Prince Edward Island, Home of the Sainted Ancestors

This picture is from the deck of the Quest where we docked at the seaport in Prince Edward Island, the smallest of the Canadian provinces and the place to which the sainted ancestors emigrated from Monaghan County, Ireland in the wake of the potato famine around 1840.  For years Tom has searched his family's roots using various sources from Ancestry.com to little newsletters published right here on PEI.

We were here so many years ago we can't remember when and it is certainly a different place now.  The sleepy little town of Charlottetown with its library housed in a temporary building and its genealogical records written on index cards has been metamorphised into a busy and modern harbor port with contemporary condos and sophisticated shops.  The old charm is still here though, with old Victorian gabled houses with deep porches and the beautiful Basilica towering over the town.

We decided to hire a taxi to take us to a few places that Tom wanted to see (based on his research as well as family lore), and Wayne, a local driver/tour guide hovering outside the port, was happy to do the honors.  First stop: the house of Edward Kelly, the sainted great-grandfather.  Yankee Ned, as he was known because of his later success as a land developer in and around Charlottetown, was an Irish immigrant, farmer and brickmaker whose grand house in the countryside was quite unusual for the day.  Tom had come across it in an article on PEI architecture.  Tom already knew stories of Grandfather Kelly, as he was called by the family, from his Dad who spoke nostalgically of the many cousins who would cross the frozen river by bobsled in the winter to visit the sprawling mansion sitting on 350 acres of land--a true paradise where all the cousins could play unsupervised.  Seeing the article about the house and Yankee Ned lent further credence to the legends that had grown up around them.

Wayne drove around Charlottetown for a little bit and then we left the city in search of the Kelly homestead, which Tom already knew from the article were, at best, in ruins.  Thirty minutes into the countryside and Wayne by now was involved in the quest and determined, despite the fact that we weren't having much luck in the now rolling farmland dotted with picturesque potato crops and dairy farms.

Not to be defeated, Wayne said that surely the people living around here would know and he drove right up into a driveway, stopped the car, jumped out (despite a snarling barking labrador on a nice long leash) and walked up to the door.  Then he gestured for Tom to follow.  I had already been warned not to open the back door where I was sitting because the latch was broken and was thus a prisoner in the back seat.  Not to worry...all in the name of genealogical research.  There were six cats in my field of vision, laying about the driveway, and they occupied my interest during what must have been an interesting conversation inside the small rural house.

They came back to the car, Wayne backed out (honking loudly lest there be a kitty cat lounging under the wheels) and I learned that sure enough the man knew the family and while the Kelly house was no more, the property itself was just down the road  and there was a family living next door at #854.  Again, he pulls into the driveway, knocks on the door and below you see the tree that is the only remaining vestige of the once magnificent home of Great-grandfather Yankee Ned.  While the tree on the left in the picture doesn't look like it could be more than a century old, It definitely looks exactly like the tree in the picture of the Kelly mansion.  Wayne was the one who noticed that.

And these are the McGuirks, the lovely folks that live next door and filled in a few of the blanks about how the house met its final demise, with one of their three rescued pooches, and Wayne, our enthusiastic and persistent guide, in the black tee shirt.

Back in Charlottetown we stopped in to visit St. Dunstan's Basilica where Tom's Dad and family went to Mass and Confession and school while growing up on PEI.

After a lovely four hours with Wayne we were starving and on his recommendation had oysters and PEI mussels in this great little lobster shack right in front of the ship.

This is the pint of the local craft beer--Beach Chair Beer that Tom enjoyed along with the shellfish, for those of you interested in such things... 

               And these are the unbelievably fresh and succulent mussels, half eaten by now because I forgot to take the picture in our starving frenzy, among the best we've had anywhere.  PEI mussels in PEI...we have surely died and gone to Mussel Heaven...

One more thing about Charlottetown.  One of the places Tom wanted to visit was the gravesite of his Dad's paternal grandfather, Michael McQuaid, for whom he had not only the name of the cemetery, but the plot number as well.  Wayne was only too happy to oblige gaily announcing that he visited both the Catholic and the Protestant cemeteries all the time and if he couldn't find the plot, there was an elderly gravetender there who not only knew everyone there but had probably buried them.  Alas, although we visited both cemeteries, the old guy was not around, the young one had no idea where to look, and in spite of walking the plots at length, no Michael was discovered.  Wayne even called St. Dunstan's to try to track him down and some other Bureau of Records, and though he talked to a couple of wonderfully interested and helpful people, they said unfortunately that Michael had been placed in the ground before the records had been computerized.  But here is the kicker: Wayne has promised to walk both cemeteries in his spare time and when he finds Great Grandfather Michael McQuaid, he will email a picture of the grave to Beloved himself!  I told him that was way above and beyond but he insisted!  We shall see what develops from that rash promise.