Maud Burke was born on 6th June, 1910 in Achill Sound, Co Mayo, Ireland.  Maud sailed from Cobh, Co Cork aboard the Dresden on 24th March, 1929 arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada on 31st March, 1929.  She proceeded by train to Montreal on 1st April, 1929. 

Jim Coleman was born to Mary and John Coleman on February 13, 1909 in Turloughmore, The Neale, County Mayo, Ireland.  He was baptised James Joseph Coleman a day later on February 14 in The Neale Catholic Church by Fr John O'Malley, the renowned Land League advocator and leader.  Parents were expected to have their children baptised as soon as possible after birth, a responsibility that usually fell to the grandparents and sponsors.  Jim had the same sponsors as his sister, Mary, and brothers, Pat and John, Uncle James Davoren from the Island of Inishmacatreer and Cousin Margaret Holleron from the Island of Duras (near the village of Cong), two very picturesque islands in Lough Corrib.

He began his schooling at The Neale National School in 1915 but transferred to Gortjordan National School in 1917 when his family relocated to Cahermaculick, about five miles from Turloughmore, on the advent of the demise of British rule in most of Ireland.  It was from here that he left for Canada arriving in the Port of Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1931 before travelling by train to Montreal.

Jim and Maud met in the early 30’s at a social gathering that took place after a meeting that Jim or both of them had attended.  According to his children, he was a member of The Hibernians and a founding member of the Innishfail Social and Sports Association.  Martha writes, “He had great penmanship and we have seen this in his minute books.”  Jim and Maud were married in Montreal on 21 November, 1935, a special event marking the beginning of the Canadian Branches of Clan Coleman.

1st Generation Canadian

November21, 1935 

The word ‘parlour’ has a number of meanings today but when I was a child it was the name given to the room set aside with quality furniture and always kept tidy for the reception of visitors.   The walls and sideboards were decorated with family photographs.  My earliest recollection of my Uncle Jim had its basis in a photograph that hung over the fireplace in the parlour.  In it were four tall young men and I can still picture them there.  It was a photograph that always held a certain fascination for me and it’s easy enough to understand why.  My father was one of the young men in the photograph.  To me back then, he was a very tall and strong man and yet there towering over him was Uncle Jim.  He was a giant of a man. 

When I visited my parents in 1974, all the photos had disappeared.  No one seemed to know what had happened to them.  To me it felt like the family had lost part of its history – visual at least – and I was very disappointed.  

Anyone who has read any Irish history would be aware of the importance of family genealogy to the Irish and so my interest in it shouldn’t come as a surprise.  From a very young age, I was always keen to hear about family particularly those members whom I had not ever met.  From time to time whenever I was alone with my father, I would talk to him about his brothers and cousins.  I can still hear Dad as if it were just yesterday, “Ah, he was a fine stamp of a man, very bright and sure couldn’t he do anything with his hands!”   And “Yeah to that” I hear Sonny Daveron, Jim’s first cousin, call out.  As Sonny reported to me in 1986, when I visited him at home in Inishmacatreer, the Daveron family had a lot of time for Jim.  They loved to see him call which he did quite regularly.  I suspect that it was here that Jim developed his love for woodwork and carpentry.  As well as being keen farmers, Sonny and his father, Pat Daveron, were proud of their reputation as boat builders, producing small to medium-sized wooden boats.  They were master craftsmen and, according to Sonny, Jim was in his element when helping them out.  He loved the work and was a very fast learner readily acquiring new skills and techniques along the way.  You can imagine how delighted I was when Jim’s daughters from Montreal, Martha and Mary, as well as his grandson, Kevin, met Sonny Daveron during our Clan Reunion in Ireland in 2004 as Sonny passed away the following year.

Farmer Pete O’Brien who lived a few homesteads down the village from us was without question the village historian with his share of oracular qualities.  His family worked as herdsman in the townland of Cahermaculick long before it became a farming village during the First World War.  Pete knew the intimate history of everyone who settled or grew up in the village.  I got to know him well and had worked for him on the farm on a regular basis during my school years.  He was well read, very intelligent, an extraordinary comic and storyteller and always good humoured.  I have never met anyone who could see and exploit the bright side of life as well as he could and find humour in the most adverse or trying situations.  Sardonic it might seem but in his case it was never scornful and was instead the product of a very sharp wit.  According to him, Jim Coleman and he were the best of cobbers who were in and out of many scrapes together.  “The big fella?  There was no one like him.  We all missed him when he left for Canada.  The village was never the same again.  He had such a way with people, so unassuming and dignified.  He was a great stamp of a man and a great worker who could fix anything”. 

