Posts Tagged ‘Nova Scotia’
Puzzling Over My Last Name
When I was growing up, I often puzzled over my last name: ‘Spavold.’ No one else in the community where we lived had that name. I made up stories to answer folks who asked me about my surname: we were Polish; we were the only family in the world to ever have that name; we were Italian and the real name was ‘Spavoldini.’
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My dad was also interested in the orgins of the name, but he took a more studied approach. He found out the name of the first Spavold to arrive in Nova Scotia and wrote a book about the many Spavolds in Nova Scotia who were descendants of that first ‘Spavold’ in Canada: Spavold’s Wald, S.W. Spavold, unpublished, about 1990.
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The first Spavold in Nova Scotia was a boy of only 8 years, born in England in 1808. He arrived in a shipwreck of the Trafalgar on Briar Island on July 30, 1817. He came to Briar Island with his mother (Eliza Greenfield), his step-father (John Adam Hill) and his half-brother (Thomas Hill, a boy of two). The family survived the shipwreck and stayed in the Digby area of Nova Scotia. For more about this story, see my earlier post at https://janetims.com/2011/12/03/briar-island-rock-2-the-shipwreck/ .
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William’s father, my great, great, great grandfather, was William Spavold, born in Nottinghamshire in England in 1785. In 1807, when he was 22 years old, he married Eliza Greenfield. He was a carpenter and my Dad’s story was that when he died, Eliza sold his carpenter tools to get passage for Canada on the Trafalger with her second husband John Hill.
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No other information was available to my dad, although he did track down ‘Spavolds’ elsewhere in Canada, in Australia and in England. I talked on the telephone with Helen Spavold who lives in Clowne, Yorkshire, and she said, with a proud lilt in her voice, “There are Spavolds in our graveyard.” My dad, and my brother (who lived in Australia for a time), corresponded with Joseph Spavould, who lived in Australia.
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Now, with the help of Ancestry.com, I am determined to find out more about William Spavold of Nottinghamshire. The next few posts will talk about my discovery of the occurrence of Spavolds in England in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. And in the 20th and 21st centuries—I am not alone.
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All my best,
Jane Tims (a. k. a. Spavold)
new Kaye Eliot Mystery, coming soon
I have spent the last week doing the final edits on my next Kaye Eliot Mystery. The name of this one will be ‘Pareidolia,’ meaning the tendency of people to see specific, meaningful images in random visual arrangements. Those who see a ‘man in the moon’ will know what I mean.
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In this book, the Eliot family will tackle another rural mystery, this time in a huge old house and its marble floors – marble floors with images embedded for those who look closely … a story told in ‘pareidolia.’
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The book and the mystery occur around the planning for Clara and Daniel’s upcoming wedding. Clara and Daniel, the stonemason, are Kaye’s friends and will be known to readers of the Kaye Eliot series.
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The image for the cover of the book is completed, an acrylic painting that shows some of the scenes within the old house – a house being used as a venue for weddings and anniversaries. The marble tiles are also featured in the cover image. Only a rectangular area of the painting will be featured on the book cover.
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The book will be available in late November 2023. This is the fifth book in the series. Come roam with Kaye and her family in rural Nova Scotia and enjoy the antics of the Eliot kids and their friends.
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The other books in the series are:
How Her Garden Grew
Something the Sundial Said
Land Between the Furrows
Stained Glass
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Looking forward to sharing this mystery story with you!
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All my best,
Jane (a.k.a. Alexandra)
a Kaye Eliot Mystery — number 5 in the series
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The Kaye Eliot Mysteries are cozy, family-based and set in a small fictional community in Nova Scotia. So far, there are four in the series.
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In November, the fifth volume in the series will be released. Pareidolia continues the story of a family who loves solving mysteries together. ‘Pareidolia’ is the tendency to perceive a specific, meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern. Think of ‘the man in the moon.’ In this cozy mystery, Kaye and her family search for images in the marble floor tiles of a century-old country house, now used as a wedding venue.
