[ISL] "William Douse: A family reunion taps into history"

[rfmcdonald]

Charlie Wilkins's recent Toronto Star article examining the recent reunions of a widely-scattered family on Prince Edward Island is a nice long read. It takes a look at the family's founder and the way his descendants react to his legacy.

It was not the sort of event you’d expect to find on the agenda of a family reunion, even a reunion of the Douse family, one of Prince Edward Island’s less predictable genealogical entanglements.

Certainly, there was no hint of such doings on any other days of the week-long reunion schedule. On the day prior, August 11, the main event was an “all-day lobster beach party” — hardly exceptional on an island where the Minister of Hospitality is a lobster and the provincial playground is a hundred kilometres of ocean beach the colour of Montmorency cherries.

Events on August 13, the day after the showstopper, were, again, unexceptional for a reunion of islanders: a walking tour of “Douse Charlottetown”; a visit to Province House; a lecture on the political career of William Douse, the family’s most notorious and indomitable ancestor.

It was William who had brought the clan to P.E.I. from Wiltshire, England, in 1822 and who until his death in 1864 had laid down an inarguable blueprint for family wit and tenacity. “And pigheadedness,” submits Lou Douse, William’s great-great-grandson and something of an island original himself. “And testiness,” he adds with a wink, noting that one of his sisters once remarked that she’d “rather be a Douse than be married to a Douse.”

Among the reunion’s programmed walks and talks — and oyster feeds and parties and beach bonfires — it was the event scheduled for August 12, the second full day of the gathering, that inspired you to pause, gather your thoughts, and re-read what you had read, and then read it again, perhaps thinking you had not understood.

And possibly you had not. For on that day, beginning at 9 a.m., the 40-odd members of the Douse family, some from as far away as Zimbabwe, others from Ohio and Michigan and central Ontario, were scheduled to meet in the Old Protestant Burying Ground on University Avenue in Charlottetown. They had been told to bring whatever tools might help in opening and excavating the crypt in which the aforementioned William Douse, or at least his remains, had lain undisturbed for 150 years.