A quilt that travelled thousands of kilometres to end up in a British museum has people in and around Canwood excited.
It is a Red Cross quilt, one of many sent by Canadian women to the United Kingdom during the First and Second world wars, and found in the Interior War Museum in London by Maxine March, an avid quilter.
She, along with two friends, began researching the quilt that was made in Marchant Grove, an area off the highway between Shellbrook and Canwood.
When they hit a dead end, March wrote a letter to the editor for the Daily Herald, hoping someone would read it and know something about the quilt.
“As it happens, an awful lot of people read it, and some people read it and told other people about it,” March said.
“I’m getting emails from Ottawa, Ontario, all over Canada now.
“I’ve had so many emails, you cannot imagine ... For the first 10 days to a fortnight I was getting between five and 10 emails a day.”
One the people who emailed a response was Carol Person, who doesn’t quilt but had heard of Red Cross quilts.
“It’s just that I read the paper and read the letters to the editor and Marchant Grove, Saskatchewan, stuck out,” she said, from her home on a farm just outside Canwood.
“So many of the names are familiar to the people around here, so it’s been quite exciting.”
Doris Schwehr, who lives in Canwood, also read the paper that day and sent March an email.
“I grew up in Marchant Grove and I knew all of these names ... the families of the people who were on the quilt.”
The quilt is what quilters know as a signature quilt or album quilt — a record of people in the community, said March.
A church congregation made the early signature quilts for the pastor and his wife when they were going to move to another church as a parting gift and memento, March said.
“During the war, signature quilts were made to raise money for the war fund,” she said.
People would pay to have their name stitched on a quilt and the money would go to the cause.
“Quite often, you see whole families’ names,” said March.
During the war, these signature quilts were bundled up and sent over with the rest of the quilts to service men and women or communities in need.
“That must be what happened to the Marchant Grove quilt because all the museum knows about it, is it was donated by a man in southeast London sometime in the 1970s,” March said.
It can be difficult to learn about these Red Cross quilts, as it’s difficult to collect textiles because they wear with age, she said.
However, people in the Canwood area have been able to piece together more information.
Person’s sister had a book that contained all the minutes of the Marchant Grove Ladies Aid and in it they found references to the Red Cross and references to gathering materials for quilting.
“I thought, for sure, when my sister looked it up in the book, we’d nailed it,” Person said.
But, the references didn’t line up.
“We can’t pinpoint the date and that’s what’s holding us back,”
she said.
So instead, they’ve been tracking down the people whose names were stitched on to the quilt more than 60 years ago.
Schwehr has taken the lead on this, finding people across Canada and the United States.
“We got so interested we wanted to talk to anybody whose names were on the quilt,” she said.
She’s found a pair of brothers who had their names on the quilt and are now living in the United Sates. They were both in the American air force and are now interested in learning more about the quilt as well.
Yes my mother was in the ladies aid their