Victoria MacGregor | The Woman with the Cameo

Victoria MacGregor | The Woman with the Cameo

Heather Murphy: Hi, Victoria. Thanks for joining me today. I am looking forward to hearing your stories. Could you start by introducing yourself please?

Victoria MacGregor: Terrific. Thanks Heather, for the invitation and giving me this terrific opportunity, I'm actually quite humbled, because I've listened to some of your podcasts and there's some very exceptional and interesting guests you've had on. So to be included in that group, I'm really quite, quite humbled.

 So me I'm Victoria MacGregor. I've been retired for six years and I worked in the world of business management, I was more the holding it together side of management. you probably call me the go-to person in the office, the person with the band-aid and all the knowledge that that was me. I'm self-taught internet, everything I know about the internet I've learned along the way back when we use Netscape. Those types of things. And when Amazon was still a jungle in south America, that's when I started. So a little bit about my personal, really personal stuff. Is that I migrated to Australia from Canada, about 16 years ago and behind I left two adult children, my aging parents who 100% approved of my move and a lot of friends and family.

So I literally sold everything I owned, everything. Packed five suitcases moved around the world. You couldn't get any farther from, I moved from Montreal to Brisbane. If you went any farther, you were going back again. That's how far I moved and I'm on what my son calls a Can-Aussie. I'm Canadian by birth, Australian by choice and by circumstance, really.

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you. And how did you start becoming interested in learning about your family?

Victoria MacGregor: Yeah. I thought about that a bit. I thought about that because like having listened to some of your other podcasts, and I had to think about that one, but, and I needed to narrow it down. Because there's a lot of things that interest me about family history, but I think it goes back to when I was in my late teens.

It's a small little thing, but it goes back to my I'm in my late teens, my grandmother dies my mother's mother and all, I get passed a cameo, a traditional little, ivory cameo gold Guild around it, nothing of great value, but it came to me from my grandmother. I know I used to wear that all the time on a black shoe lace, believe it or not around hanging around my neck until about 10 years after that, I was given a photograph, and my great-grandmother Ester Alice Longworth. And she's wearing the cameo. I didn't know that when it was handed to me that it belonged to my great-grandmother. So at that point in time, the cameo came out of my jewelry box, shoestring came off and it's now behind me, they're in a shadow box. Can't wear it, not even tempted to wear it. There was something about having a tangible piece of my, something that belonged to my great-grandmother and a photograph of her wearing it, that it all became quite real. She was a real person. She had worn this.

At the time it was the 1990s at that point, I was also given an old family tree that one of my mother's cousins, was working on and that's before internet and before Ancestry and all the other programs that are out there now, and Beth had done an brilliant job following my mother's father's side of the family.

And it's huge. It's massive. I have a lot of American family that I didn't know. I had, that had migrated to North Dakota in the 1800s. but that all went away. It just went in a folder in the drawer until I retired and then retirement, we, we travel a lot then with COVID we don't travel alot.

And I needed something to do really at home busy work. And I wanted to do something. Having said, busy work. I want to do something that wasn't just to fill time. I wanted something to do. That was substantial. And so I pulled out that old faded Xerox copy of the family tree. And what struck me about it is that the women, aren't usually the starting point of research. It's the men. Now I get it. Women are hard to follow for many, many reasons. but that's not the starting point of the story. So I decided I was going to go down. Esther, Alice Longworth family, all wanted to know about her. And what was her story, the lady with the cameo. I did that and it was really interesting, I guess, a few of the, the takeaways were that it's quite easy to, especially with the, you know, with the internet and everything that's available. I was able to go back to with Esther Alice, about 250 years, quite easily, tick flick, chick flick all through everything, lined up perfectly census documents, the parents, everything, all lines up beautifully.

Oh, I had this Eureka moment one day while I was here at my desk, putting it all together. And I realized that Esther Alice Longworth and her husband, John Joseph Helm were actually third cousins. And I find that quite fascinating, but if you look at the time there from Lancashire England, the 17 hundreds and 18 hundreds probably not uncommon at hall for that to happen. I was really interested in that and that, that led me to wonder about a couple of things.

