SHANIA'S GREAT GRANDPARENTS

Shania's Great Grandfather was Francis George Pearce. If Shania's Great Grandfather would have been on time for the maiden voyage of the Titanic, Shania would not be here today. However the 24 yr. old soldier promised his wife and baby daughter that the voyage taking them to Canada to start a new life would be on a brand new ship. Fortunately for him he arrived to late and all the Third Class Passages had sold out. The Titanic sailed without Francis George Pearce. On April 14,1912 the unsinkable ship hit an iceberg and sank, fifteen hundred people lost there lives, most of whom were travelling in Steerage Class.

The Pearce Family was a solid mixture of English and Irish stock. Although they denied there Irish blood for years. Francis was born in 1887, and joined the British Army in his teens and was serving in Norfolk, where he met Lottie Louise Reeves, one of eleven children.

She was a few months younger, born in Weybourne, where the winds blow straight down from the Artic over the North Sea. Francis and Lottie were married in St. Michaels Church,Aldershot, on October 2,1909, after which Francis was posted to keep the peace in Ireland. Their eldest daughter, Eileen, was born in Newbridge,County Kildore, on April 10,1911. The next year they decided, along with most of her family, to try their luck in the Dominion of Canada. Frank, Lottie Louise and baby Eileen made the crossing safely on the next available boat and took the Trains as far as Manitoba.

     Frank had been lured by the promise of a quarter section farm, one hundred and sixty acres to call his own. Until his claim was registered, he worked on the railroads out of Winnipeg, thanks to the man his sister-in-law Mary had met on the boat over and subsequently married. There second child, a son also named Frank, was born in Winnipeg, but when war broke out, Frank Sr., an Army Reservist, was immediately called up. He returned to Europe, leaving his wife pregnant with Jack, sitting in there new homestead in the wild scrubland outside of Badger, six miles north of the U.S. Border. Frank did not worry about his wife. He knew the Reeves women had strength of character,spirit in spades. They knew how to look after themselves and their families, "Lottie and her sister Cyl didn't take a backseat," says Frank Jr.'s son Roger Pearce. "If someone pissed them off, look out. There were three Irishmen, the Ryans,in town. They were raising hell, fighting all the time, but if they were where Lottie was she would give them a tune up and they would sit in the corner like little boys, wouldn't say 'boo.' They had respect for her because she wouldn't take no BS from anyone. When she and Cyl were older they loved to watch wrestling on TV, they'd get all wild over it."

       Francis George Pearce held the rank of Gunner in the Army and did not return home for five years. He served in the Royal Regiment of Field Artillery, his special affinity with horses proved essential for driving the guns and ammunition trailers through the mud behind the front line. Gunners didn't have to live in the trenches, or go over top into the machine guns of no man's land, though Frank regularly volunteered to carry extra ammunition supplies into the trenches. He returned home in 1919, sporting "Pip,Squeak and Wilfred," a full set of medals: the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal.

       Frank was a well mannered, quiet dignified man who never spoke of his wartime experiences and just got on with providing for his family. During which two more daughters were born in 1926, they named them Grace and May. When May turned two they moved to a new farm just outside Piney. It was a family affair, for Lottie's father, Sidney Reeves, had the farm opposite. The land around Piney was all right but nowhere near as fertile as the Red River Valley where the Great Plains began thirty miles farther west. It was mostly flat scrub and bush enlivened by a few hills and East Ridge, with its plunging ravines and towering red pines over one hundred feet tall. Frank ran a mixed farm supporting a few cattle, other livestock, and grain fields, enough to feed the family.The cash crops were oats and alfalfa, excellent cattle forage. Frank produced such high quality alfalfa seed that he was contacted by the University of Manitoba, which wanted to know how he did it.

         During the twenties, life was tough and money short in rural Manitoba, the Pearces and the Reeveses survived well enough.

       Thanks to Mary's husband there was always work on the railroads--every day Frank walked the two miles to the railroad in Piney--and the farm provided all the food they needed. They entertained themselves playing cards with Frank Jr. and May loved to sing, Lottie's sister Cyl(Cecilia) had an excellent voice and was a very good piano player, and several times a year there was a let-your-hair-down hoedown. While the farm could feed a growing family, the adults had to find work outside.

     Eileen started working in the kitchens and behind the bar of the Piney Hotel when she turned eighteen. There she met Walter Fraser, a lad from a local town. They got married in 1932 and decided to chance their luck in the mines of Northern Ontario.(there is how Shania's family came into the area) He found work as a shaft sinker in the Hallnor mine in
Timmins, where their son Don was born on August 7, 1933. Soon after Don was born the marriage started to falter and Fraser left town, severing all contact with his family. Eileen struggled to make ends meet. Money was so tight that when Don was ten, he was sent to live with his grandparents on the farm in Piney for the winter. Eileen scrimped and saved her waitressing tips to buy him a pair of ice skates for christmas.

      Things looked up after she fell in love with George Morrison(Shania's  grandfather-George was born in 1908), a professional saw filer who sharpened and hammered into shape the huge blades in a sawmill. "George," May recalls, "was very nice looking. He was a big man, tall and very kind."

