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Note: N3 In the latter part of 2011, I found out some surprising information about my father. Making a very long story short and much to my surprise (since I knew my father as Albert Melville Smith), it seems highly likely that he was really Donald Melvin STRACHAN. A professional genealogist named Mary Murphy made this connection and I've confirmed it as much as possible via genealogy DNA testing at Family Tree DNA.
Sources in which I previously looked for information about Albert Melville SMITH:
(1) Ontario birth records (Jay Smith in Canada)
(2) Ministry of Defence in UK
(3) Muster Rolls of WWI airmen (David J. Barnes in UK)
(4) Personal Records of WWI servicemen (Bob O'Hara in UK)
(5) Miscellaneous Canadian web pages and archival records
(6) Churches and Cemeteries of the Maritimes (website)
(7) Island Register-Prince Edward Island (website)
(8) Tom Tulloch-Marshall (UK military records researcher)
(9) Various books on the Clan McLeod
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Here's a posting I made on 27 Dec 2011 to the <a href="http://boards.ancestry.com/localities.northam.canada.ontario.thunderbay/1066/mb.ashx">Thunder Bay, Ontario message board at Ancestry.com</a>:
Until hiring the professional genealogist this year, here is all I knew (or thought I knew) about my father:
Name: Albert Melville Smith
Birth: 26 January 1897 somewhere in Canada
Parents' names: John Smith and Bella McLeod Smith
Military service: in the RAF in WW I in Egypt and the Sudan
Married to Alice Elizabeth Hedrick (my mother) in 1936 in Kansas City (I was born in 1947 in California.)
Died: 19 September 1971 in Corona, California
I didn't even know he was from Canada until my mother told me a year or so after he died. She didn't even know what province he was from. I asked her,"Didn't you talk about these things when you were courting?" She said his response was he didn't want to talk about the past; the future was all that mattered.
Over the years I've tried a number of time to track him down, with absolutely no success. Even hired researchers in both Canada and the UK to work on this. This spring I tried once more, and this time got a researcher with a good creative imagination. She first retraced my steps, with the same negative results. Then the looked in the database of attestation papers for the Canadian Expeditionary Force for anyone with that birthdate and found:
Name: Donald Melvin Strachan
Birth: 26 January 1897 in Port Arthur, Ontario
Parent's names: John Strachan and Bella McLeod Strachan
Military Service: RAF in WW I in Egypt
This was--and is--pretty mind-bending for me. I asked the genealogist how sure she was that Albert Melville Smith and Donald Melvin Strachan were one and the same person, and she said she was 95% sure. To try to nail down the remaining 5%, I had genealogy DNA testing done on myself, and found myself related to two STRACHANs (and no SMITHs) at the 37-marker level, which apparently is the lowest level of any significance.
I've tracked down census and marriage records for Donald Melvin Strachan and Bella McLeod Strachan beginning in 1891. I also have newspaper articles covering the deaths of his father, two of his brothers, and his mother, as well as his return from service in 1919.
This fall I also found that Donald Melvin Strachan appeared in the city directories for Port Arthur until 1930-31. He was a manager at the EJ Bawlf Company (a grain brokerage firm) until it went out of business in the fall of 1931. My hypothesis is that he came to the US, perhaps illegally, to try to find work, and changed his identity at the same time. I imagine that the requirements for documentation were much less stringent then than now. The first evidence I have for Albert Melville Smith is his application for a Social Security card in 1935, where he lists his parents' names as John and Bella Smith.
Given the discoveries that the genealogist made this year and the results of the DNA testing, I am gradually getting used to the idea of my father being named STRACHAN, not SMITH. But, getting back to the point of my original query, I would really, really, really love to have a photo of Donald Melvin STRACHAN to compare with those of my father. (The earliest photo I have of my father is at around age 40.) As I said in my first posting, inquiries about possible photos to the local school system in Port Arthur as well as the Cadet Corps (of which Donald Melvin STRACHAN was a member for 5 years) have gone unanswered. If anyone have old school yearbooks or other photo archives with a photo of him, I'd be hugely appreciative if you could share that with me. In pursuit of this, I've made unsuccessful inquiries to both the historical museum and the public library in Thunder Bay.
