Image credit: Mel Rothenburger

By Mel Rothenburger

ARMCHAIR MAYOR

ROTHENBURGER: Three headstones by the river, and a rediscovery of ancestors

Dec 2, 2023 | 6:20 AM

RELATIVES SHOW UP in the darndest places at the darndest times. Three of mine did it this week.

Their headstones are side by side in a hayfield off Dairy Road. Massive bank erosion there has brought the river’s edge to within 30 yards of where they rest.

Their names are Alexander Brown, Annie Brown and Kitty McAuley. I didn’t know they were there until I went on a media walk-about to look at the big slide that took away several acres from landowner Wendy Robertson and deposited it in the North Thompson.

She has protected the gravesite for the 30 years she’s owned the place — even installing an iron fence around it — and is worried the river will soon claim them. The headstones are modest and worn from time and weather and it’s impossible to read some of the dates. They’ve been mentioned in various media stories this week on the erosion issue simply as “historic grave markers” of seemingly unknown people.

But they’re much more than that to me. As soon as I heard the names on the markers during our visit I was fascinated to learn more, because Browns and McAuleys are closely connected to McLeans, my mom’s side of my genealogy. So, to my family history files I went.

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Dairy Road is so named because the Hudson’s Bay Company operated an “experimental farm” there, and a pioneer named Donald McAulay produced the first butter in 1859. After that, the area was subdivided into farms and ranches.

Piecing together family history is challenging. Historic records, physical evidence and family recollections often don’t agree with one another, but I think I’ve figured out how those three headstones got where they are.

Alexander Brown came to Kamloops from Aberdeen, Scotland. He married Donald and Mary Ann McAuley’s 16-year-old daughter Margaret ‘Maggie’ McAuley in 1869 and they had two children: Annie, whose gravesite is beside Alexander’s, and George Mill, who married my great aunt Matilda ‘Tilly’ McLean.

(George Mill Brown was killed in 1928 when the McLure Ferry he was operating capsized and threw him into the North Thompson River. He had lost an arm a few years earlier and couldn’t swim in the swift current.)

Annie Brown’s headstone appears to give her year of death as 1876 (the same year George Mill Brown was born) at the age of four, while other records say she was six.

Alexander Brown was only 38 when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage on Sept. 3, 1877. Or was he 35, or 36? The headstone looks like 38, but other records say 35 or 36, so the weather-worn date on the headstone could simply look like a 38.

Anyway, Margaret remarried, to Alexander Gordon, in 1879. They added surrounding land to the homestead Margaret and her first husband had established in the same spot Donald McAuley had farmed, and it became known as the Gordon Ranch, and later the Hayward Ranch.

I have no information on what took little Annie Brown’s life. And I know little about Kitty McAuley — other than her given name was apparently Catherine and that she was Margaret McAuley’s sister — or why she died at 12. Her grave marker and death record agree she died May 10, 1870.

But all that’s just statistics, numbers on a screen. It tells nothing of the courage of our pioneers who travelled from home to the far side of the world in search of better lives, or of their struggles to live off the land in the most meagre of circumstances, or how they persevered and, in their own way, prospered.

The long agricultural history of the Dairy Road-Noble Creek area, and the importance of protecting it, is something that seems to escape those in authority. The preservation of that history, and of the land itself, shouldn’t be taken lightly.

It’s not as if the problems with the river, which have led to the City’s abandonment of the Noble Creek Irrigation System, have developed all on their own. The erosion, according to those who live along the river, has accelerated dramatically in recent years as climate change, wildfires and logging have altered runoff into the North Thompson.

So, the final resting place of Alexander Brown, Annie Brown and Kitty McAuley may soon become a casualty of those changes. At the least, I’m thankful to have ‘met’ them before it happens.

Mel Rothenburger is a regular contributor to CFJC Today, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.