More Tree of Thanks Stuff

 So after I discussed the young boy with my daughter, my strange and tangential mind moved onto another young boy who had heavy burdens…. my mother’s grandfather.

Daniel Ambrose O’Connell had responsibility from an early age…his father had kept going on after going out for a ‘quart of milk’. In the way of that time, Daniel was lucky  to have been given his father’s job in the coal mine. He was 9 years old. No 4th grade primer for this boy, he was on the path to helping feed a family.

Such is life.

He went on to be a well respected man, a ‘dragger man’, a man who dragged others out of the mine following a cave-in or a fire. He also became the Fire Chief of his local area, a man who led other small town saviours into the very heart of all that intended to destroy everyone: ruin, despair,  and death. Along these same lines, he was an early union organizer. Somebody forgot to tell him that  he ‘owed his soul to the Company Store’, and he didn’t believe it when they tried to influence him after the fact. Union supporters were having unfortunate accidents’, and there was out right brutality in the streets of New Waterford, and Dominion Beach, and Glace Bay, courtesy of The Company'( and the Government of Canada). Mr. O’Connell started a Credit Union in his house so that the miners would have a place to come for emergency funds. Some place not owned by the ‘Dominion Coal Company’.

"A man’s a man for a’ that….."

I told my daughter that her great great grandfather was one of the reasons that sociologists love to hang around Nova Scotia. And then I moved onto another strange and wonderful story….