Hello Janice
Lovely to meet you!
Sarah (Sissy) went to Canada in about 1916, and was employed as an indentured servant. She met her husband, Thomas Chappell, quite soon. My mum was their first child, born in 1917 in Windsor, Ontario. He was from Manchester and had moved to Canada when a young boy. The family lived mostly in Montreal for most of Mum's childhood, though later moved back and forth between Montreal, Belfast, Manchester and London during the 1930s' Depression. They struggled to find work in Canada; one of the reasons was a serious rift with the Chappell family, and so they had very little support. They stayed with Aunt Lizzie and her mother, Sissy's stepmother, when they were in Belfast. Sissy eventually settled in Islington, London, and died there in about 1953, before I was born.
I don't know if you know that the Ussher family lost two brothers in WW1: one, James, I think, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and the other, I think Robert, just 9 days before the end of the war. Both these stories are, of course, poignant, but Robert was sent home because he had the Spanish Flu, and Lizzie and her mum nursed him back to health only to have him sent back to the Front. I don't think Sissy was there at that point.
Mum always maintained that Sissy Ussher was badly treated by an older brother after their mother died, and that was the main reason she left for Canada. I never heard his name. Before that, she had been working in the linen mills in Belfast from the age of 9. I think she might have been the only girl amongst 10 siblings: another reason she bonded with Lizzie and her stepmother.
I knew about Great Uncle Albert in South Africa. One of his children eventually moved to England: Dorset. Her name was Colleen and she had 4 daughters. I can't remember her married surname. She was a Christadelphian: they might have records. I'm saying 'was' more because we no longer have contact, which fizzled out after Mum died in 2010, though Colleen would probably also be in her 90s now anyway.
There's a local history book about the making of Greenfield Park in Montreal, in which my mother's family features. She contributed a chapter about her childhood memories of the area.
Dory
