The Family Bible, the School Book and the Photo Album
/A Family History in Artifacts — Part 2
In Calgary a hundred years ago today, November 26, 1919, my grandfather, John Wellington (Jack) Cummer, married my grandmother, Laurine Lila Jackson.
I came across this information by accident a couple of weeks ago, when I showed my son, Jacob, the large Bible that has been in my family since 1886.
We weren’t looking for wedding dates. We had been discussing alcohol consumption and how it has changed over history. To support my point, I hauled out the Cummer family Bible.
The Bible is a massive publication, measuring 31.5 cm by 26 cm. and is 13 cm. thick. It contains not only the Old and New Testaments in King James and Revised versions, but also “A Complete Concordance, Embracing Every Passage of Scripture” plus “Dr. Wm. Smith’s Standard Bible Dictionary” and “A Concise History of All Religious Denominations.”
But wait! There’s more! “2000 Scripture Illustrations on Steel, Wood, and in Colors” and “Many Other Important and Valuable Aids to the Study of the Holy Scriptures, All Written to Increase the Interest in and Simplify the Study of the Word of God.” It was published by McDermid and Logan of London, Ontario, in the 1880s and was presented to Frederick William (Fred) Cummer of Wallaceburg and Margaret Ellen (Maggie) Robertson of Alvinston on the occasion of their wedding in Alvinston, Ontario, on May 20, 1886. Fred was 25; Maggie 22.
The pages are not numbered but there well over a thousand of them. The pages of the family records are the most fragile as a result of frequent use over the generations. Whenever we wanted to highlight the family Bible, we would turn to the Temperance Pledge.
Nearly 90 years after Fred and Maggie received the Bible, their last-born child, Carl, would recall how important giving up alcohol had been to his father’s life. “[Fred] remarked that he had always hoped that none of his boys would ever become as near to being addicted to alcohol as he had been in his early twenties. He said that he had reached the stage where he would rather drink than eat, when all of a sudden, he met the girl of his dreams, Margaret Robertson. She was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and consequently abhorred alcohol. When he proposed marriage, she told him she would not marry him unless he promised to lay off liquor. He took the pledge and from that day on never touched liquor for the rest of his life.”
Fred and Maggie signed the pledge page in the Bible nine years later, when their oldest child, Charlie, signed at the age of eight, perhaps at the time of his first communion. It stated: “We hereby solemnly promise, God helping us, to abstain from all distilled, fermented and malt liquors including wine and beer, and to employ all proper means to discourage the use of and the traffic in the same.”
In subsequent years, Fred and Maggie’s other six children signed the Temperance Pledge. Their daughter, Ada, signed at the age of 11, sometime around 1899. Her younger siblings, Jack (9 years old), Roy (7) and Wilda (5) likely signed at the same time. Note the fine cursive handwriting for children so young. The next child in line, Harold signed four years later when he reached six. The youngest in the family, Carl, was seven when he signed the temperance pledge in 1910.
Cummer family ca 1904: Carl, Fred, Ada, Herald, Charlie, Margaret, Wilda, Jack
That was the year Fred and Maggie took the rest of the family – and the family Bible – to follow Charlie and Jack to begin a new life in Alberta. Carl recalled: “It was a monotonous journey in a C.P.R. colonist car and took the better part of four days. [They arrived in Calgary on April 1.] [We] were given a tearful well-wishing send-off by friends and neighbors. As there was no opportunity to do any cooking on the way, [we] had to make provision for enough food to sustain [us] on the trip. This consisted of pre-buttered bread, jam, hard boiled eggs and a large cooked ham which one of the neighbours provided as a parting gift.”
The two oldest boys, Charlie (aged 22) and Jack (19), had come out the year before. They had arrived on the harvest trains that brought temporary labourers from the East to work on the grain harvests on the prairies. Once out in Alberta, Charlie and Jack had decided they would stay and suggested that the rest of the family join them.
Charlie was a pharmacist who set up shop in Edmonton.
Charles Frederick (“Charlie”) Cummer
Jack thought he would try his hand at farming and filed papers on a homestead in Youngstown in the dry plains east of Drumheller, Alberta. The rest of the family chose to settle in Calgary.
