This is my accounting of my family, extending up from me, through my parents, and beyond theirs a generation or two. I mention names, birth places, and some key events for each person, with links under their name if there’s more history to share.
I was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on March 1, 1966. Since 1989, I’ve had a career creating computer graphics, graphic design, animation, and video. Since 2011, I’ve been an eLearning Media Developer at Vancouver Community College. My sister Kimberley was also born in Saskatoon, on July 29, 1968.
My mother was Angela Huntley Love (nee Clarke). Angela was born in Victoria, BC, on June 18, 1931. In her twenties, she had a successful amateur musical theatre career in her hometown, and was known as a talented pianist and opera and pop singer. She was a member of the Victoria Gilbert and Sullivan Society and The Starlight Theatre Company. Angela met my father when they both worked at CHEK TV in Victoria in the early 1950s. She died aged 64, on March 8, 1995 at Riverview Hospital in Port Coquitlam.
Other names in my mother’s family tree are Marks and Gillman. Before those families came to Victoria (via ships landing in Quebec), they were based in places like Horsham, London, and Newmarket, in the UK. I am named after two men in my mother’s family: her father Ernest Huntley Clarke, and her mother’s brother John Edward Marks.
Unfortunately, my sister Kim and I don’t know where her first name Kimberley came from; that name doesn’t seem to be attached to anyone else in our family, although her middle name Anne likely came from our mother’s grandmother, Eunice Anne Gillman.
My father was James Evan Love, born in Prince Rupert, BC, Oct. 21, 1921. His family includes the names Owens, Callbeck, and McConnell. His given names James and Evan were passed on to his son James Eric and (through his daughter Maggie) to his grandson, Evan Middleton. Dad had a long career in radio, TV, and RF systems. He died at the age of 68, at Burnaby General Hospital on Nov. 4, 1989.
My father’s Dad and uncles all came to Prince Rupert, BC from Summerside, PEI in the first few years after 1900. That generation of Love brothers all took jobs in the fields of energy and communications during Rupert’s early days. My dad and two of his brothers followed similar paths to their father and uncles, going into careers in hydro-electric, electrical, and RF communications.
Dad’s family house is still standing in Prince Rupert, over 105 years after it was built by Grandpa Love.
Our Love family line is well researched, and has been found to extend back to Clanranald (MacDonald), based in the Hebrides of Scotland, at Castle Ormidale. So far, the oldest direct relation I’ve found online is a man named John Love, who was born in Perthshire, Scotland in 1793. He perished in the wreck of a ship called “The Jessie” off of St. Paul Island, not far from Charlottetown, PEI, on December 24th, 1824. He’d have only been 30 or 31 when he died. His wife lived into her nineties, and their descendants lived in PEI for generations after that.
My mother’s father Ernest (whom we knew as “Poppy”) had one of the most colourful lives: he left his home in Sussex, England at the age of fourteen (around 1913), and made the cross-atlantic sailing from Liverpool to Montreal on an ocean liner called “The Megantic”. He didn’t travel alone, but who he was with and why he came over at such a young age were never explained. He once told my Dad that he was disowned by his father and had been mistreated by his uncles. I speculate that he might have been a “Home Child” youth, shipped to Canada by the British government to live with Canadian families as cheap labour for the new world. Homeless kids and those from families who could not afford to feed them were all candidates, hosted by various churches and the Salvation Army. After he was in Canada for some time, when he was about 17, he applied to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force for World War I, and listed his church as “Salvation Army”.
After a few months, he was honourably released for health reasons. At 18, Poppy applied to the Northwest Mounted Police (soon known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police). He served with distinction for 30 years, all over western Canada. Later, he worked at a photo shop in Victoria, and then became the manager of the Hotel Yates for many years. He was a prolific photographer, and studied drawing and painting in his later years.
There are many Scottish and English roots in the families of both my parents. An Ancestry DNA test I took a few years ago has borne-out just how waspy and west european my forebears were. On my mother’s side, names like Gillman or Marks are of some French and German origin.
