#220 Visited India’s Cousins Mary and Owen Halfpenny

Although the cousins address was Mulgrave their house was at Sand Point.

A 5-minute history of the people in Nova Scotia.

When you date the girl, you date the family. When I talked to India I learned about how things were growing up she` spoke fondly of Ganny.

This was India's early childhood named for her grandmother and it stuck.

India enjoyed spending time with Ganny.

Ganny was a charismatic lady and she liked to play bridge even traveling to tournaments.

Ganny, Mrs. White, India’s Grandmother was born in Nova Scotia.

One day she met India’s future Grandfather and at a reasonably young age moved to Greensboro and spent a lifetime there.

As India’s Mom was growing up, she would sometimes ask Ganny who are the relatives on her side of the family. Ganny would say there's not a lot to tell you about my side of the family. She said I didn’t have any brothers and sisters or cousins and for a long time I had lived in Nova Scotia but there was just no family there so that's that. It was something that was never talked about and the questions stopped soon enough.

It would appear that Ganny had a falling out with her in-laws and must have said you'll never see me again and I'll never come back to this town and never looked back. I believe this anger stayed with her such that she made out like she had no family still living.

At about 60 years old Miss Beal, India’s Mom found out that she had a ton of family in Nova Scotia. She wanted to meet them wanted to get acquainted and that set up the Nova Scotia connection.

She reconnected with them on two separate trips with some of the other sister's Nancy and Tommye. I’m not sure why but we weren’t part of those visits.

We thought it would be nice to visit since we in the area and so we did. We left Baddeck and were on the way to meet Owen and Mary. They're not spring chickens but I'll tell you what they were a hoot. So with all that as a backdrop, I'll tell you a little bit about our visit.

They knew we were coming and they had made lunch and it was very nice of them to do. I had told them I had a big rig and we discussed how to handle that. I dropped the rig at a gas station back in town and drove two or three miles to their house in that they are on a small country road.

I regret not taking any pictures of our visit.

They invited us in and had a nice little get to know each other visit. I talked to Owen a good bit we talked shop. Everybody talked to everybody and come to find out Owen and had a bit of a health scare recently. He had a heart attack but he looks to be feeling good right now. He said I’m lucky to be alive and it had been a very close call. He had made some pretty significant changes to the house. They had installed a brand new heating and air system as they had always just burned wood. Now that he had his heart attack he didn't feel like he could cut five cords of wood each spring anymore. We sat and talked and reminisced. We had a wonderful time and then had the most marvelous dinner/ lunch. They introduced us to the most interesting pickles ever. It was a Canada thing. They are pickles like bread and butter type but they're in a sauce that's like a honey mustard type thing.

Bicks Sweet mustard pickles

I haven't seen them in America but they were so good and she gave us about half a jar of them to take with us. She said they’re so popular where they live it's like deviled eggs at a covered dish. There will be several jars at any picnic you go to.

They lived right on the water and I looked around it was clear that a ton of people made their living fishing, netting, and lobstering. I believe Owen said that they had made a living doing that for a long time and that his son still does. Over the years of profits would come and go and that it had been kind of bleak for a while.

He also told me about behavior that the lobsters seem to exhibit and are one of the reasons they're easy to catch. He said that they had an annual migration. if you can imagine hundreds of them even thousands of them slowly canvassing across the bottom of the ocean-going from one place to the next. They're kind of on some sort of trek like wildebeest and we just put the traps where they are walking by. Of course, this is happening in Maine and the Northern parts and that's why they got so many lobsters I guess.

We spend a few hours with the friendliest people ever and then we moved on and went back to Truro Fairgrounds.

Although I have a separate section of pictures for Truro. There's not a lot to say it was a Fairgrounds that's about it. The exciting thing I did in Truro was I went to the hardware store and bought a drop cord so that I can take a nice hot bath. The hook-up was a 30 amp service and there's not enough power to do baseboard heat and a hot bath without tripping the breaker. I dropped the power cord out the bathroom window to a different 30 amp service. The water heater has two 2000 watt elements which are 17 amps each. I would plug one into the washer outlet and the other into the dryer outlet. This works fine when you have a 50 amp service. The cord was my workaround when the power is limited.

We left the cousins and stayed at Truro fair again.