I was delivered some large collections of photographs and archival material from my mother's grandparents family, Robert Arthur Scott , 1839-1920, and Anna Cree, 1852-1934, of Belfast area and 10 sons and daughters. The material covers from Belfast about 1900 to the 1930's and Western and Northern Canada and the First World War.
They entered the Port of New York about the turn of the century, then to Canada, built a large home in Niagara Falls. Part of the family homesteaded in Alberta, bringing horse breeding stock. They also purchased a dairy and fruit farm in Fonthill, Ontario, where Robert passed in 1920.
I have a large collection of their gentleman cowboy adventures in the Drumheller, Alberta area, the horses, the roundups, the breaking in, the gathering for the horses to be sold to the First World War Cavalry and so on.
A captive story of gentleman cowboys, farmers, engineers and calvarymen, and soldiers that essentially disappeared by the mid thirties...
I was a young mongrel farm boy listening to their early efforts at ranching in the west and the disastrous machine that fractured their dream..the First World War. I appear to be the last refuge for the stories of a family with few threads left here. I'm still looking here.
I suspect that there are Scotts in the Belfast region that would be from their original families and I would be thrilled to hear from you and to share some of this archive.
As I expect this will require some meticulous efforts, the winter snows will likely unfold before I have a lot of time to sort and scan all the photos..and construct the necessary website to load all this for public sharing..but i can share selective bits and lay some groundwork for folks to share in and around the busyness of paying the rent and looking for a farm to start our retirement career.
I have done some cursory research on the original horse breeding side of the family going back to 1753. I have a lot of names and dates and places...My mother, now 89, is the last she says of seven generations of horse people. They lost all that with the first world war, the plagues and epidemics and the Depression and the fragmentation of the new postwar reality.
respectfully....colonial son..
