The Lighthouse Keeper's Granddaughter

 

I only met my paternal grandfather Edward Boudreau twice, due to family dynamics. The first time I was in preschool. The second was the morning after I eloped. 

I'd called my father, whom I now saw regularly after years of estrangement, to tell him. He asked me and my bridegroom to stop at his house in Weymouth, MA on our way to Washington D.C. where my husband was at the Naval School of Music. That was 1962.

My grandfather was there. He was well into his nineties, skinny with white hair.

I never saw my grandfather again. We were assigned to the 7th Army Band in Germany and he died before my husband's tour of duty ended.

Only in the mid 2010s did I learn that he had been a lighthouse keeper on Green Island, Nova Scotia from 1912-1923.

As I came to know my paternal aunts and uncles, they talked of their childhood escapades but never of living in the lighthouse. With one exception. I did hear about Aunt Agnes who was sent to the mainland to live with a relative. She had been caught scaling the lighthouse walls. My grandmother must have thought her safer off the island or maybe better out of her hair. 

What was life like for my aunts and uncles on the island? My father would have been born in 1913 so he would have lived there along with his older sisters and brothers. All have died and I can only wish I had asked them when I could have.

Research shows the work my grandfather was expected to do as a lighthouse keeper included: 

• polishing lenses 
• trimming wicks
• checking lamp
• maintaining fog signal 
• keeping the lighthouse painted and repaired

My grandmother with ten children, one a new baby, would have been busy. I wonder if she maintained a garden and canned the produce as other lighthouse wives were said to do. Running to the store to pick up this or that would have meant a boat trip.

• Did my grandparents get lonely for the company of friends? 
• In those pre-electricity, pre-radio, pre-television days what did they do when their work day was done? 
• Did they worry about illnesses with medical help so far away? 
• Were their letters from family received regularly or not at all? 
• What about school for the older children?
• Were there any ships stranded on the island while they were there?
• Did any bodies wash ashore? It happened on other lighthouse islands.
• How did they weather the often violent storms?
• What did they do to stay warm in the North Atlantic winters? 

Although I can find facts about the lighthouse, there are so many questions I would like to ask about their daily lives.

The lighthouse itself was two years late in being finished in 1865. The original light that warned ships was white, but was changed to revolving red to be seen more easily in fog. 

In 1902 the annual salary was $500. I don't know what my grandfather was paid, but they had nowhere to spend it on Green Island. What were their finances like?

The year after my grandfather left the job, an electric horn was installed, the first of many upgrades, but full electricity didn't arrive until 1963 thanks to two, five-kilowatt diesel generators. Then there was single light bulb which replaced an oil-vapor lamp.

And in 1971 there was an electric horn to warn the ships.

Harry Boudreau, Amedee Boudreau and Valdor Boudreau were also keepers of the lighthouse. Were they relatives? Maybe. 

My family's ancestor Michel Boudreau, who left La Rochelle, France in 1640, found time to become a general before fathering 11 children and went on to populate much of the area to the point there is even a Boudreauville, Isle Madame, Nova Scotia.

I wish they left diaries. The writer in me wants to know the little details of their daily lives. I have to be content with I'll never know.