John Wellington (“Jack”) Cummer
In the 1970s, Carl Cummer contributed to a biographical sketch of his older brother Jack: “He filed papers for a homestead then miles from Youngstown, Alberta, a small settlement about 150 miles northeast of Calgary. He pitched his tent adjacent to a Boer War veteran who had already established himself on his own homestead and lived with his wife the year around in a one room, three foot thick sod hut with a dirt floor. In order to prove his prowess with a revolver, the veteran used to stick a playing card between chinks of sod, pace off several yards, and shoot holes through the Ace of Spades, much to the chagrin of his wife who was still inside the house.
“In order to acquire title to the homestead, only a certain number of months in the year were required to be spent developing and improving the land. What savings he had managed to accumulate were soon used up but with financial assistance from his brother Charlie in Edmonton and his earnings from the winter when he worked in Calgary as a clerk at Freeze’s grocery, he managed to get by. At first his only means of transportation was a native range horse, known in the West as a cayuse, on which he rode back and forth to Calgary. It was necessary for him to hire teams and equipment from neighbours when it was time to work the land and harvest. He grew wheat, oats, flax and rapeseed [canola].
Jack’s first harvest, 1911
“Jack was perennially optimistic throughout his life. With rocks from the land, he constructed a dam across a coulee which ran through his property, hoping any run-off would provide him with a slough for the stock which he anticipated he would eventually have. Sufficient snow and rainfall didn’t materialize, however, and his expectations met with frustration.”
Thought to be a photo of Jack Cummer’s homestead ca 1913
Jack used to drive a wagon and mule the 260 km from Youngstown to Calgary to pick up supplies. Carl recalled joining him on one of those trips:
“In 1912 [Jack] decided he decided to build a granary in which he proposed to live until such time as it would be needed to store the bountiful crop he always looked forward to. He purchased a high-box wagon and team of mules in Calgary and loaded to the hilt with lumber, provisions, and three brothers – Charlie who was on vacation at the time, Harold who was 14 and Carl who was nine. For the first part of the journey from Calgary to Youngstown, there were prairie trails to follow, but for the most part it was a matter of heading in a general direction across the prairie with settlements few and far between. The journey took four or five days. There will hills to climb, rivers to cross, and numerous sloughs to circle around. Some of the smaller rivers could be forded. There were ferries at river crossings and every time it was necessary to cross on a ferry, there was the possibility that the mules would panic and bolt, taking the whole kaboodle with them. This didn’t happen, however, and the only near tragedy on this trip happened one night when the mules broke loose from their tether. In the morning there was no sign of them and the better part of the day had to be spent tracking them down.”
Jack’s wagon and team.
Carl continued: “The whole country was plagued with swarms of mosquitoes whose stings caused considerable discomfort and itchy swellings. Mosquito oil or Citronella rubbed on the hands and face did little to deter them from sucking the blood of humans and animals alike. Broad-brimmed straw hats with mosquito nettings draped over the face and neck and canvas gloves discouraged their efforts to quite an extent, but there was no means of protecting the animals. In the evening, smoke from smudges had the effect of keeping them at a distance, but when it came time to roll into the blankets with only the stars overhead, there was no way you weren’t going to be ‘stuck for drinks.’ The dead silence of the great outdoors was broken only by the incessant humming of swarms of mosquitos and the occasional howling of coyotes. Meals on the trip consisted mostly of bread, butter (which was too hard to spread after chilly nights and too runny during the heat of the day), canned stewed tomatoes, beans and creamed corn, all unheated.”
Was as it on that Calgary trip to pick up lumber that Jack met his future bride? That same year, 1912, Laurine Lila Jackson had come to Alberta from Ontario.
Laurine Jackson
Laurine had been born on March 22, 1890. She was one of the six children (five daughters and one son) of William and Jane (Young) Jackson who had farmed near Orillia in Simcoe County. Her sister Dorothy would move to Hawaii; her brother Lorne set up business in Drumheller which was the closest village of any significance to Jack’s homestead.
Laurine Jackson as a child
Among the items that I’ve inherited from Laurine are a number of books, some of them school texts from Ontario, and one of them a volume of Stephen Leacock which she sent to her sweetheart overseas during the Great War.
The school texts are carefully annotated in Laurine’s hand.
