First-hand accounts of ancestors’ lives are often hard to find, so it was fortunate for me when a letter written by my great-uncle in 1921 recently came into my hands. It sheds some light on old ways of life in the Arrow Lakes district of British Columbia.
The letter was written on August 21, 1921 by Percy Blakeman (1885–1955), who was living in Edgewood, and sent to his fiancée, Nina Glass (1883–1967), who lived at Syringa Creek. It’s remarkable that it survived at all: perhaps because it was a love letter, it was kept and tucked away in a bag or book or somewhere out of sight.
Eileen O’Keefe Giuliani of Vancouver had come across the letter in papers belonging to her late parents, Tierney and Betty O’Keefe, who set up the Historic O’Keefe Ranch near Vernon As part of their search for authentic memorabilia to equip the ranch’s general store, the O’Keefes visited the Arrow Lakes in the mid-1960s, buying old merchandise from low-lying settlements that were shortly to disappear with the building of new dams under the Columbia River Project.