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The floor tiles are clues to the location of a valuable hidden sculpture. Each tile reveals the next line in a story, told in the black and white patterns in the marble of the tile. If Kaye can find the sculpture, a beautiful wedding venue will be available for Kaye’s friend Clara, free of charge.
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You will love the various rooms in Marshall’s Elegant Weddings, the quirky folks who live in the community of Stone Ridge, and the members of the Eliot family, especially five-year-old Matthew. You may not love Kaye’s plan for her family to spend the entire week of March Break staring at black and white tiles. You may never again look at the floor in the same way.
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This week, I am working on the book cover painting for Pareidolia. It will show Clara and her husband-to-be, the stone-mason Daniel, sitting in the hall of Marshall’s Elegant Weddings, dreaming of their future together. All around them are the marble floor tiles, some showing clues to the mystery.
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All my best,
Jane
(a.k.a. Alexandra)
Book Review: Jan Fancy Hull’s new Tim Brown Mystery
February: Curious by Jan Fancy Hull (Moose House, 2022)
February: Curious is a delightful walk through another month of a year-long sabbatical with newspaper editor Tim Brown. Enjoy Tim’s thought process as he prepares to delve into the intricacies of rural life in Nova Scotia. Although he plans and thinks more that he actually does, Tim is able to discover a mysterious problem and find a solution that assists the victim, a young man in need of a mentor, and the entire community. I love his approach to plotting his daily activities and overcoming his troubles—maintaining a household, outfitting a new office space, deciding what to wear. All the old friends are back—Stella, and her perils of politics, and Robert and his coaching of the choir. In spite of being on sabbatical, Tim works with the temporary editor to improve the newspaper in ways he would not have done when he worked full time.
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Looking forward to the next book – March: Enigma.
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All my best!
Go find a cozy corner and read a book!
Jane
Stained Glass – new cozy mystery
It’s all ready for ordering! Stained Glass, my new Kaye Eliot Mystery is live on Amazon, in both paperback and ebook. Stained Glass takes place in Nova Scotia and will take you on another adventure of the Eliot family… Kaye, Michael, Katie and very funny, very lovable, Matthew.
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When Kaye discovers the body of a suicide in his living room, she is unsettled to hear he has made a special request in the event of his death. Spread across the countryside are seven stained glass windows, telling the story of four friends in the 1950s. One of the four has disappeared, never to be seen again. But what happened to her and who was responsible for her disappearance? Only the stained glass windows will tell the story.
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Join Kaye’s family as they drive the countryside to find the windows. Some of the owners will be happy to see her, some will not be welcoming at all. The book will also take you back to the 1950s, to meet the four friends and to see what they were doing to pass the time, all those years ago.
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To order the book from Amazon, click here. If you would like to get the book directly from me, or from Westminster Books in Fredericton, I will have copies by April 20, 2022.
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All my best,
And happy reading.
Jane
A Kaye Eliot Mystery: number four in the series
Next week, the fourth volume in the Kaye Eliot Mystery Series will be released. Stained Glass continues the story of a family who loves solving mysteries together. Set in Nova Scotia, the cozy mystery sends Kaye and her family on the search for seven stained glass windows. The windows will tell the story of four friends in the 1950s. They will also show what happened to one of the friends, Rita Carn, a beautiful woman whose vanity and jealousy result in her destruction.
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Four friends go on a picnic and only three return.
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To date, there are three previous titles in the series, all available by clicking here.
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Stained Glass will be available at Amazon on March 31, 2022. I will have copies by April 20.
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All my best
Jane
a book to lose yourself in …
My most recent read is a book I could not put down. The first in the Tim Brown Mystery series is ‘January: CODE’ by Jan Fancy Hull (Moose House Publications, 2021). The book is funny, engaging and makes me want more!
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Tim Brown is a newspaper editor in small-town Nova Scotia who has decided to take a year off to dig deeper into local stories of interest. He finds himself over his head right away when he is asked to solve a mystery that has no clues and no suspects … the mystery itself is a mystery. Readers will be charmed by Tim’s personality and his relationships with the characters he encounters. His attempts to dress the part of a local ‘detective’ are funny and relatable.