Esther Alice migrated from the UK to Canada in 1914 with her four daughters. Couple of things about that are really interesting. 1914 is two years after the Titanic disaster. And she sails with two of her daughters, but lets two of the other daughters, my grandmother and her sister travel alone. They're 15 and 18 traveling from Liverpool to Montreal, on a ship the same route that Titanic took and you just can't help, but wonder what was the logic behind it or what were the worries?

Um, how were the girls? They were third class. They weren't first class passengers. What was done for them. Was there anything done for them? I found that fascinating, but more so the point is Esther Ellis was in her fifties. And she moved from a world that she knew who the roots were big and deep and she moved to Canada where she didn't know anybody except the husband who I don't think they were all that close. That made me look more at her. My mother was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, but when she was 21 and freshly married she for all intents and purposes migrated to Montreal, not far, but she moved and she left all her friends and family in Toronto, not, not a big distance, but in 1945, that is a big move.

So what I migrated here in my forties, to Australia, not everybody got it. Not everybody understood why I was doing it. Just out of curiosity, I moved for love. I didn't move for work. I didn't move from a horrible place, an unsafe place. I moved from a really nice place to a really nice place. but there's sacrifices you make when you move.

And I, and I think when I started to look at Esther Alice and realize that she, she must have had her reasons for doing that Oh, I think it sort of validated my, my moving, the questions I might've had around why people move and why people make huge changes on their lives in their forties or fifties. I felt a little bit better about all of that.

The other thing that struck me. And anybody that we all do. We read census documents, we read birth documents and birth registers. Esther Alice was born in 1861 and she's one of seven children. On the census document of 1871 she's not listed and she was only 10 years old. I find her on her aunt's census document of 1871.

But what's also significant about 1871 census is it lists her brother Joseph as, and this is just shocking to me, but he's listed as an idiot since birth and poor Joseph goes on to die to workhouse in 1880. But I wonder was she living with her aunt because Joseph was a lot of work was it too hard for her mother with the six other children and so she farmed for Esther Alice out? I don't know.

But I also have a disabled son. Brilliant, wonderful young man lives independently in Canada, but I began to think about that and what was his disability. And did he have the same disability that my son has? And to find information about poor Joseph Longworth, impossible. It's it's near impossible. So, uh, the story behind all that is, but I really do believe, I do really believe that it was too much for her mother who dies in 1874, 3 years after the census, when Esther Alice is, is only 13, quite possibly too much for her seven children and one with the disability.

I find all that really quite, there's some crossover there between her life and mine and possibly more subpoint her mother's life, my two times great-grandmother, in that she had to let one of her children go to help one of the other children. perhaps I don't know, I have two children and they're both fabulous and, but I did leave. I did leave to my. And I left a, a disabled son, well cared for very independent. So it did give me a bit of comfort when I was reading that story.

So Esther Alice's, his daughter married a fellow, my grandfather Claremore, and I never knew him. He died before I was born, but my mother was a great. Super eight video taker or home movie maker in, in the fifties and the sixties. And what I have to add to that story of him is I have video of him in the early 1950s. There's course. I don't know his, what his voice was like, but I can see him and he's moving and he's looking at the camera. He's interacting with this beautiful Saint Bernard dog that I knew 10 years later I could watch. I've got it's 19 seconds. That's all it is is 19 seconds, but that 19 seconds tells me he was kind, he was gentle.

He loved his dog. Is there with his two grandchildren. You can see him just interacting with them but he was focusing on the dog and it's, it's quite a beautiful thing. So there's something about photographs or home movies that bring people to life.

Heather Murphy: Well, you said that with COVID hitting with retirement, and then COVID hitting that you were looking for something substantial to do with your time. How do you think that the efforts in your family history have measured up to what you hoped it would lead to when you started?

Victoria MacGregor: Part of what I, have discovered is a way to share with my family. when I first did all of this, I created this photo book. It's it's fabulous. It's great. And in it, because of the way technology is today in it, I have downloaded copies of birth registers 300 year old stuff, marriage fans from the UK, put them all in there and all I sent this off to be printed.

And when it came back, it's beautiful, but it had a really embarrassing typo in it. Really a bad one don't show to grandma kind of bad one. And so I had to send it off to get printed again. And which I'd done. but of course, by the time I got it back, I found more research. I'd found more documents. Some new photographs had popped up.

So what do you do? Do you continue just printing out new books, updated edition after edition after edition? Well, no, not in my world. I did it not gonna happen. And I am the social media person and far as I like to share what I'm doing and how I'm doing it, but I don't want to share personal family stuff on the internet.

