On my way back to Toronto after spending time with my mom and dad in Thornbury Ontario. If I have time I like to stop by the grave of my great great grandparents Mungo Dand and Catherine Ann Munro who are buried in the cemetery of Burns Presbyterian Church in Feversham Ontario.
My great great great grandparents William and Marion Dand are also buried here, but their graves are unmarked.
These two are a tragic story. Catherine died in childbirth delivering her fifth child who himself died two months and 20 days later. Mungo remarried but lost his second wife too and stricken with grief he shot himself in the head with a shotgun in 1902.
Mungo was a hewer of wood and a barnraiser and a farmer and was a well loved neighbour. On my great great grandmotjer’s stone he put this little poem:
Beneath this stone I’ve placed in trust
Not the immortal but the dust
Of one on earth to me most dear
Who learned in youth her God to fear.
I get the sense they were a pious family and his suicide must have been a shock.
Subsequently in 1918 his son William Gordon Dand died tragically as one of the first flu victims in Regina, Sasaktchewan. I have visited his grave too in Regina in the flu section of the city cemetery.
I love connecting with my ancestors.
