Pursuing directory entries

 

                                                                       The Hudson's Bay Downtown Victoria

In-person research has been missing from my life for a while, so when a recent trip offered a chance to see if two places mentioned in a 1948 directory still existed, I dragged my friend off on a walk to find out. We were in Victoria, a place where my mother lived and worked in the late 1940s. I knew that she and her parents had left the UK in 1946. Passenger lists confirmed this part of the family story. They only stayed in Canada for a few years but had intended a permanent move. It was a sojourn that would have lasting consequences for the family. More on that later.

I was happy to track down the Victoria address where my mother was listed as living in the 1948 directory. It was worth the walk. It even looked like the house which currently holds the address would have been the same building as the one in 1948, at least to my eye. You can see it below. 

As we were staying downtown, there was very little walking involved to track down the address of my mother's former place of work. She was a saleswoman at Hudson's Bay. That building still stands on Douglas Street. I'm sure there have been a lot of changes since she worked there but it was a kick to see the building and translate the directory entry into reality.

Finding the places where my mother had been all those years ago, reminded me that her parents were in Canada at the same time. I just didn't know where. Perhaps it's time to check some directories to see if I can find their whereabouts for the same time period. The search this time could be done online, not trawling through the directories in the Vancouver Library's Special Collections where I had found the entry for my mother so many years ago. But were they in Winnipeg, where my grandmother's sisters lived or in Vancouver, closer to their daughter? 

An internet search brought up a few places to search like the Can Genealogy site at https://www.cangenealogy.com › manitoba-directories or, if looking for Vancouver addresses, I could look through https://bccd.vpl.ca › index.php › browse › title › 1948 Many sites give access to Canadian directories for free and many are searchable by surname which would be a plus except the name I'm searching is Chambers which brings up all sorts of government and other types of chambers. I'll see how I get on.

Organizing my search

 

                                                               Some of the World War 2 books from my shelves

Doing the research and writing about my mother's Land Army experience was relatively easy as most of the information I had was already compiled. I also have a few books about the Land Army but when I actually read them, they were short and gave a general picture about what life would have been like for Land Girls. My mother's war story lent itself to being a self-contained narrative. The rest of my WWII research looks more daunting.

As you can see by the picture of the books up above, I have a few tomes to read through and those are just a sample of the WWII books on my shelves. I've been collecting books like these for ages with a view to reading them someday. Well, that someday has come but it's going to take me quite a while to read all the relevant books on my shelves. It doesn't help that I can't resist buying new books on the subject either. A case in point, I just received the book on the top of the stack, Land Girl: A Manual for Volunteers in the Women's Land Army 1941, in the mail.

While I continue to read and research, I want to keep writing WWII stories for my blog so I'm going to have to be more systematic about this. That means writing lists and outlines of the family members I am following up on so that I don't miss any interesting stories along the way. Some people are natural outliners. I'm not one of those. I do like writing timelines, however. Maybe timelines of the families I'm following might throw up some useful hints of where to find those stories. 

Newspaper clues to a Land Army past

 

                                                                    A Land Army girl on a Fordson tractor

Finding out more about the Women's Land Army experience in Hertfordshire gave me a better idea of what my mother had gone through when she was part of the WLA in that county. Between that and the WLA Alphabetical Index Card that I found, I have sketched the parameters of her service which I interpret as starting May 1, 1942 and ending with her resignation August 12, 1945. But I wanted a clearer picture.

The sites I had visited gave me a general idea of what the Land Girls did and the book, The Women's Land Army 1939-1950, supplied photos of many of the activities. What I wanted was to know what my mother's actual duties had been. I turned to the newspapers to see if there was any mention of my mother which would throw light on her war experience.

Unfortunately, when I tried to apply filters down to the county level to get the news for Hertfordshire where she was stationed, the British Newspapers on Find My Past didn't have any newspapers for that area. But my mother and her parents had emigrated from Manitoba. My search through Newspapers.com was much more productive. It yielded a clipping which merited a photo of my mother on a tractor at the West Hertfordshire District Agricultural Competitions Association's ploughing match just after the war. The story was carried in the Winnipeg Tribune and gave the name and address of her grandmother who lived in Winnipeg.

With family in different places, it's surprising where news will turn up and I wonder who supplied the newspaper with the photo. Perhaps the grandmother named? Interestingly, the article appeared in the paper in January of 1946 although the competition had been held in October of 1945, just months after my mother had resigned from the WLA. The article contains many clues to follow up on but, after the research I've already done, I now know more about my mother's experience in the Land Army.

Through my research, I know that driving a tractor required specialized training and not every Land Girl did it. My mother would have gone through that training and must have been using her skills for a while to be proficient enough to enter a competition. My increased knowledge gives me a greater appreciation for her war experience. 

Sources:

Find My Past https://search.findmypast.com/search/british-newspapers

Newspapers.com https://www.newspapers.com/

Powell, Bob & Nigel Westacott. The Women’s Land Army 1939-1950. Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2000

Image:

By Ministry of Information official photographer - http://media.iwm.org.uk/iwm/mediaLib//36/media-36219/large.jpg This is photograph D 128 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30861464

Adding colour to the official Land Army record

 

                                                                            Land Army girls working in a barn

Trying to add colour to my mother's Land Army experience, I turned to the books on my shelves about women's experience in World War Two and books on the Land Army in particular. It will take me a while to get through them all and, in the end, while it will be a useful exercise and give me more background on the women who served on the farms in Britain, it won't be the story of the particular person I'm interested in. In fact the book I'm reading now, The Women's Land Army 1939-1950, seems particularly sparse in its coverage of Hertfordshire where my mother was stationed.

Then I turned to online sources. A search brought up the website Herts Memories which gave me access to stories and articles which would bring me closer to my mother's experience. On the site there was a write up by Margaret Hurst about her time in the Land Army in Hertfordshire. The stories highlighted the reality and grittiness of the experience, from the cockroaches in the kitchen to the scurrying rats as the workers got to the bottom of the threshing pile. Was my mother's experience similar? One of Margaret's memories did strike a chord. She wrote about going to pick Brussel sprouts on a freezing cold day. That brought forth a memory of one of the things that my mother had said, that Brussel sprouts were picked after the first frost. Maybe she too had worked harvesting sprouts for a market gardener like Margaret Hurst had. 

Sources:

Herts Memories - https://www.hertsmemories.org.uk/content/herts-history/topics/world-war-two/womens-land-army/the-womens-land-army-in-hertfordshire

Powell, Bob & Nigel Westacott The Women’s Land Army 1939-1950. Sutton Publishing Limited, Gloucestershire, 2000

Image:

By Nora Lavrin - http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/16311, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53995217