From Amaret Hewson Smyth to Sheila Turvey (February 17, 1978)

Kennedy, Sask., 

February 17, 1978.

Dear Sheila:

I have been fascinated by the two accounts you have sent me this winter, and have re-read them a number of times.  Most of the information I knew in a vague sort of way, with incomplete notes of my own, but to have it all set down with dates and personal notes about the people concerned is really wonderful, you must have spent hours and hours working on it.

If you ever uncover anything further about Major Waters forebears and how he happened to have so much money (was it left to him in a will?) I should be most interested in hearing of it.

When your letter came the beginning of this week with the second account arriving the same day, I got busy and did something I’d been meaning to do for three months.  I knew that up in the attic I had a scrapbook containing an account of Edith Waters’ marriage, but I can’t go up there because I am allergic to the insulation, and somehow I never managed to get Jim to climb up on the stepladder and have a search for the book until this week. The scrapbook belonged to Amaret Dakin Waters, and I thought that you and Ralph might like to have this page of it, I think that the list of presents is very interesting.

When Heather and Thomas were on a holiday in the U.S.A. this past December, they spent a night in Philadelphia in the house where Edith Waters (Capt. Thomas’s granddaughter) had lived for many years, her friend, who is over ninety, still lives there.  When Cousin Ede died she left a large painting to our branch of the family, and Thomas now has it in the living room of his house on the farm he purchased last summer, a few miles from my father’s.  It is of Capt. Thomas’s ship, The Wealth of Nations – the picture is no great work of art, but the frame is beautiful, and we are all glad that Thomas has it.  They also brought back some small photos, I have just looked at them once and forget who all was included, really all I remember were two of Major Waters’ daughters, Jane and Nancy, I think, as young women, and one of Barbara Bake – and Barbara Mills looks surprisingly like her.

They also brought back an old letter framed in glass on both sides, the letter is badly worn, as if it had been carried in a wallet for many months, but I have copied it as best I can, thinking you might be interested in it; I see from your notes that John died two months after it was written.

This is the only letter I have ever seen written to Capt. Thomas by his family and, like you, I have often wondered what happened to the rest of them. They did not come to Saskatchewan or go to Benjamin Waters’ family in Massachusetts, so I would guess maybe they stayed in Nova Scotia, possibly with Charlotte Gilpin.

We have had several letters from Heather since she got to Papua New Guinea about the middle of January, she is teaching at a male teachers’ college near Rabaul in East New Britain, all the other teachers are men, and I think she finds it rather lonely.  It is hot, 80^o to 85^o, but cools off at night, and it rains several inches every afternoon or evening. Rabaul is in an extinct volcano crater and they have quite frequent small earthquakes, but soon after she got there they had a 6.5 one, the strongest for years. She expects to have a garden, says anything you put in the ground will grow, she rents a duplex, it has electricity, water and a telephone, so is not so primitive as she had thought it might be. 

Daddy and Edith just got back yesterday from their trip to England, they are coming here for supper tomorrow to tell us all about it.

We have had a very cold winter.  Since the beginning of November there has only been one day when the temperature got as warm as 32^o F.  We usually look for the snow to go any time after the middle of March, so hopefully there shouldn’t be more than six weeks of winter left now, it is always so nice to see the green things start poling through the earth again.

With love to you all,

                 Amaret