One of the books – a school anthology of Tennyson’s poetry – contains sheets of paper providing exam questions, and ideas for how she would answer one of them.
In the notes, Laurine comes across as a systematic, thoughtful and intelligent student. According to her 1906 report card, she ranked 10th in a class of 32 pupils. Her marks were poorest in math and algebra but quite good in chemistry and ancient history. (Note that in this report card, every mark in every subject for every student is listed and sent home to all the parents.)
Laurine was a careful reader. She was also a collector of family “snap shots.” Her photo album begins after her arrival in Calgary in 1912.
Open the first page of the album, and there’s a spread that includes an outing in weather cool enough for hats and overcoats.
One picture shows Laurine and one of her sisters.
The picture was likely taken by Jack because, in the next picture, Jack and Laurine stand at the same gateway. The sister had likely taken this picture.
On the next page, Jack and Laurine are out on there own. First, there’s a picture of Laurine. She appears to be standing where Memorial Drive now runs along the Bow River in Calgary, with the North Hill in the background.
Later in the album, there’s a picture of Jack standing at the same spot. They had taken turns photographing each other — they were out on their own without Laurine’s sister as a chaperone.
Later pictures show Jack outside the Cummer family home on 13th Avenue in Calgary. He is clowning around with three friends. They are all in uniform. On the back of the equestrian photo, Jack has written, “This picture doesn’t flatter the horse; and the rider never will be made good looking by a simple snap shot. Am getting my photo taken here before I go.”
Who were these soldiers. Another picture in the album, taken in June 1914, identifies the military unit as Squadron D of the 21st Alberta Hussars, a reserve unit in which Jack served before the war. On September 24, 1914, Jack enlisted with Lord Strathcona’s Horse, one of the first Canadian units to be sent overseas. Of the three Cummer brothers who saw action in the First World War, Jack was the first to leave and the last to return.
Jack Cummer’s adventures overseas will be the topic of a future blog. Meanwhile, on the home front, the family Bible was once more put to use. Second only to the family records, the other well-thumbed pages in the Bible are the maps – especially the maps of the Holy Land, including, “The Path of Jesus as He Went About Doing Good.” It traces His journeys through Galilea, Samaria and Judea. There would be a special reason for the family to consult these maps: in 1918, their brother Jack would be riding through this same countryside on horseback with the army of General Allenby.
Jack and Laurine became engaged before he shipped overseas and through the war years, she remained very close to the Cummer family. She and Wilda played tennis together.
Laurine worked as a secretary in the Merchants Bank on the corner of 8th Avenue and Centre Street. Her letters and parcels to Jack, recalls Carl, “gave him the moral support he needed to bolster his spirits.” He sent her photographs and post cards, including new from his training in officer school in Bryanston, Dorset. The back of the portrait reads, “Your erstwhile cadet.”
Her photo albums show an active social life with family and friends during the war years. Part way through the album, more pictures show men in uniform – the soldiers were coming home from the front.
But Jack was not among them. Following the Armistice in November 1918, he remained with the British Imperial Army in the Middle East. He was demobilized on June 16, 1919 and by July 21 he was back in Drumheller where he signed his War Service Gratuity papers. And, as the photo album shows, he met with Laurine. They were both 29 years old. They had not seen each other in nearly five years. How much had they each changed in that time?
Trooper Jack Cummer left Alberta in 1914 as a farmer whose knowledge of the world was limited to Southwestern Ontario and Southern Alberta. He returned as Lieutenant Cummer who had been across Canada, had crossed the Atlantic, lived in England and the trenches of Flanders, had been wounded in action, had taken officer training, had served in the Imperial Army in Palestine, had served as an intelligence officer for a British general, had been mentioned in despatches, and whose circle of friends now included gentlemen from across the Empire – many of whom he kept in touch with for the rest of his life. That is a story that will be told elsewhere; suffice it to say that he returned to Alberta a changed man.
But two things appear not to have changed: his attachment to his family,,,
Jack with his convalescent brother Carl, 1919.
…and his love for Laurine.