To an Australian, the Roaring Forties are powerful trade winds that have helped so many sailing ships make Australian ports.  To a Canadian, the Roaring Twenties were boom times in Canada.  The country had never been more prosperous with unemployment at its lowest and the earnings of individuals and businesses at their highest.  This was the Canada that eighteen year old Maud Burke from Achill Sound had entered in March 1929 to start a new life for herself, and she certainly had every reason to feel good about her decision to leave her homeland and to feel optimistic about the future.  Despite the tyranny of distance and its very real impact on when people like Maud would return to visit parents and family, I’m quite sure that Maud, given the very good conditions in Montreal, would have worked out in her mind, a short time after settling into life there, a time frame for such a visit.   But eight months later without warning all plans and prosperity came to a grinding halt with the stock market collapse in New York, Toronto, Montréal and around the world on October 29, 1929.  The crash set off a chain of events that plunged Canada and the rest of the world into a decade-long depression with devastating effects in both the industrialized countries and those which exported raw materials.

This was the Canada that Jim Coleman entered and adopted in 1931.  It was quite a gamble and would have taken considerable courage and determination.  The Great Depression caused Canadian workers and companies great hardship.  Business activity fell sharply and many companies were wiped out affecting everyone.  There was massive unemployment reaching a staggering 27% at the height of the Depression in 1933.  Between October 1929 and June 1933, the gross national product dropped 43% and families saw most or all of their assets disappear.  The big city would have been foreign to him having come from a farming background, and I’m sure had conditions permitted he would have headed for the countryside.  But, while all of Canada suffered greatly, the regions and communities hit hardest were those dependent on primary industries such as farming, mining and logging as commodity prices plummeted around the world making those regions to suffer the greatest decrease in per capita income.  To add to the hardships, nature was working against many Canadian farmers as a devastating drought on the Prairies wiped out the wheat crops. 

This dramatic economic downturn and social upheaval and depression encountered by Jim Coleman when he arrived in Montréal would have taxed his creativity and resourcefulness to the utmost.  Things were different in the community he left behind in South Mayo as the people there had learned to cope after decades of hardships.  Sadly, Jim hardly had time to settle in to conditions in Montreal before learning of the death of not one but both his parents within a fortnight of each other in January and February of 1932.  It must have been such a difficult time for him, a young man 22 years of age.  The comforting thought of returning home to visit his parents could no longer be part of his plans.

In Montreal the workers had nowhere or no one to turn to and felt helpless, and because of this the Great Depression was a turning point for Canada.  Before 1930, the government intervened as little as possible, believing the free market would take care of the economy, and that churches and charities would take care of society. But in the 1930s a growing demand arose for the government to step in and create a social safety net with minimum hourly wages, a standard work week, and programs such as medicare and unemployment insurance.  The Depression also led the government to be more present and proactive in the economy. It brought about the creation in 1934 of the Bank of Canada, a central bank to manage the money supply and bring stability to the country’s financial system. 

When I asked Jim’s children recently if they could recall what type of work he did in Montreal, I wasn’t surprised when they told me that he worked on projects in the woodworking field making furniture such as wardrobes and finishing and staining them.  He also enjoyed making different types of leather bags and his attention to detail showed great skill and patience.  He worked for anyone who hired him and in his free time worked for himself creating and making those quality household goods that people were happy to pay for.  He worked underwater on the construction of the Mercier Bridge which is one of the main bridges connecting to the Island of Montreal.

By all reports, Jim was quite gregarious and very sociable.  Patricia and I first met Maud in Montreal during the summer of 1997.  It was a Sunday Morning and Maud’s daughter, Martha, had rung to say that her husband, Rudy, and she accompanied by her mother Maud would pick us up at our hotel and take us to St Patrick’s Cathedral for mass.  I had been looking forward to this meeting for years.  It was a wonderful moment and I couldn’t get over how well Maud looked.  One wouldn’t normally expect to be able to talk about too many things during mass in St Patrick’s but on this occasion that certainly wasn’t the case.  Maud and I sat together and we talked about so many things.  Martha was quite surprised to see her mother speak so freely about the past.   It was obvious to me that I was in the presence of a woman of extraordinary strength and character.  Her memory of the past, particularly the 30’s and 40’s, had lost nothing of its sharpness with the passing of the years.  Maud talked about Jim with the warmth of the personality she was describing.  He was an excellent conversationalist and had many friends.  

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