James married Living [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

1. Living

James married Annie DOUCETTE. Annie died in in Nova Scotia. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Notes:

In her last years, Annie lived in a trailer in a trailer park on the Cabot Trail, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. She came, in about 1977, to visit her grandaughter, Anna (MacNeil) Moore, in Stoney Creek, Ont. when Anna had been married for a few years to Jay Moore. Their son, Aaron, was an infant at the time. This visit was remarkable because the MacNeil family had more or less abandoned Anna and her mother, Marie (Sornat) MacNeil when their kin, James Anthony MacNeil, died at thirty-two years of age far from home in Ontario. It was said that they had never approved of Marie since she was a foreigner and a "D.P." - a displaced person. Anna knew little of her MacNeil family and hadn't see her grandmother since she was a child.

It was a wonderful visit. Annie was warm, open and full of bawdy jokes and lots of stories of Anna's father and the family's past to share with Anna. She spoke of how,as a small child, she was separated from some of her brothers and sisters when they were taken in at orphanages. Some went to a French-speaking convent and others to an English-speaking orphanage. When she met her sister for the first time in many years as an adult, she couldn't communicate since neither could speak the other's language.

She returned to her trailer on Cape Breton Island and died a short time later. It was suspected that she knew her heart wouldn't last much longer and that she came to give the gift of herself to the child her dead son, her long, lost granddaughter, Anna.