a boarder or lodger

Readers of my books and this blog might remember my ongoing search for my mother’s biological parents. She was given up at birth, raised in a foster home by a widow who took in other children, though my mum was the only one she kept until adulthood. She knew, or thought she knew, her biological parents’ surnames. In fact, her own surname, Macdonald, belonged to one of them, her father, she thought, but she wasn’t certain. Some years ago I sent a spit sample to one of the ancestry sites and began to receive sporadic notifications of DNA matches. Mostly they were 4th or 5th cousins which I guess means we share a great-great-grandparent or something as remote. But several had some shared names and from there I was able to determine my mother’s biological father. I’ve been in touch with his family and they’ve been helpful. Does it matter that I found him? I think it does. But I wondered if I would ever find her mother. I knew where my mum was born and she said she believed both parents were listed on her birth certificate, the one her foster mother had, and which disappeared. (My mother carried a reissued birth certificate that had no information about her parents.) When I contacted Vital Statistics in Nova Scotia, I was told that because my mum wasn’t formally adopted, I was not entitled to any information about her until 100 years after her birth, which will be 2026.

Yesterday John and I went for a hike up a favourite trail beyond the Malaspina substation, mostly to see the flashes of maples and to watch for flights of geese heading south. (We saw brilliant patches of maples but no geese.) When I returned, there was a message from my mother’s father’s family. They had news, the message said, and so we had a long phone call. Something almost impossible had happened. The woman who would have been my mother’s sister-in-law was in the process of moving and was sorting papers. In a tin box she’d never opened, she found an envelope with her father-in-law’s name (my mother’s father) on it. Do Not Open, was written on it; After My Death, Burn This. She opened it. It was a letter to him, breaking a promise not to contact him again, but pleading that the money he’d given her hadn’t been enough. She had suffered shame and humiliation and pain, she wrote. She’d thought her feelings were also his, she wrote, as though promises might have been exchanged, and abandoned. No, she hadn’t gone to Quebec but to Sydney — my mother, raised in Halifax, had been born in Sydney, on Cape Breton Island — and she hoped he would be a gentleman and send a cheque to cover expenses, for which she would return a receipt. And she signed her name. So I have her name. Her surname? Maclellan.

We talked at length on the phone. The woman who is in a way an aunt, or a half-aunt, was emotional, as were her daughter and granddaughter, who’d been present when the letter was found. I was emotional too but I think I must have sounded cool and calm on the phone because the woman who would have been my mother’s sister-in-law said I did. (I was a jangle of emotions inside.) And after we talked, I called my son Forrest who is an archivist. I have her name, I said, and although this might still be circumstantial…No wait, he replied, and then he told me that he’d been looking at the 1931 census results for Halifax last week and he found my mother’s foster mother listed. In her household, several boarders (I knew she took in boarders; she was a widow…), including a 5 year old girl: Shirley Macdonald Maclellan. He forgot to tell me.

By the time I was ready to go to bed, Forrest had located much more information on the woman who was my biological grandmother. It’s not a happy story and I’m not sure what to think. She wasn’t a young girl, as we’d originally suspected. It’s more complicated than that. My mother wasn’t her only child. But my mother was the one who was given away.

This morning it’s raining and I’m inside, quiet, wishing I had my mother here to talk with, to offer her the gift or curse of this story in a way that was loving. So much was withheld from her in her life, particularly during her childhood; she was marked by it. She was a good mother, maybe better than I deserved, because I wasn’t always much of a daughter, or at least not the daughter she might have wished for. Nearly a hundred years ago she was wrapped in a blanket and handed off to a household in Halifax where she was considered a boarder. One name was dropped and forgotten, until now.

Years ago John and I were in Halifax. We heard this beautiful singer sing this beautiful song and I wept in the dark pub, feeling that somehow the song was about my mother and myself. And maybe her mother.

Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,

While the star of hope she leaves him?

Me, nae cheerfu’ twinkle lights me;

Dark despair around benights me.
                   (Robert Burns)