On this website you will find information onfamily life, politics, transportation, fashion, film, relationships, education, home, inventions , pioneering on the Prairie, women's movement and suffrage and above all WORK It contains over 300 family letters, rare documents and  family and public domain articles from 1910 era and diverse primary and secondary source material. Many succinct essays, too.Click for 1910 Canada slideshow of Tighsolas pictures.

I'm writing this essay on August 29, 2007. About 6:30. It's a muggy end-of-summer day, at dusk, and I can hear thunder rumbling in the distance. (Oh, it's starting to rain!)  I'm a little sad, because son NO.1, Andrew,  is at this very moment, deep under Place Ville Marie, seated in a train that is just about to chug out of the Central Station on an 18 hour trip to New Brunswick. He's off to college at Mount Allison.

I am left home, alone, to wax philosophic about Andrew's great great grandfather, 57 year old Norman Nicholson, of Richmond, Quebec who, exactly 100 years ago, was about to embark on an adventure of his own. He was soon to hear that he had finally found employment, on the Transcontinental Railway. In a few days he  would leave for La Tuque, Quebec, starting work as an Inspector at 'end of steel' on September 7. Norman was my husband's ancestor and he kept good records about every aspect of his life, so I know that his first pay cheque was on October 7^th and he was paid by the month! 125 dollars to start.

You see, 100 years ago today (and all the local newscasts are featuring stories) the Quebec Bridge, under construction, collapsed, killing 100 people, many of them Mohawk. (CTV Montreal's 6 o'clock story focused on the Mohawk memory of the event).  The bridge was a component of the Transcontinental Railway.

I'm guessing that the Powers That Be felt it important to immediately hire more inspectors in order to look good (maybe even fudge statistics).  Back in June, 1907,  the Office of the Commissioner of the Railway had written Norman to say that there were no jobs open , that the railway was over-staffed when it came to Inspectors. The tone of the letter was apologetic. After all, Norman's Member of Parliament, E.W. Tobin had written and requested a post for Norman, but still, the letter was a long-winded rejection.

But then a giant bridge collapsed (like the Titanic, another example of Man's hubris in an age of sweeping technological advances) and all that changed.

This Tighsolas website exists because Norman left for this job out in the bush with the bears 100 year ago. (Andrew would, in the summer of 2007, spend a summer tree-planting in the same area.)

Norman left a wife, Margaret, behind and the two corresponded back and forth. Their daughters (and one son) also wrote letters. The bulk of the letters have survived for a century in an old trunk, which I found about 3 years ago. I read the letters and decided that they were more than just mundane family letters, that there was something BIG  going on the in the background - and after a great deal of research, my suspicions were confirmed. The birth  of the Modern Era (and modern Canada) was going on, that's what. So I added some background information for context and created a social studies website for Canadians (and anyone else who's interested) to use. Of course, any historian could have told me about the vast changes happening one hundred years ago, but I had to learn for myself. I hope that's what students use this website for, to learn for themselves. That's the best way to learn, isn't it?

For more about Norman's Life on the Railway, click here.

For a 1907 article about the Quebec Bridge Collapse and some pics, click.