Jack and Laurine 1919
In the first post-war photos showing the two of them together again, Jack is not in uniform. He always had a flare for fine clothes, and here he is very dapper in a white panama hat and silk stockings, sitting in a back yard. Laurine is wearing her best dress. In another photo in a Cummer album, she wears that dress while she and Ada and Wilda pick roses and create a bouquet. Was this the preamble to her reunion meeting with the fiance she had not seen in five years?
Ada, Laurine and Wilda 1919
The following pages in Laurine’s album show the two of them having fun together again. She wears his prized Machine Gun Squadron hat.
They go for summer drives in her brother Lorne’s big car. He owned a Chevrolet dealership in Drumheller.
Another photo tucked away in the snap shot album (but not glued in place) shows them swinging on a hammock in someone’s back yard.
But there are no Jack-and-Laurine wedding pictures to be found in Laurine’s album, nor in the Cummer photo albums I’ve seen. Nor did they keep a photographic record as they settled into domestic life. Auntie Ada’s photo album has a snap of the two of them relaxing on a beach.
Laurine seems to have stopped pasting photographs into her “snap shot” album after she was married, but elsewhere I’ve found pictures of her with her babies, Billie (born 1922), Allen (1924) and Freddie (1926).
Laurine with Billie and Allen ca. 1924.
The last pages of her album show outings with unidentified families and friends, sometimes swimming in the Red Deer River.
Rather than return to Jack’s homestead in Youngstown, they had bought a house in Drumheller on the banks of the Red Deer River. No more trying to scratch a living as a farmer on the semi-arid plains of the Palliser Triangle. Instead, Jack went into business selling real estate and insurance in partnership with Lorne Jackson.
Lorne Jackson with Allen and Billy Cummer ca. 1926
As with Allenby Cummer’s stamp album, there’s much to be gleaned about life, times and personality from items tucked between the pages of the photo album for safe keeping. Laurine had saved four printed quotations, suitable for framing, from the American writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard.
A champion of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the author of A Letter to Garcia — an essay that was highly influential from the time of the Spanish-American War to the presidency of Richard Nixon — Hubbard espoused a philosophy of individual initiative. He began his writing career as an anarchist and socialist but became an ardent defender of free enterprise. This would have fit well with Jack’s own temperament: he was always looking for new opportunities to advance himself and his family. In the heated political atmosphere of the 1920s, he was anti-Communist and anti-union. According to family lore, he may have applied his skills as an Imperial Army intelligence officer to help break the 1925 Drumheller coal miner’s strike. The pages from Elbert Hubbard in Laurine’s photo album may indicate that she shared the political and socio-economic perspectives of her husband.
No matter where you stood politically or within the socio-economic structure of Southern Alberta, as the 1920s rolled on, things were getting worse. The dry conditions that had convinced Jack to give up on farming worsened. In the years to come, they would be known as the Dust Bowl. Drought and bad harvests made selling real estate and insurance a difficult proposition in Drumheller. Jack was always willing to try new things. At one point in the 1930s, for example, he opened an agency to sell Norge Refrigerators in Calgary: “an ambitious enterprise,” Carl recalled, “in which he attempted to convince potential customers to trade in their ice boxes for the modern appliance.” It was a tough sell during the Great Depression and didn’t end well..
But by then, Jack’s life had changed irrevocably and the bankruptcy of the refrigeration company was just another blow in a series of events that had its worst tragedy in 1929. The last picture I have of Laurine was taken likely in the summer of 1928. She would have been 38 years old; Billy six, Allen four, and Freddie two.
Allen, Laurine, Billy and Freddie Cummer, ca 1928.
The family Bible tells us Laurine Cummer died on February 21, 1929, which was the day before her youngest child, Freddie, turned three. In writing about her sudden death, the Calgary Herald described her as “an active member of Knox United Church” and the wife of a “prominent real estate agent,” and noted that she died in the Drumheller hospital after “a short attack of pneumonia.”
Laurine was buried in Calgary’s Union Cemetery, in the plot maintained by the Jackson family. Jack and Laurine had been married for less than ten years – for 3,375 days, to be exact. They’d known each other for about 17 years. We don’t have much information on what their lives were like together – the oldest child, Billy, was only six-and-a-half when he lost his mother. Most of his childhood memories were of growing up until the loving care of “the Aunties” in Calgary — Ada and Wilda..
