The Women Who Made A Home
Homemakers, mothers, aunts, and neighbours in the life of St Margaret’s Parish.
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A family tree may give a woman’s name, her marriage, and the names of her children. It seldom tells us who prepared the meals, mended the clothes, sat with a sick child, or helped a neighbour through childbirth. Yet this work sustained parish life as surely as farming, fishing, and trade.
The work behind the word “homemaker”
A home was a place of work as well as a place to live. Feeding a household meant repeated decisions about provisions, preparation, storage, and what could be spared. Clothes required washing, repair, and replacement. Children, older relatives, and people who were ill needed care. These responsibilities continued through changes in weather, income, and family circumstances.
The tasks varied across generations and households. A nineteenth-century farm kitchen and a twentieth-century home did not have the same equipment or routines. Household size, health, money, and access to help also mattered. We should not give every parish woman an identical working day, or assume that every task fell to women alone.
A household was part of the economy
An Island example helps us look beyond the division between “earning” and “keeping house.” Emma Chadwick Stretch’s account-book diary of 1859–1860 records exchanges involving sewing, butter, and other goods and services. It reveals women participating in the material economy of a rural community.
Emma’s diary concerns another Island household, rather than a woman established here as a member of St Margaret’s Parish. It supplies context: household work could create goods to exchange and depended on relationships beyond the front door. 1
Within our parish, family histories preserve occasional glimpses of the women who did this work. The details are sometimes modest—a cake, a journey in winter, a niece brought up in an aunt’s care—but they allow us to see more than names and dates.
Sarah Stewart: family, neighbours, and a winter journey
In Chapter 5 of her parish genealogy, Jenny McQuaid remembers Sarah Stewart as a woman who raised a large family and also gave many years of service as a midwife to neighbours near and far.
One detail makes that service especially vivid. In winter, Sarah sometimes travelled by hand sleigh to reach those who needed her. The account does not say who pulled the sleigh. It does tell us that distance and difficult travel were part of the work of helping other households. 2
Sarah’s story brings homemaking and community care together. Raising her own family did not define the full reach of her work. She also entered other homes at a consequential moment in their lives.
The goose-egg cake
McQuaid preserves a lighter memory, too. Sarah made a wedding cake for neighbours Hughie Sandy MacKenzie and Lily MacKenzie. When someone admired its appearance, she replied, “It ought to be good. I put a goose egg in it.” 2
Remembered as local folklore, the exchange gives us something a formal record rarely supplies: a glimpse of humour and personality. Sarah appears as a neighbour taking part in a celebration, as well as a mother and midwife. The cake belongs beside the winter journey in a fuller account of her life.
Mary Ann Hanning: an aunt who brought up a child
McQuaid records that Mary Ann Hanning never married, worked as a housekeeper for a priest in Vernon River, and reared her niece Margaret MacKinnon, who later married a man named Praught. 3
These few facts widen the story of homemaking. A woman did not have to be a wife or a biological mother to take responsibility for a home or a child. Mary Ann’s life combined household employment with the care of a younger relative.
The account does not explain why Margaret came into her aunt’s care, or describe their daily arrangements. What it preserves is the relationship itself: an aunt had a substantial part in bringing up her niece. That is an important family connection even where the surviving narrative is brief.
Mary Ann’s work took her beyond the parish, but her story belongs among its family connections. Like the lives of relatives who went away to sea, to work, or to establish new homes, it helps show how parish families extended into other communities.
Holding a household together through change
Birth, illness, bereavement, and departure could alter a household’s responsibilities suddenly. The family accounts often record the event more clearly than the work that followed it. A death notice may name a widow and children without explaining how they subsequently supported one another.
Flora MacNeil and a disrupted migration
Helen MacDonald’s supplied family research identifies Flora MacNeil, wife of Roderick MacIsaac, as widowed when Roderick died at sea during the family’s 1792 journey. The account follows branches of the family on Prince Edward Island and describes Flora’s burial at old St Margaret’s in 1813. 4
The surviving account does not describe the practical arrangements Flora made after that loss. It nevertheless places a woman’s experience at the heart of a settlement story: migration could mean arriving after the death of a spouse, with family life still to be carried forward.
Sarah MacKinnon: household and public responsibility
Another example comes from the coast. After her husband Frank drowned in 1917, Sarah MacKinnon became keeper at Shipwreck Point. The PEI Lighthouse Society preserves family stories of her son Neil helping with the light and of Sarah maintaining its rotation by hand during a storm. 5
Her story is told more fully in Working on the Water. Here it reminds us that home, family care, and paid work could overlap. The lighthouse was both a workplace and a dwelling, and Sarah’s responsibilities reached beyond its household to mariners offshore.
The knowledge passed on at home
Recipes, ways of repairing clothes, household remedies, and methods of making supplies last can survive in families long after the person who first taught them has gone. Photographs, letters, account books, and handmade objects can help recover that history—especially when a name, date, or remembered explanation accompanies them.
These sources also make room for differences. Some women worked for pay; some cared for relatives; many combined responsibilities that changed over a lifetime. A prosperous household and one facing shortage could place very different demands on the women within them.
Affection and pride belong in this history, but so do the demands of the work. Remembering a woman’s skill should leave room for the time, effort, and choices it required.
Remembering women as people
The cemetery records help restore women’s names and connect generations. The family stories can go further. Sarah Stewart’s journeys and wedding cake, Mary Ann Hanning’s care for her niece, and Flora MacNeil’s interrupted migration give individual shape to a history often compressed into the words “wife,” “mother,” or “widow.”
Homemaking was part of the parish’s working life. It supported children growing up, relatives growing old, and households meeting the next day’s needs. Where the records give us a woman’s own actions or words, those details deserve a place in the story.
Sources and further reading
- An Economy of Words: Emma Chadwick Stretch’s Account Book Diary, 1859–1860, Acadiensis. An interpretation of an Island woman’s diary, used here for regional context, not as evidence of a St Margaret’s family connection.
- Jenny O’Hanley McQuaid, Genealogy of St Margaret’s Parish (2022), Chapter 5, printed page 74: Sarah Stewart, family responsibilities, midwifery, and the wedding-cake anecdote. The anecdote and winter journeys are preserved as local recollections.
- McQuaid, Chapter 6, pages 78–79 as cited in the supplied parish research: Mary Ann Hanning, housekeeping at Vernon River, and her care of Margaret MacKinnon.
- Helen “Arty Johnny V” MacDonald, supplied family research, Ancestors of Margaret “Helen” MacDonald (report dated 3 November 2003), Part 1, printed pages 11 and 18, and associated MacIsaac research. Source for Flora MacNeil, Roderick’s death during the 1792 journey, and the reported 1813 burial. No individual grave location is inferred here.
- PEI Lighthouse Society: Former Shipwreck Point Lighthouse, Sarah’s service and the MacKinnon family stories.
Named stories follow the sources identified above. The discussion of household responsibilities provides context; it does not assign undocumented tasks to individual women.