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thur was allowed to have a violin and take lessons but his mother demanded he promise he would never play it for dances. He kept his word AND he played for many years at many dances, but not on that violin.
Mary Ellen's older brother George Day and his family also arrived from Wisconsin in 1906 and their homestead was not far from the Carey home. Their daughter Sadie Newman was widowed after only three years of marriage and became a member of the Carey home. Around that time Mary Emiline suffered a stroke and Sadie was likely needed to help care for her prior to her death in 1922. And so Mary Ellen's niece Sadie assumed much the same position in the household that the sister-in-law had enjoyed.
In 1927 Arthur married Beatrice Webster, Lavina Muriel[Merle] sailed for Europe and Myres with Mary Ellen, Sadie and Mary set off in a new Chevrolet to visit the families of Clara and Valley in Alberta. The following summer they hit the road again, this time headed for Wyoming and the ranch of John Day whom Grandma hadn't seen since he disappeared down that dusty South Dakota trail when she was a child.
Later that fall, the good times were beginning to have "run their course". Daughter Mary was taken to the Wynyard hospital fourty miles away for an appendectomy, meanwhile Mary Ellen fell and broke her hip and had to be taken to far off [in those days] Saskatoon. Myres was beside himself with grief over his wife's suffering. Before either Mary or her mother was well enough to return home Myres suffered a massive stroke and passed away within hours.
The dry years were beginning. Crops were not abundant. Medical expenses had piled up. Myres had funded the car and the trips by mortgaging the farm. A bill for the lumber that Arthur and his father-in-law, Eugene Webster had used to build a small house on the south quarter was due. Mary Ellen, daughter Mary and niece Sadie were alone in the big house. There was nothing to do but allow the lumber company to take the new house and a very bitter daughter-in-law came back to live in the parental home of my father Arthur. It was not long before Sadie was "needed" elsewhere.
As a child I recall hearing my grandmother sitting in her room on a Sunday, reading her well-worn bible, softly singing "In the Sweet By and By" and almost always reading and re-reading old, old letters from a battered old trunk. It was not until years later that I learned that little old trunk had carried all of Sarah Shepherd's worldly possessions from England about 1858.
And in the 1960's all those letters were still in the trunk. The trunk was now in a storage shed in Foam Lake where the Arthur Careys lived, for the farm where my brother and I were born had been sold. My Grandmother had finally passed on in 1954 after too many years of advanced Alzheimer's in a world that was not then equipped to care for her.
My cousin Lavina, youngest daughter of Aunt Clara arrived to interview my father. She had recently joined the Church of Latter Day Saints and was in search of her roots. To her delight, some of the letters were from the families that Sarah Shepherd and James Day had left behind in the little villages of Meare, Mark, Binegar and Wedmore in Somersetshire, England. Grandma had also tucked safely into her mother's trunk all the clippings, death notices and pictures from her husband's ancestors back in Lambton County, Ontario.
Unfortunately, Lavina removed the trunk and all it's treasures to her home in British Columbia and when she passed away in 1997 it was not returned to me, but it's contents served to guide Lavina to the history of our British ancestors in Somerset and Lavina inspired me to continue the work in genealogy.
I pray that battered little old, leather-covered steamer trunk and it's precious cargo is as safe today and will be as safe tomorrow as it was in the care of Grandma Mary Ellen Day Carey.
June Carey Pearce
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