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I am looking forward to the next adventure in the series — if the book’s title provides a clue, I can look forward to eleven more of these mysteries! Write faster, Jan Fancy Hull!
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Enjoy your reading in the New Year!
All my best,
Jane
next Kaye Eliot Mystery: Stained Glass
Set in Nova Scotia, the Kaye Eliot Mysteries feature a woman and her young family as they set out to solve local mysteries. You will love the kids, especially Matthew who adds his own naive curiosity to the mystery.
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When I started writing the mysteries, I wanted each one to include a communication from the past. The mystery in How Her Garden Grew is sparked by a dusty bundle of letters found in a crawlspace. In Something the Sundial Said, Kate finds an old diary that leaves clues to a century-old murder. In Land Between the Furrows the family finds a stack of post cards and solves the mystery of a valuable stone.
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Stained Glass presents a new mystery to the Eliot family. This mystery is also a communication from the past, from an artisan in the community. He has created a series of stained glass windows in houses along the Bay of Fundy shore. The stained glass artist asks Kaye to solve the mystery by finding the windows and discovering a secret he has kept for forty years.
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Stained glass has always been my favourite art form. The interplay of colour and light creates a magical medium for telling stories and expressing emotion. In this mystery, Kaye will also make use of her botanical skills, interpreting the meanings of various plants and flowers included in the stained glass windows she finds.
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Stained Glass will be published by the end of March 2022.
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Here is a short excerpt from the story:
I looked into the room where the cat had gone. Not a room, but a long hallway, with a stairway at the end. I shrugged and followed the hall. At the foot of the stairs, I hesitated. Wandering around the main floor of an empty house was one thing. Climbing those stairs would be brazen, even for me.
The stairs led to a landing where a huge stained glass window let in a marquee of coloured light. I was very like the glass panel decorating the landing of our house. Even the picture was similar. Two women and two men. A grape vine gone crazy. One of the women, the one with the wings and a crane of stars, was looking out to sea, precariously near the edge. One of the men held on to her elbow. If I had to name the piece, I would have called it ‘teetering on the edge.’
I turned to face the room opposite the stairs and screamed.
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Happy New Year and happy reading everyone!
Jane
Kaye Eliot Mysteries
There are now three books to read in the Kaye Eliot Mystery Series. Set in Nova Scotia, these mysteries feature a mystery-loving family, Kay Eliot and her kids Matthew and Katie. The mysteries they solve are always based on a message they discover from the past: old letters, an old diary, post cards sent long ago.
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How Her Garden Grew
A mystery in a bundle of letters and a weird sea shell in an old garden …
In 1994, when Kaye comes to Acadia Creek to spend a quiet summer with her two children, she has no idea what waits for her. Instead of passing stress-free days of swimming and hiking, she finds herself embedded in mystery after mystery. A missing vagrant and a gang of thieves have the community worried. And neighbours seem determined to occupy all of Kaye’s time and energy in restoration of an old flower garden. Meanwhile, she and her kids have stumbled into a century-old legend of a treasure buried on the property. At the root of it all is a sinister sea-shell that will not stay where it is put. Can Kaye recover her calm or will she be the victim of neighbours, vagrants, thieves and a shell called the Grinning Tun? just click here to see the book on Amazon. Or pick up a copy at Westminster Books in Fredericton.
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Something the Sundial Said
A mystery in a diary and a murder by a sundial …
In 1995, Kaye and her young family attend a country auction, never dreaming the stone sundial in the garden is the site of a century-old murder. They end up buying the old house but someone else buys the sundial. Then Kaye finds a diary written in 1880, chronicling the days leading up to the murder. When Kaye reads the diary, she decides to search for the sundial and return it to the property. And she decides to try and solve the mystery with the clues left in the diary. At every corner, she is outmaneuvered by a local genealogist who is anxious to obtain the diary and keep information damaging to her family hidden. The woman will go to ridiculous lengths to obtain the diary, even stalking Katie, Kaye’s teenaged daughter. As Kaye discovers someone is entering her house at night to find the diary, she wonders who she can trust. The former owner of the house? The handsome stonemason who offers to mend the stone walls on the property? Or the genealogist who will go to extraordinary lengths to protect her family name? Just click here to see the book on Amazon. Or pick up a copy at Westminster Books in Fredericton.
