Old Friends from Far Away

The Islay shore close to Kildalton

A few nights ago, I attended a presentation given by a local artist at PoCo Heritage's museum. It was a fascinating talk about making art with camera-less photography but it was one thing that she said during her presentation that really caught the attention of the audience. It was nothing to do with her art. She let slip where she had gone to high school. It seems that many in the small audience had gone there too. After the presentation they crowded around her swapping dates of when they had attended the same school. The inevitable cries of "did you know so and so" and "was Mrs X still teaching when you were there" emerged as the gang reminisced.

We do this. We seize upon common experiences and use them to walk down memory lane, to reach out and engage in a conversation which brings friends and strangers closer together. And this is in the modern world where there are so many ways to communicate. Maybe there's even a Facebook group for the former students of that same high school. How much more excitement would coming across someone from old neighbourhoods have caused among those from other countries who currently lived in the sparsely settled farms of New England or Ontario?

Some of my Ontario ancestors came from Kildalton in Islay, one of the islands of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. In 1870, John Ramsay of Kildalton made a trip to Canada to seek out former tenants in Ontario to see how they had prospered after emigration. He travelled from farm to farm, seeking out Islay people and they were glad to see him and exchange news of their new places for word of people back home. John Ramsay embodied a link to the old country, was treated well and left a wonderful account of the Islay people he saw, as well as other Scots, because, with the benefit of distance they all came from the same vast neighbourhood. Finding commonality among people from disparate parts of the old country was also a benefit of distance, it seems.

It is interesting to think how or common need for social bonds connects us to people with a common link to a place or an event, like the audience at the art presentation. A better understanding of our ancestors comes if we remember that this was also a common experience that they shared.