        George Morrison was also of mixed ancestory. His father, Bert, was Scottish and his mother Mary, (nee Brisbois) was, despite her French name,predominantly Irish with a little dash of Spanish. Their only child, Sharon, was born in Vita,Manitoba, on June 4, 1945,  because Eileen wanted to be back with her parents. She returned to Timmins soon after the birth, to the family house on poplar street. Later they moved to a small three-bedroomed, wooden bungalow with white walls and a red roof out on Highway 101 between Matheson and Moose Creeks, fifteen miles east of South Porcupine. Eileen's children came out to visit on Sundays, the main entertainment was the short walk to the gas station in Hoyle where two brown bears, Yogi and Booboo were kept in cages.
 
       George made a good income and the family was well provided for, although like most father's of his generation he left the child rearing to his wife Eileen, who was a gentle woman. Eileen was happy milking the cow and tending to her large garden. Her daughter, virtually an only child and was headstrong and willful. Sharon's brother Don had gotten married and left home at the age of nineteen. After her brother left home Sharon was virtually an only child. May Thompson recalls that as a child Sharon was a real handful. May Thompson is Eileen Morrison's youngest sister. Sharon wanted her way with everything. Eileen Morrison also had a brother, Jack who lived in Timmins too, and he couldn't get over how disciplined his and his sister Mays children were in comparison to there sisters child. "Sharon had a nervous complaint of some kind Eileen always worried about her.
 
     She would raise heck every morning, about going to school on the bus, there was an argument every day about something. She was a bright young girl, very enthused about life is the way her brother Don put it. Don also said,"She went to school in Hoyle and then to Roland Michener High School in South Porcupine. Sharon was very headstrong, but she was also high-strung,very high-strung,so she would go into depression very easily. She was also always on the go, a very busy girl.
 
        In the early 1960's the Morrison's moved to Field, just outside Sudbury. In just a few short years, everything went horribly wrong. George suffered a severe stroke that left him 90% paralyzed and unable to speak. Under the added pressure Eileen, who had a congenital heart condition, suffered the first of several minor heart attacks. That did nothing to help Sharon's mood swings, and without any male influence she started to look for a substitute. Sharon had always been interested in boys--even at thirteen when she went to help out her mother's pregnant cousin, Evelyn Struthers, who was staying up at Nellie Lake.  Sharon was young and happy-go-lucky, and a cute girl. Evelyn went on to say that Sharon was very outgoing and there were a few younger guys on the island and she was certainly interested in them.
        At seventeen Sharon was a pretty girl,tall,5'7" and very slender---perhaps to thin for some. She had blonde hair turning to auburn. When Sharon was happy she was great, company who would talk and talk and talk. However when she was moody she could be difficult company because she would withdraw into herself.
      She had gotten engaged to Gilles, who was a young Frenchman from Sturgeon Falls, whom both her mother and brother liked. However just before the wedding he was killed in a car crash and Sharon was already pregnant. She had Jill on April 19, 1963 and she had named her after her father. Sharon then found herself flooded with a fistful of adult responsibilities with a baby, an invalid father, and a poorly mother, no money. She was only 17 and should have been out having fun. She had a hard time coping with her situation as she was not able to earn enough money to support herself.
    In 1964 that was a man's job and Sharon needed help. Jill was a toddler when Sharon met Clarence Edwards a man who seemed to be the answer to all of her problems. Don recalls, "How times back then hit everyone really hard, especially Sharon, as she had a little girl." "When she met Clarence she was still very upset." At that time Don said he thought Clarence was a really nice person.
        Clarence Edwards was the eighth child of Harold and Regina Edwards's nine children. The Edwardses were a brawling clan who emigrated from Ireland in the 19th Century and started up farming in the Ottawa Valley outside Renfrew obn the Quebec border. When they were fed up with life in "Cowshit Valley," Harolds father moved to Chapleau to work on The Railroads in the early 1900's.
        Timmins, 125 miles to the east had a reason to exist: the mines. If Chapleau didn't have the railroad it had no reason to exist. For over a century, it has been the biggest railway terminal between Montreal and Winnepeg and for many years had its own shop and was home to crane drivers,engineers, and drivers. If the railway ever leaves, the town, which is slowly wasting away, will disappear back into the forests. There is logging in abundance, for trucks can go anywhere there is wood and bush road, but little else.
  Harold was born in Chapleau, in the year 1906. Later he fell madly in love with fourteen year old Regina Benson. Her father was Swedish, while her mother was from an old French Family, born and raised in Quebec. Along the way the Quebecois had incorporated some Native Genes. Gordon says his mother told him one time when he was younger that her mothers mother was part Indian. "Clarence and Ernie, they don't look Indian, but my brother Walter, you put him beside one of the Indians here in the reserve and they look like twins." Gordon says. The Bensons decided to move two hundred miles due north, to Kapuskasing, where the Spruce Falls Power and Paper Plant  was promising to build a model town in which the needs of the forestry industry could  coexist happily with the community. Between Kapuskasing and James Bay, is nothing but four Hundred miles of river,forest and lake which makes its location ideal for an internment camp.