas along the coast of Newfoundland while they fished. In October, they moved to more protected areas, often further inland where they constructed their winter homes. The winter tilts were built where wood was more readily available for home construction but also for firewood. The homes were made of logs, seams filled with moss or bark, sod roofs.The stone fireplace provided for heating and cooking and a hole in the roof allowed the smoke to exit. Bessie was born in such a tilt.
Inside of a fisherman's tilt at Battle Harbour
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(The phrase 'smoking like a tilt' is a commonly used phrase in Newfoundland. Looking at the picture one can imagine how much smoke there was in the tilt and going out through the hole in the roof. You can imagine that someone who 'smokes like a tilt' is like a chain smoker.)
There were four girls and one boy in Bessie's family. The boy, Fred, was the oldest and Margaret (Maggie) was the youngest. The middle children were Bessie, Nellie and Elsie.
Bessie had diphtheria, a common disease at that time, before she started school. It left her deaf because her eardrums ruptured and healed leaving scar tissue. Bessie's speech wasn't affected because she had acquired language before this happened. She didn't get hearing aids until the 1950s. She survived the diphtheria, unlike some of my ancestors and children in her future husband's family, where three children died one year from the dreaded disease. Her survival was probably due to her mother who sent the children to the wharf every day with a saucer to get cod liver oil from the top of a barrel of fish livers. She drank this every day.
Small is stature, Bessie had tiny hands and feet. Her mother died when she was young and her father eventually remarried. However Bessie went into service, which meant that she left home and went to work as a servant to another family. She was young but we don't know her age at that time. One of her placements was in a home in Millertown Junction, in central Newfoundland, a long way from Durrell's. Eventually she landed in Corner Brook where she met Ernest Smith. They married in 1925.
The Smiths had seven children, Fred, Melvin, Evelyn, Beryl, Janet, Mavis and Marie. They lived next door to what is now the Coleman's Store on Caribou Road in Corner Brook. Ern was a locksmith, though he was a man of many jobs over the years.
Bessie kept house, raising the children. Melvin's favourite dessert was Washington pie which his mother made. It was a white cake, in two jam-filled layers, with a thin glaze over it. The jam was often made of partridgeberries which were picked by the children. The cake was always served on a cake stand which Bessie bought for Fred's baptism cake. Our daughter, Claire, still uses this cake stand today.
Congestive heart failure took Bessie's life in 1968. Ern survived her by several years. All of their children, except Melvin, moved away from Corner Brook to various parts of the mainland. The baby born in the winter tilt has many descendants all across Canada and beyond.
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Fred Earle married Mary, (we don't know her maiden name.) Mary spoke using thee and thine in her speech. She said things like,
"Drink thine tea, my dear."
This is the way that people from Yorkshire, England spoke. If Mary wasn't from Yorkshire herself, her family must have come from there.
2 comments:
What a lovely story.
Thank you, Lois.
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