Giving Thanks

Happy Thanksgiving to my American, or at least transplanted Canadian and Scottish, friends and relatives. Today, across the USA, Thanksgiving dinner is being served at family gatherings and for genealogists, it is all about families. "Disturbing the dead and irritating the living" as the saying goes!

As my mother was born in Detroit, I must admit to occasionally feeling ties to my neighbours to the south. When I was young, I can now admit, these feelings typically resulted in feigning a mysterious illness so that I could stay home from school and watch the Macey's Thanksgiving Day parade on television. My recollection is that it sometimes worked but if I held the thermometer on the light bulb for too long, my mother, the trained nurse that she was, just didn't buy the 114 Fahrenheit degree fever that I was faking.

Here, in Canada, we celebrated Thanksgiving, a harvest holiday celebrated in various forms around the world, last month. In my family, we have started breaking away somewhat from the North American tradition of the big turkey dinner - likely something that would have been good news to the 'bird' pictured above with my cousin, Donald Hadden, in a photo taken in Garrick, Saskatchewan in the late 1930's.

So to my cousin David Hadden and his family in Florida and Louisiana, Hadden descendants that I've learned are in the Pasadena, California area, friends Doug and Suzie in Florida, and John Perkins and family in Louisiana, to the Kimmerly cousins known and unknown and, to the Faulkner and Knox cousins of my wife Ellen with whom we have not yet connected but one day hope to - enjoy your time together. I know that you are thankful for it.