In the year 2000 my mother gave me Aunt Adelle's 1961 Old Age application. She was born in 1890 of Adeline Johnson from Bear Cove and Richard Martin in Ketch Harbour Nova Scotia. She was my Great Grandmother's sister and I was 'the apple of her eye'. Prior to her death at the age of 107, she gave me a shoebox full of photos with details written on the back.

I posted a query on the old Roots Web Forum and received an answer immediately. She and my Great Grandmother were from a 250 yr old line of Irish Fishing Villages that dot the Southern Coast of Nova Scotia just west of Halifax. These two sisters arrived in Parkdale Toronto around 1905. This was the start of my passion for Genealogy and when I think of her as the inspiration for this journey I goosebump. It is happening now as I write this.

The Irish stories are still unfolding as I continue to dig into their history and how they were a part of the founding of Halifax NS.

My sister and I were raised in our mother's Doreen Hayes School of Dancing in Toronto. Throughout her life she was very attached to her maiden surname. It wasn't until after her death that I discovderd Sir Thomas Hayes Lord Mayor of London under James 1st, John de la Haye executed by Henry VII and all their long line of Norman/Viking origins.

“I will be here until the end. I don’t want to sell this place,” she said. “I think when I am done, I want my name gone, too. It’s been a good name and served me well.”
Toronto Star 2012

For 20 years I searched for my mother’s Hayes ancestry. A letter from her aunt said her grandfather Charles was from Dublin, Ireland. Opening the package from the National Children's Home in England, my mother's excitement quickly turned to disappointment. He was not Irish.

As a 14 yr old orphan in the 1890s, he was picked up off the streets, admitted to the Liverpool Sheltering Home then shipped along with 80 other children to Knowlton House in Quebec, a Home Child Distribution Centre. The girls as domestics, the boys farm labour. Some were 6 years old. He faked his origins his whole life taking the secret to his grave in Park Lawn Cemetery where unknown to everyone a mass grave of Toronto home children was close by.