In 1920 Bill's grand uncle, Thomas O'Donnell, (Bill's paternal grandmother's brother) emigrated to Canada where he settled and had a family. We first met Uncle Tom in 1972 when he and his wife Anna visited England and again a couple of times in the early eighties when he came alone after Anna had died. We kept in touch with Uncle Tom until his death in 1984.
In the early 1990's one of Tom's grandsons, Bruce, came to England and met up with us. Over dinner he persuaded us to visit Canada as part of our Silver Wedding anniversary celebrations. In 1995 we went and stayed with Bruce's parents Ted and Dot in Victoria BC. Here we met many members of the O'Donnell clan not realising there were so many. These included Tom's other son, Tim, his wife Darlene, their children and Tom's daughter Peggy and her family. We also met Bruce again and two of his sisters Heather and Kresta. There are two other siblings that we couldn't meet on that occasion because of the distance, they being Gail and Gary.
We have since met Gary and his wife Kim in, of all places, Miami USA back in 1997, also Gary has visited England to attend courses and stayed with us. Gail and her family we've yet to meet but Facebook has kept us in touch. On the subject of Facebook, whilst researching his O'Donnell heritage Bill discovered Mark O'Donnell, one of Tim and Darlene's sons. We are sure there are many more cousins scattered across this vast country, who knows where we may meet up with some as a result of this blog.
It has always been on our bucket list to travel through the Rocky Mountains on the train so we have decided to do it. However, notwithstanding the size of Canada, we felt we couldn't visit the country and not meet up with our cousins. In order to achieve this in, July 2017 we shall be travelling the whole breadth of this vast country from Halifax, Nova Scotia in the east to Victoria, British Columbia in the west via Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Banff and the Rocky Mountaineer to Vancouver. While we're in BC we shall meet Mark in Vancouver and other cousins in Victoria. Also we shall visit Salt Spring Island, home of the O'Donnell clan, stay in their windmill and meet more cousins, some we met fleetingly in 1995, and hopefully this time we will maintain contact. This blog will record our trip and we hope you enjoy reading it and looking at some of the pictures.
We shall advise you when there is an update.
