In 2010, I visited the town of Rose in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, to meet the nieces and nephew of Ada Lophemia (Halliday) Clark. Ada was the second wife of my great-grandfather Thomas William Clark of Moncton, New Brunswick. Within the walls of their ancestral home in Rose I heard stories of a great-grandfather who died more than a quarter-century before I was born, a man that my own father only mentioned by name, and whose face is still unknown to me. No photograph is known to exist of my great-grandfather. Nonetheless, through genealogical research and family stories I have been able to draw a picture of what he was like, with a rough sense of his life story.
Thomas William Clark was born at Moncton on 11 October 1877, a son of Joshua and Mary (Tower) Clark. His father worked for the Intercolonial Railway in Moncton, and young Thomas would soon follow in his father’s footsteps and work as a brakeman for the Canadian National Railway beginning on 13 December 1898. He held various jobs for the C.N.R. and was promoted to engineer 17 December 1915. Thomas remained in this position for over the next quarter-century. To the people of Amherst, Nova Scotia, he was known as “Wildcat” Tom Clark for the speed in which he drove the locomotive. The Library and Archive of Canada have partial employment records for Canadian Railway Employees online. The file cards relating to my great-grandfather detail his days as an employee from 1898 until his retirement on 30 September 1941. Sadly, the original case files for these employees were destroyed.
Thomas Clark was first married at Moncton in 1899 to my great-grandmother Bessie Jane Taylor, who died in 1922. My grandmother Margaret Jane (Clark) Lambert was their eldest child. Thomas’s second wife Ada worked as a waitress at the Amherst Hotel. He married her at the home of the officiating minister at 32 Rupert Street in Amherst on 2 September 1924. Ada’s family remembers him fondly, telling of going fishing with a friendly and loving uncle. After my great-grandfather’s death in 1942, Ada stayed in Moncton and took care of her aged mother-in-law Mary (Tower) Clark until 1950, when she died at the age of 95. Afterwards, Ada moved back to Nova Scotia and lived near her family.
Sometime before her death she passed along one of the keepsakes from her late husband to her brother Arthur Halliday. Before his death this same keepsake was passed along to his son Raymond Halliday. During my visit, I told Raymond’s sister and brother-in-law that I had no photo of my great-grandfather and asked that they let me know if they ever found one. A couple of weeks ago I got a letter telling me they wanted to give me something that belonged to the man I never knew. A name that I had researched since childhood, without a face, without a gravestone, would now become real to me.
Shortly after the letter arrived I received a small package wrapped in cloth. For once in my life I held something that actually belonged to a man who was previously just a name on a chart, the subject of family stories. The gold railroad engineer’s watch ticked once again after being wound for the first time in years. To hear the ticking of a sound familiar to my great-grandfather’s ears made me pause. Where would this watch, this heirloom, go after I am gone? The scuffed old pocket watch on a chain would mean nothing without a name and the stories attached to it. I can now close my eyes and almost see the face of the man who held this watch each day as he pulled into the station with his train. I can see the man glancing at his watch at the occurrence of the birth of his children or the death of his first wife.
This watch once caught the reflection of my great-grandfather’s face and now reflects that of his three great-great-granddaughters. I plan for each of his living descendants to see and hear this watch. To me this is more than a pocket watch, serving as a priceless sentinel of the history of my family, a time keeper for a man who shall now never be forgotten.
