A Child who lost her connections

On February 1, 1901, a little girl was born to Phillip and Barbara Mackie. They named her Alexandrina, and she had a big brother James, a sister Jean, and later two sisters, Barbara and Willamina (sp?).

But before she could grow up in this family, her father died, and so did her smallest sister, Willamina, the last tragically at the home of her grandfather, who was a woodsman.

With no husband and five children to raise, Barbara must have been distraught, so she accepted the offer of her sister Helen, and her brother-in-law John Jaffray, to take Allie, as she was called, to Canada with them.

What must the little girl have felt as she climbed aboard a large ship bound for Canada? Did she feel that she had been thrown out of her home? Or was she excited to be going to the New World for a new life with her aunt and uncle?

Allie never got back to Scotland, although her Uncle Jack did, and we have a photograph of him with his sister-in-law Barbara, and another niece, Sheila. Over the years, Allie married in Canada, a man by the name of Albert Steels, and she kept in touch with her mother, through money orders at Christmas, but her children, Albert Murray Steels and Patricia Steels never knew their grandmother.

In 1946, Allie died of cancer, leaving her husband to bring up the children. It was many years later that Patsy met her cousin Sheila in England, but by then her grandmother was gone, and the family had lost touch with their Scottish roots. When Pat and her husband Joe Nelles went to Scotland in 1985 they travelled to Kemnay, and they searched out other family members in Aberdeen. Now Pat wants to reach out to Kemnay again, to go back to some of those roots, because Scotland felt like home all those years ago.

If anyone there would like to correspond, it would be quite wonderful. pjnelles@linetap.com in Canada.