Lost generations

October 2012. Just as I am making final revisions to this book, my uncle informs me that he has unexpectedly found a few things belonging to my grandmother Roseena (whose story opens Chapter 3). In a brown envelope along with a few letters and some photographs of my mother, my brothers and me taken in Canada the summer before Roseena's death, is her treasured watch, long assumed lost, a gift from her brother James sent from America. The fine inscription engraved on the back, ‘From James to Roseena Aug 20th 27’ provides another intriguing clue to her migration story. Though their plan to meet had been thwarted by the American authorities who repeatedly denied Roseena entry to the United States at several crossing points along the Canadian border, it would appear that the siblings had been touch over that period. The date on the watch, five months after Roseena's arrival in Canada and more than a year prior to her return to Northern Ireland, suggests that James sent the watch to her at a Canadian address. This is strangely comforting in view of the tragic outcome that they were never to see each other again. Ironic too, that just as I was laying this story to rest, it comes to life once more – this engraved timepiece like Barthes’ punctum – a point of memory intersecting between past and present to ‘puncture through layers of oblivion’ (Hirsch, 2012: 61).

In spite of the tragedy of her brother's disappearance, Roseena's migration story is one of courage, daring and self-actualisation; her Canadian adventure, a resource she drew on throughout her life that helped to sustain her. Exactly thirty years later in 1957, fortified by her mother Roseena's story, my mother too embarked on a new life in Canada with a spirit of optimism and adventure, undaunted at the prospect of living and working in a French-speaking city. I am conscious of how their stories – Roseena's as a returned migrant, my mother Margie's as an emigrant – resonate with my own, a Canadian-born immigrant (or ancestral returned migrant) to Ireland.