I don't think it's a safe thing to do. So I went scratching around and I found a way to do it, and I found a program to do it. I use a program called Ponga to do that. What this did was it. And I don't even think they realized what, what it could do was all, I took all this research and my family tree and turned it into an album that, that I could share privately with my family.

But not only am I sharing it privately with my family, I'm inviting them into the story. Come on in. What do you think? Do you have anything else to add to it? And there was one particular photograph that sparked really a lot of interest and it was a photograph, not even of a blood relative. It's my great aunts.

One of the four sisters who traveled to Canada, it was her husband and he's playing a violin and he's, it's the early 19 hundreds. The thing that struck everyone about this photograph is I was the only one that knew he played the violin. I had the photograph, everybody else thought he was a real estate guy, I had the photograph of him playing the violin.

I was able to share that picture of the violin and it just opened this little flood gate of stories about, do you remember the $10 we used to get every year from Auntie Pat at Christmas time? that just mushroomed into, do you remember her car? And do you remember how well we had to be behaved when we sat at their table because they had very strict rules.

One of the cousins that responded, because I shared it with 22 people. I just was very cheeky and asked everybody for somebody's email address. One of the cousins that's responded, I've never met. And there's something about a family photograph and a little story where there was a similar history that was comfortable for him to share. Then he went on to share, oh, well, Uncle Bert, I didn't know that he played the violin, but he's the one that taught me how to use a camera. That's why I love photography. And it was just, it was a beautiful, beautiful thing. I have a photograph of my mum and dad, and my mother was a beautiful woman. She's stunningly, beautiful woman. And my dad wasn't too bad either. And one of my cousins, commented on my parents and how

she felt about my mother being so beautiful and kind, I know, I didn't know that, that she felt that way about my mother, but she also commented on my father saying my dad was really nice looking, but a bit scary. So that conversation started about, well, why, why did you think he was scary? And then when she started to explain it, I got it.

And it was just because of that photograph that I had shared with them. These were personal things. These weren't things that you you'd put on to, you know, the world, you know, onto social media, these were personal things we were talking about and it was really, really lovely.

So what I, what I've now done is I've gone through and I it's a constant creation thing for me. I think I'm a bit of a frustrated artist, so I can go in and take four or five photographs I use Canva or PowerPoint, and I create these little storyboards and give them a bit of a theme, put the photographs in and then send them out to my family with a little bit of story. sometimes it's an address or sometimes there's two photographs taken from a different angle. But the say, you know, it's the same day because they're wearing the same clothes. and, and just throw it out to try and build the stories. And what comes back is remarkable.

I also have a niece who lives on the west coast of Canada and she accepted my invitation and was looking at some of the photographs. And she sent me a type written letter that my mother had written to her back in the nineties when she was a teenager in high school. And it's it's unremarkable, right? It's a typed letter, probably on an old manual typewriter. It is unremarkable. You could even see the whiteout in it, but what that letter has in it is beautiful little pieces of information that ties to some of the photographs that I have a family. I have a great-grandmother who whose sister married my grandfather. So stay with me for a minute.

 Lydia married Robert Moore and they moved to North Dakota in the late 1870s, early 1880s. They had three children. In those times, they could buy for those, but equal to about a hundred dollars you could buy some land in North Dakota if you were going to farm it. And that's what they did. They had three children and unfortunately Lydia died 10 days after her third child in February in North Dakota. Tragic. the third child was also named Lydia. The best that I like that we can understand is that poor Robert, devastated, three children, brand new baby, call goes back to Canada, somebody has got to come and help. Elizabeth goes to help, her sister goes to help. Two years later, Robert and Elizabeth are now married and have two more children. One of them being my grandfather. they eventually do go back to Canada with the five children and Robert dies.

And now Elizabeth is left with her three step children, nieces, and nephews. I dunno what you call them and she's left alone and she has no skills, except child rearing. So she ends up moving in with her spinster and widowed sisters and is their housekeeper for the rest of her life, sort of a Cinderella story, really. and that was fascinating to me that again, Tough woman made a big move, made a sacrifice for her sister for her own life. Um, and I found that fascinating as well, that, that she would do that.

