one grows older it seems all Grandmothers are wonderful.
Her brother, Nathan Allen, lived on the farm next to ours. He never married. When Nathan was older he took a young couple, Joe and Emily Gotell, to live with him. This was how the Gotell family came to be on Boughton Island. Although all of the Gotell children were born during the time their parents lived there, only the two youngest, Kimball and Mary, were actually born on the Island. Their mother would go to her parents in Sturgeon or her sister’s in Georgetown to have her babies. Many of the children on the Island were close in age. Except for my older brother and sister, the children in the Gotell and King families were all about the same age. Fred Allen’s oldest son, Malcolm (Mac) was ages with Basil Gotell, Martha and myself.
FARMING.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the small farms which every family had. On our 70 acre farm we had cows, horses, pigs, hens, geese, turkeys and sheep. We always had work horses for ploughing and hauling. I recall that my father raised four foals; the last one we named Dobbin. We had six cows milking at different times so there was always fresh milk. There were always young cattle and pigs for butchering. This was usually done in the late Fall as there were no refrigerators because there was (and still is) no electricity on the Island. The weather seemed to be colder back then, and there was never any problem keeping them hung in the barn for months at a time or until the meat was all gone. I can remember going
Buughronlslundtwins to the barn in the
winter to cut a
piece of meat from a frozen carcass. You’d place a knife on the meat and hit it with the hammer. Sometimes meat would be salted in wooden
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