Patience Ingram 1896 – 1983

My mother was born on Hann’s Island in Harbour Buffett, Newfoundland, on June 30,1896. She was the third child of Thomas Hann and Victoria Smith but neither of the first two children had survived beyond a few weeks. Later there would be another sister and a brother. It was the year that the Klondike

Gold Rush began and Henry Ford test-drove his horseless Quadricyle in the streets of Detroit, but these things meant nothing to the improvised people of outport Newfoundland, most of whom led a hand to mouth existence.

At age seven she began her schooling but after just three years, she had to leave and go to work as a servant or “in service” as it was locally known. She fell in love in her mid teens but the young man, like so many of his generation, died on the battlefields of Europe in World War 1. Later she married and had a daughter, only to be widowed at the age of 21. She was twenty-four when she married my father then a widower with four children. He was also seventeen years her senior. When my father died in 1974 at the age of 95, they had been married for fifty-four years and had begotten another five children of which I am the youngest.

Like most women of the day, she accepted her role of wife, mother, and homemaker, leaving all major decisions to her husband. With such a large family, she was always busy. There were nine or ten sheep which she would shear every spring, then there would be the washing, carding and spinning of the wool. Everyone in the family wore socks, mittens and at least one sweater that she had knitted. There was a vegetable garden in which she took great pride and a separate potato garden with which all of the family were expected to help. Like most women of the time, she helped her husband cure the fish each summer and sometimes went in the boat herself to catch some cod for the family table. Sunday was her only day of rest and even than there were meals to prepare.

In 1956 at the age of sixty, my mother faced her greatest challenge to date and one that would change the rest of her life. she was diagnosed with stomach and bowel cancer. If many consider Cancer a death sentence today, it was even more so fifty-four years ago but my mother beat the odds by making a full recovery, though she had lost two-thirds of her stomach and part of the bowel. Never again would she be able to do the physical work that had been so much a part of her life. Fortunately Newfoundland had become a province of Canada in 1949 and life, even in remote communities, had improved greatly. My father who was now 77 and blind, received a pension from the Canadian government and my mother was now eligible for some monetary assistance herself. One of my brothers purchased a washing machine for her which, since we had no electricity, was operated by a small gasoline motor. In my final year of high school, I nevertheless helped with many of the household chores, which still included fetching water from a nearby well. A year later the family moved to a smaller house in another part of the community where they had running water.