So in this typewritten letter, my mother has described perfectly Elizabeth's life and how hard it was for her to live with her sisters. And, well, that one went off to work. She worked in, what was called Eaton's in Canada, which would be probably like at JC penny in the U S big department store and the other one, I don't know what she did. That, that was all part of it. And so that was her role and the way my mother writes about it, very matter of fact, but I did a lot of, I didn't know that.

Now had my niece not shared that letter with me I still wouldn't know it, but I've taken that letter. The photographs of my great grandmother. I have the address of the house where she lived. So off I go to Google and get it all and put it in a storyboard and up it goes and shared on Ponga with my family.

The other little tidbit that was in that letter, too, that sort of grew a story was it talked about, and my mother never, ever told me this, and it's small, it's not significant, but my mother writes in the letter about the bed she was born in, in this house that was a brass bed and ended up being in her cousin's house at a property north of Toronto. Little, little tidbits. But now I've got this, this image in my mind of this bed and my mother being born and it's Yeah, it grows the story. It does definitely grow the story.

So, and that's off a letter. So, you know, sharing a photograph, it's a bit like the cameo in the photograph. It's something you can hold in your hand. It's and it's real. And it gives context to the picture and context to the story. and my niece, I think now she's in her forties, she's a more interested in. The family history and, and is also quite fascinated by all of that. It's a wonderful thing.

 I would say that I probably a little bit, I don't think I'm obsessed, but I'm motivated. Definitely motivated.

Heather Murphy: Yeah, I watched one of the videos that you've done and I can't remember which one it was, but you said something to the effect that you've transitioned from being ancestor focused to like living family member focused. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Victoria MacGregor: Absolutely. And that, and that is what's happened with my cousins and I have about twenty-five cousins, not that many, by sharing these details and that's what they are, they're just names and dates on a page, sharing details and the photographs and drawing them into the story that there's something safe in that. There's something safe in remembering and sharing those things and oh, I didn't know that.

I had a little photograph when I was camping. And when I was about 13 in Northern Ontario with this particular female cousin, her name is Wendy. I don't think she'd mind me saying her name, Wendy. we really were crushing over the same boy, big time, I still have a photograph of this guy. I put it in a thing and I sent it to her and I said, do you remember him? Do you remember his name? And she said, I don't remember his name, but I do remember that we might have lost being friends at that summer because of that boy, you sorta chuckle about it was such a big deal at the time, but it's not now.

And that, that opened up that dialogue. And I think for my cousins, what I hope has happened just for them, I don't know what conversations they're having between the siblings. I don't even know the dynamics between them. You know, siblings sometimes don't talk to each other, so it's very possible. Maybe it has brought them together and questions about some things in their family and with their parents.

I was terribly corrected with, I assumed one of my aunts developed dementia following a car accident and she banged her head and it wasn't the case at all. And so the story that had been told to me wasn't right, and the person who corrected me on that was my cousin, the son of the woman who I thought that is what happened.

So going forward, I feel more that you can share, the more photos and stories you can share brings the living story. As I said, one day I will be the past. And I think that's really important. And to document it in a place that's safe and secure is really adds another dimension. It's it's, it's that whole freedom to say what you feel.

And there isn't any pressure to go in front of a camera and, you know, I want to see what you look like now that we're all in our sixties and seventies, there isn't any of that sort of perverse curiosity. That's not what it's about. It's about sharing the stories of when we grew up. Um, and it's brilliant.

It really is really, really as brilliant. And it just grows. It all get, you know, it's inspiring other people to get as excited as I am about this stuff as a challenge, but I'm patient and, you know, every once in a while I'll get an email or a comment will come through and they're just, they love this stuff.

Uh, I think as the Northern hemisphere gets colder, I will get more comments. and so it's, it is, I'm just going to keep doing it. I'll just keep doing it. I keep finding more stuff and, and ways to tie it up and put a nice bow on it and send it out. And I get wonderful stuff back.

Heather Murphy: Well, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and how this process has evolved for you and It sounds like more than you expected it to when you got started on it.

Victoria MacGregor: It is. it's a quite a journey that I've been on over the last 18 months has has really been brilliant. I've had a lot of encouragement and because of it I'm talking to you, I wouldn't have been talking to you otherwise. So thank you for the opportunity.

Heather Murphy: Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing.

Victoria MacGregor: You're most welcome.