Another Canadian Cousin

Gordon Nosworthy, me, Dawna Wightman

Gord and Charlene with one of Gord's paintings.

As soon as we were settled in Toronto I looked up another one of my cousins here, Gord Nosworthy and his wife Charlene. They invited us along with Cousin Dawna and Jay over for dinner. It took a few weeks of emails but we got a date set and Dawna and Jay gave us a ride out to Markham, a suburb just north of Toronto. We had never really been outside the core of Toronto, let alone 30 miles from the city centre and five miles beyond the last subway stop. The ride was a real eye opener as we got a taste of how sprawling the metropolis is. The funny thing is that once you get out that far it looks like every other suburb I have ever seen anywhere in North America.

We had a wonderful get together; cooking out on their deck. I can’t say that we were catching up because it was a first meeting for Gord and Dawna, and Gord and I only met once nearly fifty years earlier. It is funny how this works, virtual strangers meeting face to face for the first time but the barriers evaporate simply knowing there is a common ancestor binding us in some invisible way. If you were to see us you would think we had all grown up together.

A little backstory:

Gord is my first cousin once removed. Neither of us can remember it but we first met on our big family vacation in July, 1963. Gord’s father Roy and my grandfather Donald were brothers. Roy and his family were the first of the family to move away from Montreal in 1947, the year before my grandfather moved his family to Kansas City. When we came to Canada in 1963 our first stop was to see Roy and his wife Margaret (still living nearby, age 97 and sharp I am told) in Toronto. We spent a couple of nights there before continuing on to Montreal. Their home was a semi-detached house in the Beaches area east of downtown on Silver Birch Avenue.

Gord grew up in this house in the Beaches, theirs was the unit on the right. I once spent the night in the third floor dormer.

Twenty years later Toni and I came to Toronto to visit her sister and brother-in-law. They had just moved into their 1940s era semi-detached…on Silver Birch Avenue. It is only four houses up from the house Uncle Roy once lived in! That is a huge coincidence for a city this size. Now, to add to this story Dawna moved to the Beaches three years ago and is just three blocks east of Silver Birch Avenue. That is a lot of connections to one very small part of a neighbourhood.

Summer 1953. Gord, my Uncle Donald, my Mom, all at Lake Ontario.

Gordon in high school.