In keeping with my 2013 New Year’s resolution to devote a couple of hours to my blog at a local coffee shop each week, I find myself sitting in a relatively loud room, in a surprisingly cold, uncomfortable and unbalanced chair, sipping an extremely disappointing vanilla spice latte that cost a whopping $5.37, listening to music I would never bend an ear to in the comfort of my home, and wondering who on earth is peeking over my shoulder, undoubtedly judging me as I type these words.
I endure all of this in an attempt to thrust myself back into my student past, back to the predictable and dictated life of rigid deadlines and the panic-stricken heartbeat I depended on to inspire the believed brilliance of every concluding paragraph I have ever written prior to scrambling out my room and across campus to class. Call me crazy, but I miss being a student. I miss the stress and the debilitating feeling that perhaps there was an oversight and I was mistakenly admitted instead of someone else.
Perhaps it’s because of my academic past that I find myself quick to critique what has hitherto been written about the Shaw family of Banks, Collingwood Township. Thankfully (and regrettably) I know of only two such occurrences. The earliest appears in the form of a newspaper article entitled “This is Collingwood: The Shaw Family of Nearby Banks” which appeared in Collingwood’s Enterprise-Bulletin on September 6, 1972, written by J.T. MacMurchy. The sole source of the article’s content appears to be my great, great uncle, Lorne Shaw.
The second occurrence is recorded in the pages of one of my greatly treasured books – An Illustrated History of Collingwood Township, edited by Bill Shannon, and published by Collingwood Township Council in 1979. An entire chapter is devoted to the small, agricultural community of Banks, and the Shaws are credited as one of the area’s pioneering families.
[Sidenote: If you ever stumble across a copy of this book, please do yourself a favour and buy it as quickly as you can. Do your best to suppress the look of astonishment if you happen upon it at a yard sale. Mask your excitement upon seeing a 25 cent sticker on its cover. Calmly hand over your quarter (there is no room for error here – do not try to get it for less), continue to smile, walk casually to your car and leave the scene as quickly as you can. Remember this. Train for this. And whatever you do, do not tell me if this happens to you as I may persuade you to give your copy to me, your mentor. And may God with you if we happen upon the book at the same sale and reach for it at the same moment.]
While reading these early accounts, I often forget, and inevitably take for granted, that while I sit in comfort (well, relative comfort due to this ridiculous chair), I have ready access to a wide array of ancestral records courtesy of the internet that assist in determining dates of settlement, births, marriages, deaths, etc.
Lorne, and other family members, must have relied on a number of family stories passed down to them throughout their lives by the many voices of their collective past. Without Lorne’s account of Thomas’s arrival and livelihood at Banks, I would be even further removed from the early Shaws whom I have chased through the history books and across the Atlantic.
So without further ado, I give you Lorne’s account of Thomas’s arrival in Collingwood Township as recorded by Mr. J.T. MacMurchy… Well a little ado – just one more week.
The Shawking Facts 