And then, too, I'd love to make connections with any living descendants of his two surviving brothers, William and John. Elaine, to answer your question about his brothers' kids, here's the info from his mother's 1947 obituary:
Mrs. John Cooke of Fort William
Eleanor and Ruth Strachan of Manitoba
Sybil, Billy, and Margaret Strachan of Fort William
I don't know which of those people are children of William and which are children of John.
I hope this clarifies what was apparently too brief and cryptic in my original posting. I've probably gone to the other extreme of long-windedness :-)
Great thanks in advance to anyone who can help me with this inquiry!
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Update (April 18, 2012)
Finally connected, via a phone call, with Sybil Strachan in Ottawa. She had lots to say about Melvin (whom she referred to as "Mel") and other members of the family.
I started off by briefly describing my research to this point and then simply asked her what she knew about Donald Melvin Strachan. She said she didn't know a lot for sure, but that there were some family rumors/stories. First of all, he was said to have been a war correspondent for a London newspaper in WW I in Alexandria, Egypt. This does not fit with what I know so far, although his British military records from the time he transferred from the Canadian Army Medical Corps to the British RAF in the Fall of 1918 are very sketchy.
The big news: he DID have a family before he met my mother. I had recently discovered that a Donald Malvin Strachan had married a Ruth Garwood in Winnipeg in June 1920. Sybil confirmed that this was Melvin's first wife's name, and that they had three children: Sarah Louise, Eleanor, and Ruth (the youngest). At some point, Melvin simply disappeared (the proverbial "went out for a loaf of bread and never came back"). After 7 years, the story continued, his wife had him declared legally dead, and immediately married Newton Isaac "Jerry" Reed. Another part of the rumor was that Melvin went back to Alexandria after leaving his family, because he had enjoyed his time there. This is clearly false.
Sybil confirmed that Sarah Louise Strachan was married to a John Cook. Along with Eleanor and Ruth, this accounts for the other three grandchildren of Bella, mentioned in her obituary. And it accounts for the statement that Melvin predeceased her, since he was legally dead.
So, I apparently have (or had) three half-sisters!
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Update 2 (May 13, 2012)
On Tuesday, May 8, 2012 I "met" (via phone) my oldest half-isister, Sara Louise Cook! Had a wonderful conversation; she said she was "gobsmacked" to hear from me with the story I had to tell. No doubt--I have been equally surprised at the amazing track this genealogical research has followed, leading me to a whole "new" family! I've entered details about varous people that I learned from this conversation in appropriate places in this database. The big question about my father remains:
Why did he leave his family in 1931?
Sara said she was 9 years old when he disappeared, which would fit with information I previously got from both the genealogical society and public library in Thunder Bay, that D.M. Strachan appeared in the city directory there for 1930-31, but not afterwards. (Sara also said that he kind of bounced back and forth between Winnipeg and Fort William; the same city directory lists D.M. Strachan as a manager at the E.J. Bawlf company, a grain brokerage. I think it was based in Winnipeg, but had a branch in Fort William.)
Sara said he was depressed and "feeling like a failure" and apparently just couldn't take it any more. She also mentioned that her mother had gotten married quite young (on her 20th birhday!) and perhaps that wound up being a contributing factor to the disintegration of her parents' marriage. Sara said that eventually she gave up on wishing her father would come back, and pretty much got over the devastation that she suffered when he left. But her youngest sister, Ruth, who was only 1 when he left, is still bitter and resentful about not having known her real father.
After he left, his mother, Bella, came to live with Sara, her mother, and two sisters during the early 1930s, helping take care of the three girls.
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Information from 1940 U.S. Census, under name of Albert Smith:
Education: 4 years of high school (question 14 on the census). Claimed to have been born in Illinois, and to have been living there on April 1, 1935 (questions 17-20 on the census form). Earned $700 in 1939 (question 32).
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