Danu

Impressions of Cecelia Fisher

DANU

The Celtic deity, Danu was the Irish Mother Goddess, associated with earth, water, winds, fertility, skill, poetry, art, knowledge and wisdom. Revered as the triple goddess, maiden, mother, crone; and as a goddess of war Danu was capable of shapeshifting into different animals.

about Cecelia Fisher

Cecelia Fisher, my maternal grandmother, was born in 1905 in Winnipeg, to Kathleen Maude Gleason and Theodore Fisher. Cecelia died of cancer in 1945.

Cecelia married Archibald William Langston in 1925, and they had three children, Archibald George in 1927, Corinne Shirley in 1929 and Kenneth Charles in 1937.

Cecelia was five when her mother, a refugee from the potato famine in Ireland, died suddenly. With her father, a teamster and mail carrier, away working, Cecelia and her seven siblings were put in convents and orphanages, some French speaking, some English, around Manitoba. Cecelia and her sisters Violet and Kathleen were sent to Grey Nuns Hospice, a convent in St. Boniface, Manitoba.

Within the year she was sent out to become a foster child of Alice and George Beaulac on a farm in Neelin, Manitoba. There she learned to cook, milk cows, stock grain, and ride horses. Her favourite was Joker, a tall black stallion, specially bought down in the States in South Dakota for her foster brother but which he found too spirited to control. Cecelia rode Joker through winter blizzards to a small one-room country schoolhouse in Neelin, a small town in Manitoba.

Despite having only a grade six schooling, Cecelia read constantly and believed that education was imperative. That and a kind heart were the answer to everything.

She was loved by all who knew her, her husband, children and their school teachers, her farm and Indigenous friends, neighbours, the brothers and sisters she met a few years before her death, and even the hoboes of the thirties who rode the rods during the Depression in the 1930s when food and money were scarce. All were welcome at her dining table including the drifters who were always given a meal and a spare nickel or dime at “the corner house".

Cecelia was particularly outraged when the city officials would truck in groups of Indigenous people to walk and dance in their parades but would abandon them after the events had concluded— leaving the people not only to find their own food and drink, but also to find their own transportation back home again.

She survived the loss of her own mother, the horrific breakup of her family, constant ill health and major surgeries, the difficulties of the Depression years, along with the horrors of the Second World War where many of her friends along with membars of her own family perished. She allowed no self pity in herself or her children and died of cancer at the age of forty.

At 17 she was located by her eldest sister, Maude and her husband Rob Hofley and brought back to Winnipeg where she was reunited with her father and sisters, Kathleen and Violet. The whereabouts of the other six children was unknown until 1942 when the eldest sibling, William, (m.Jessie), who’d been adopted by an American family, and had grown up to become a successful businessman, hired a detective to locate the missing members of the family. It was 30 years before the surviving children were finally united. John, the second eldest, had enlisted at 17 and died in the trenches in WW1, in the Somme, France in l915. His name is on the cenotaph in Winnipeg. Paul, one of the twins, had been sent to an Italian family who abused him until he ran away and was taken in by a French family. He spoke French only, no English, was married with one child. His twin Peter had died as an infant and was buried in St. Ignatius cemetery along with their mother, Kathleen Maude. Another brother had died of typhoid fever at the age of eight. Eileen had been adopted by a family in Flin Flon, married young and had 10 children. The boys had initially been taken to an orphanage near Polo Park in Wpg, which subsequently burned to the ground and family records were lost. Taken to another orphanage, which suffered an outbreak of typhoid fever they were moved again. Maude the eldest was able to remain in the family home until her father, a teamster and mail carrier who’d been away in Fort Garry and Selkirk, forty miles from Winnipeg when his wife died, returned some time later to find the rest of his family gone. 

Their father made no effort to find his children, and tried to enlist in the army in the first World War but was rejected because of his age. Cecelia often made mention of having Romanian/Gypsy heritage, so it’s possible her father came from that lineage. Whether there’s any truth to the story that he was a cook and a deserter from the German Navy when his ship docked in Dublin is impossible to ascertain. It’s possible he met Kathleen Maude Gleason there, a young girl singing in a pub and they made plans to link up later in Winnipeg. At the age of fifteen, after crossing the Atlantic, working as a nanny for a family on a Canada-bound ship, Kathleen Maude Gleason reputedly arrived in Canada, plonked down what little money she had and said to the attendant: “Give me a ticket for far as this will take me.”

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