{"id":8368,"date":"1820-10-29T12:31:00","date_gmt":"1820-10-29T20:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/?p=8368"},"modified":"2026-10-29T12:34:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T19:34:24","slug":"the-women-who-made-a-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/the-women-who-made-a-home\/","title":{"rendered":"The Women Who Made A Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Homemakers, mothers, aunts, and neighbours in the life of St Margaret\u2019s Parish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>On this page<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"#daily\">Everyday work<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"#sarah\">Sarah Stewart<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"#mary\">Mary Ann Hanning<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"#change\">Holding a household together<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"#memory\">Remembering women<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"#sources\">Sources<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A family tree may give a woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The work behind the word \u201chomemaker\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A household was part of the economy<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">An Island example helps us look beyond the division between \u201cearning\u201d and \u201ckeeping house.\u201d Emma Chadwick Stretch\u2019s account-book diary of 1859\u20131860 records exchanges involving sewing, butter, and other goods and services. It reveals women participating in the material economy of a rural community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Emma\u2019s diary concerns another Island household, rather than a woman established here as a member of St Margaret\u2019s Parish. It supplies context: household work could create goods to exchange and depended on relationships beyond the front door. <sup><a href=\"#s1\">1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Within our parish, family histories preserve occasional glimpses of the women who did this work. The details are sometimes modest\u2014a cake, a journey in winter, a niece brought up in an aunt\u2019s care\u2014but they allow us to see more than names and dates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Sarah Stewart: family, neighbours, and a winter journey<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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. <sup><a href=\"#s2\">2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Sarah\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The goose-egg cake<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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, \u201cIt ought to be good. I put a goose egg in it.\u201d <sup><a href=\"#s2\">2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Mary Ann Hanning: an aunt who brought up a child<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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. <sup><a href=\"#s3\">3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019s life combined household employment with the care of a younger relative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The account does not explain why Margaret came into her aunt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Mary Ann\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Holding a household together through change<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Birth, illness, bereavement, and departure could alter a household\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Flora MacNeil and a disrupted migration<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Helen MacDonald\u2019s supplied family research identifies Flora MacNeil, wife of Roderick MacIsaac, as widowed when Roderick died at sea during the family\u2019s 1792 journey. The account follows branches of the family on Prince Edward Island and describes Flora\u2019s burial at old St Margaret\u2019s in 1813. <sup><a href=\"#s4\">4<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The surviving account does not describe the practical arrangements Flora made after that loss. It nevertheless places a woman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Sarah MacKinnon: household and public responsibility<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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. <sup><a href=\"#s5\">5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Her story is told more fully in <em>Working on the Water<\/em>. Here it reminds us that home, family care, and paid work could overlap. The lighthouse was both a workplace and a dwelling, and Sarah\u2019s responsibilities reached beyond its household to mariners offshore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The knowledge passed on at home<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2014especially when a name, date, or remembered explanation accompanies them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Affection and pride belong in this history, but so do the demands of the work. Remembering a woman\u2019s skill should leave room for the time, effort, and choices it required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Remembering women as people<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The cemetery records help restore women\u2019s names and connect generations. The family stories can go further. Sarah Stewart\u2019s journeys and wedding cake, Mary Ann Hanning\u2019s care for her niece, and Flora MacNeil\u2019s interrupted migration give individual shape to a history often compressed into the words \u201cwife,\u201d \u201cmother,\u201d or \u201cwidow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Homemaking was part of the parish\u2019s working life. It supported children growing up, relatives growing old, and households meeting the next day\u2019s needs. Where the records give us a woman\u2019s own actions or words, those details deserve a place in the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Sources and further reading<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/journals.lib.unb.ca\/index.php\/Acadiensis\/article\/download\/10799\/11583?inline=1\"><em>An Economy of Words: Emma Chadwick Stretch\u2019s Account Book Diary, 1859\u20131860<\/em><\/a>, <em>Acadiensis<\/em>. An interpretation of an Island woman\u2019s diary, used here for regional context, not as evidence of a St Margaret\u2019s family connection.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Jenny O\u2019Hanley McQuaid, <em>Genealogy of St Margaret\u2019s Parish<\/em> (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.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>McQuaid, Chapter 6, pages 78\u201379 as cited in the supplied parish research: Mary Ann Hanning, housekeeping at Vernon River, and her care of Margaret MacKinnon.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Helen \u201cArty Johnny V\u201d MacDonald, supplied family research, <em>Ancestors of Margaret \u201cHelen\u201d MacDonald<\/em> (report dated 3 November 2003), Part 1, printed pages 11 and 18, and associated MacIsaac research. Source for Flora MacNeil, Roderick\u2019s death during the 1792 journey, and the reported 1813 burial. No individual grave location is inferred here.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/peilighthousesociety.ca\/index.php\/lighthouses\/private\/45-former-shipwreck-point-lighthouse\">PEI Lighthouse Society: Former Shipwreck Point Lighthouse<\/a>, Sarah\u2019s service and the MacKinnon family stories.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Named stories follow the sources identified above. The discussion of household responsibilities provides context; it does not assign undocumented tasks to individual women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Homemakers, mothers, aunts, and neighbours in the life of St Margaret\u2019s Parish. On this page A family tree may give [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1450],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work-everyday-life"],"gutslider_comments":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8368"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8368\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8369,"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8368\/revisions\/8369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peipioneercemetery.com\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}