Postscript

[Postscript:  Jean Sinclair did stay with the Steins until the end of 1905.  Armed with enough money to pay room and board for a few months she traveled to Montreal.  Mrs. Stein had a friend who ran a boarding house on St. Catherine Street, and armed with her former employer’s reference she took a room.  Jean found work at a neighbourhood café.  Slowly but surely she saved a little cache of money, although it would be years before she could bring her daughter to Canada.  We have few details of these years, although we know she met and married a French-Canadian by the name of Stevens.  Jean had two children with him, Alex and Jean.  We have no knowledge of her years with Mr. Stevens, other than his death during the influenza epidemic of 1917-8.  He left her with enough resources to open her own rooming house.  More determined than ever to be self-sufficient, she and her children thrived.  Unable to do so until the end of World War I in 1918, Jean finally was able to bring Mary to Canada where she settled in among her family at 110 Centre Street in Montreal.

During those years, history continued to unfold.  The Boer Wars finally ended.  In Canada:

-       Railways developed and expanded acrossthe country

-        Public libraries were built in the major cities.

-       In 1905 Alberta and Saskatchewan officially became Canadian provinces.

-       Montreal’s first movie theatre opened in 1906 .  

-        In September of 1907 anti-Asian rioters attacked the residents of Vancouver’s Chinatown.

-       In that same year The National Council for Women demanded “equal pay for equal work.”

-        Telephones and radios became commonplace. 

-       The first powered flight in Canada was made by the Silver Dart in 1909. 

-       The Royal Canadian Navy wass created in 1910.  

-       Early in 1911 King George V died and was succeeded by Edward VIII. 

-       Halifax buried the dead recovered from the sinking of the Titanic during the long, sad spring of 1912.  The ocean liner Empress of Ireland sinks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1914 with a loss of over a thousand lives.

-        The Japanese steamship carrying 376 passengers, is turned away under authority of the exclusion laws prohibiting Asian immigrants.

In 1914, Canada went to war along with the rest of the British Empire. 

At this point Jean Sinclair’s story becomes intertwined with that of yet another soldier, Arthur Christian Peterson.]