I've wanted to say how strange this is after all the searching and finding nothing because of one simple word. The missing word being that of a last name, Lloyd. To the Lloyd family the missing word was Reid.
In our family we never knew either of our grandfathers as they both passed away before any of us were born. Our knowledge of them exists only because of records and of being told about them through our relatives that knew them. We've been told about them and many times with fond memories and I can't but wonder sometimes about we missed from not knowing them. We did know our grandmothers and one of them we knew as Ethel May Reid or as we called her Gramma Holden. Both our grandmothers passed away during the 1980's. Not long after one passed away the other left us. On our father's side of the family there was lots of knowledge of our ancestral history here in Canada and what was once known as the new world to the people of Europe.
Our father's side of the family has been traced back to Normandy in France and it can be traced back further than the early 1600's when the first French settlers were coming here to this new world then called Kanata meaning a village by the natives. Jacques Cartier adopted the name Canada for the world he discovered.
Three hundred years after our father's side side of our family arrived here from France a ten year girl from the UK was put on a ship and shipped to the New World. She was taken from her family with thousands of other young children and sent out to populate this new world for the British Empire. Before she taken and placed on the ship Silician her connection to her past was deliberately severed. She would live her life as many others would, never knowing who she really was or where she was really from. The connection to her past severed with the use of one word, her last name.
My mother handed me a book in the late 1980's. "You should read this." She said. "Your grandmother was one of them." The soft covered book was The Little Immigrants, the telling of orphans shipped from the UK to the New World. Even though Ethel My Reid could not be found in that little book it sparked an interest to find our past that originated somewhere in Britain.
In my living room is a small table with rosewood inlays on it's top. In my closet is a photo album that has within it photos of our gramma Holden, Ethel May Reid and memories of her being severed from her past. She was a stout woman as was my mother who never grew past being five feet and eleven inches tall. Things are different now as that one word we know as a last name has been discovered. No longer is Ethel May Reid severed from her past as we now know she did have a family in the UK. and she was not the only child in her family. But for her it's too late, she has left us and she will never know her beginnings. It feels different here now to as with the discovery of her past a closure ends a search and new chapter begins. I've heard it said you never know who you are until you know where you've been and where you come from. It's so difficult to find the words to describe this difference now to what it used to be. What once was a feeling of being incomplete because of not knowing now is being replaced with new thoughts, new questions and new feelings. It is taking a bit to get used to being not only a Reid but also a Lloyd with living relatives overseas. Additions will be added to family trees with the discovery of new information. The family tree of the Lloyds, Reids, Pugh, Holdens, Lavoies, Sharpe, Sine and many others. I only know a few of them. Maybe in time others will surface. This is the end of an era as as a new era begins. Until then it is a time of transitions and it is taking time to adjust.
