Well, How Did I Get Here?

So, how is it that I am Canadian? I guess it goes back to the early 1750s. There was an intense mass migration to Nova Scotia organized and funded by the British, although the immigrants were all German, Swiss, and French. They arrived on a dozen ships between 1749 and 1752. I had ancestors on nearly half of the ships. They eventually settled in an area south of Halifax on the South Shore. My grandfather was a sixth generation descendant of this group and he was the first generation born outside of Nova Scotia.


The Gale as it comes into Halifax harbour. Four of my ancestors were on board this ship.

Then jump ahead to 1948 when my grandfather moved his family from Montreal to Kansas City. They came through Detroit by train on 18 Oct, 1948. My mom was only ten years old and her brother Donald was seven. Grandpa had been working at a steel foundry for the Canadian National Railroad manufacturing wheels for trains. He had put in for a transfer to their American counterpart Griffin Wheel in Kansas City, Kansas to escape the brutal winters of Montreal. They eventually settled in a house near the intersection of Mission Road and County Line Road directly behind an old lumber yard and the present day location of the Fairway North Shopping Center, about a half block from where Capers Corner was later located, and also near the former County Fair Supermarket building. All of those would come into play in my life many years later.

When I was born I was a legal citizen of both Canada and America. The only thing that had to be done was to register my birth with Canada before my sixth birthday. Of course no one knew about this and that anniversary came and went without any special notice. Some ten years or so later the Canadian Parliament responded to complaints about the short deadline for registering and enacted a bill extending the deadline age requirement to fill out the paperwork to twenty-eight years old. Once again none of us knew of this and again it came and went unheeded.

It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I started thinking of my citizenship and really considering living here for a while. Toni and I had spent a few weeks working remotely in Europe and this appealed to us much more than visiting as tourists. We wanted to experience living in different places on a long term basis. Canada seemed like a logical place to test this out. When I started looking into this in earnest I found out that the windows for getting registered had closed. However, someone at the Canadian Consulate mentioned off hand that there was a bill before Parliament to repatriate people in my situation and to keep an eye out for the results. I did just that and about six months later the bill did pass and was put into effect a year after that. The bill reinstated my citizenship and even made it retroactive to birth. I still had to fill out tons of forms and provide original documents to prove my lineage. It took yet another nine months for me to get my citizenship card. You can’t imagine what it felt like to get that in the mail one day.

So I was Canadian and then I wasn’t, then I was and was not again, and now finally I am Canadian for good and always have been. I need to mention that I do not feel 50/50 Canadian and American. Rather I am 100% Canadian and at the same time 100% American. There is no political component to my desire move to Canada. There are a hundred other reasons for moving here but the primary one is the same as for moving to New York before. That is to live in places that have good enough public transportation so that we don’t need to own cars.

Last night we had dinner and drinks at an Irish pub in our neighbourhood. We saw that next week they will be celebrating their 50th anniversary of operation. I was thinking that was quite a long time. Then I got to thinking about it and realized that when I first came to Canada and Toronto on our one and only family vacation in 1963 the pub had only been in business for two years.