There is no one left who can tell us what Laurine Jackson Cummer was like, or what she and Jack were like as a couple. Many of us still remember Jack: a kindly, soft-spoken patriarch with a sparkling sense of humour. “Pops” brought the family together for Christmas Eve where he would contribute to the living room concerts his renditions of Harry Lauder songs. Those family gatherings in the 1950s and 60s included many who would have remembered Laurine — the Aunties and Jack himself, and Uncle Carl and Auntie Ethel when they dropped by. So many questions were left unasked — so many questions had not yet formed. We rely on the textbook notations and the photographs to get a glimpse of what she might have been like, and what she and Jack were like together.
So on this hundredth anniversary of Jack and Laurine’s wedding, I look at artifacts to try to get a sense of them on their big day. They had just come through a long separation, imposed by the war. Jack returned in the summer, and they were married before winter set in. They would have ten more winters together, and nine more summers. I hope the days were filled with laughter and love, and hope that on this day, a hundred years ago, they looked to the future stronger knowing they were together at last.
A couple of weeks ago, a perusal of the Marriage page alerted me that Jack and Laurine’s anniversary was coming up. The Cummer family Bible provides a shorthand of the story yet to come. The last listing on that page indicates that John W. (Jack) married Anne Eugenia (Jean) Bailey in Banff. [1]
The entry does not elucidate that the marriage took place on August 9, 1941. Nor does it explain that, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Jack had been commissioned as a paymaster at the army training base in Camrose, Alberta. It was there he met Jean, a widow from Ontario who was visiting her brother-in-law.
The Deaths page of the family Bible wraps up their stories. Jack died October 26, 1968. Jean, on June 30, 1972. Both were in Calgary and both rest in the Cummer family plot at Union Cemetery.
The publishers of this Bible spent money on producing maps and colour illustrations, but it skimped on the quality of the paper. Someone made a valiant effort to tape the pages together as they came apart with age and use. But the Scotch tape wasn’t made to last a long time either.
We’ve long-since stopped using the family Bible to keep track of births, marriages and deaths — or pledges of temperance. Instead we upload the information to a data cloud, and pay subscription fees to companies like Ancestry-dot-com. The fragile pages of the Bible are still readable after 133 years Will anyone be able to download the family stats from the cloud 133 years from now? That will be 2152, which also will be the 200th anniversary of my birth, and I don’t have much hope that these family history blogs be available in some format by then. One thing I have observed in the decades of gathering information: paper pages and photographs have lasted longer than websites.
But certainly using a Bible to record family events has limitations. There aren’t enough pages to track the births, marriages and deaths — and, who knows, temperance pledges — of Jack and Laurine’s progeny. Of their three children, Allen was killed in the Second World War. But Billy would have five children: Allen, Don, Diane, Denise and Dean. From these grandchildren of Jack and Laurine, there are now nine great-grandchildren and six great-great-grandchildren. Freddie would have three children: Linda, Jim and Annette. There are now six great-grandchildren in Fred’s branch of Jack and Laurine’s family, and five great-great-grandchildren.
That’s quite a legacy to celebrate on today’s hundredth anniversary of Jack and Laurine’s marriage. I’ve been contacting many siblings, nephews, nieces and cousins. I use Facebook. (Yes, there’s some ways in which digital technology is better than pen and ink.) Today we’re celebrating together the 100th anniversary of our common ancestors, Jack and Laurine. Long may they continue to be remembered and celebrated.
Bill Cummer and family July 2011. Back row: Patty Riley; Mark O’Neill, Dean Cummer Stephen MacDonald, Ashley MacDonald holding Charlotte, Allen (Will) Cummer, Jan DeGrass, Don Cummer. Middle row: Cameron MacDonald, Denise Cummer-Dolph, Bill Cummer, Diane Wigington, David Wigington, Kyle Bottoms. Front row: Mike Dolph, Jacob Cummer, Melissa Bottoms.
[1] The Marriages page lists the weddings not only of Jack and Laurine (1919) and Jack and Jean (1941), but Jack’s older brother Charlie to Sarah Webb (1911), his younger brother Harold to Lillian Ramsdell (1922), his youngest brother Carl to Ethel Larson (1929), and his younger sister Wilda’s to Heywood Birchall (1953).