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Land Between the Furrows
A mystery in a stack of post cards and the search for a missing stone …
When Kaye and her friend Clara hold a yard sale, they never dream a box of old post cards will send them on a search for a valuable ‘stone.’ With the help of the stone mason, Daniel, Kaye’s family will try to solve the messages in the post cards and find an old house where the lost artifact must be hidden. When Katie’s pet, Cow, gets lost in the woods, Kaye’s family gets a sudden boost in the game of ‘who finds the stone.’ Their efforts are stymied by some new arrivals in the community: the determined member of a Heritage Association, a bird watcher who doesn’t seem to know a robin from a starling and Daniel’s new, rather unlikely, apprentice. Where is the ‘stone’ and how can it save a community from loss of everything they hold dear? The third in the Kaye Eliot Mystery Series is available at Amazon here. This week it will be available at Westminster Books in Fredericton or from me directly.
These are the coziest of mysteries, perfect to curl up with on a rainy day or during the long days of lockdown.
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Stay safe everyone!
Jane
A Book Review: Where’s Home by Jan Fancy Hull
I am originally from Alberta, but left for Nova Scotia as a teenager and remained there for twenty years until I took my first job. Although I have not lived there for years, Nova Scotia has a way of tugging at my heart-strings. I love the ocean, the rural landscape of the Annapolis Valley, the silver waters of the Bras d’Or Lakes. My Kaye Eliot Mysteries are set in the Rawdon Hills of Nova Scotia. For these reasons, I was so happy to hear about a writing project by my friend Jan Hull, a book exploring the ideas of people who consider Nova Scotia ‘home.’
Where’s Home? by Jan Fancy Hull (Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia: Moose House Publications, 2020)
An honest and charming mixture of memory, experience and connection.
This book explores the difficult idea of acceptance (how you accept your community/landscape/province and how it accepts you). Through anecdote and survey response, the book explores the idea of ‘home’—where you live, why you live there, who you are, when you arrived, and how you seek to be part of community.
A reader will begin the book expecting a series of anecdotes about down-east warmth and soothing ocean vistas. But, as the cover states, the answer to Where’s Home? can be complicated. Here you will find stories of people who love Nova Scotia, would never live anywhere else. You will find stories of those who love the ocean, the rural landscape, the home cooking and the welcoming people. You will also find stories of those who hate cold and snowy winters or have ambitions for urban success in other parts of the world.
The book does not avoid difficult subject matter but discusses problems of ‘home’ throughout Nova Scotia’s history—the loss of home by indigenous peoples who did not surrender title to their lands, the loss of home by Acadian people who were deported by the English, people who lost homes when a federal park was established, people whose idea of home has changed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The anecdotes and survey answers in the book consider the complex idea of CFA (Come From Away). Some new arrivals have been welcomed with plates of scones. Others have not found acceptance and the author considers some of the barriers to feeling at home—local colloquialisms, lack of business opportunities, even racism.
My favorite idea in the book?—a way to make people feel welcomed: organized Campground Hosts at Kejimkujic Park, unofficial community greeters, local refugee organizations, local people all set to welcome newcomers to a home in Nova Scotia.
As you read Where’s Home? you will compare your experiences with those in the book, even if you are not from Nova Scotia—the experiences related are applicable to any place where we live or wish to return. These are stories of entrepreneurs, artists, immigrants, people of various cultures and backgrounds. They are told with consideration, empathy, humor and understanding.
Where’s Home? is available at Amazon here, at your local bookstore, or by contacting Jan directly at the website here.
Enjoy your reading during these uncertain spring days.
All my best!
Jane
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