AFHS Society Meeting

The AFHS Society Meeting is our regular meeting for all members, usually held on the second Monday of each month from September to June. Guests are welcome to attend!

Please note: Due to the passing of her father, Tara Shymanski is not able to do the presentation about Hudson’s Bay records on Monday night. Instead Amber Godfrey has kindly come forward to do the talk. 

Topic: The D.R. Eaton Tragedy: Researching Three Nova Scotian Brothers Who Were Lost at Sea

Description: The Shaw brothers had no idea that their routine voyage to Bremen would end in tragedy. In the fall of 1878, they set out from Baltimore, Maryland to Antwerp, Belgium, with a load of grain and timber. Their ship, the D.R. Eaton, had been built in Eatonville, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, by brothers D.R. and C.F. Eaton and was launched in October 1877. She was built by J.G. Olive Jr. of Saint John, New Brunswick, a first-class ship builder. The D.R. Eaton was declared to be a “ship of the first order for strength and durability.” So how did this brand-new vessel disappear completely, never to be heard from again? Captain Harris H. Shaw, his wife and young daughter, two of his brothers and twenty other crew members simply vanished. Follow my journey as I learn more about this seafaring family and the tragedy that befell them. Newspaper articles, probate documents, Seafarer’s of the Atlantic Province records, census returns, birth and marriage records all help me piece together their story.

Our Speaker: Amber Godfrey

Amber Godfrey is an amateur family historian whose love of family history started in childhood, listening to family stories shared by her parents, grandmothers and extended family. She received a Family History kit for Christmas when she was twelve and that started her on a family history research journey that continues to this day.

After finishing college and working in a variety of office jobs, Amber realized that she could combine her love of books and research and her interest in computers by working in libraries. She graduated as a Library Technician and worked in public libraries in BC for nearly twenty years. When she moved to Calgary, she was hired by the Calgary Board of Education to work on-call in school libraires. Now that her family has moved back to BC, she is currently searching for her next job.

Amber plans to remain a member of the Alberta Family Histories Society and will continue her role as editor of the AFHS Chinook Arch newsletter. While she was living in Calgary, she also volunteered at the AFHS library and helped with their Family History Coaching program at Calgary Public Library.

In 2024, she submitted a presentation idea to the Nova Scotia Genealogy Virtual Conference and was chosen as one of the presenters. Amber is passionate about sharing stories of ordinary people who led interesting lives, especially women, and she hopes to do more presentations for groups in the future.

This meeting will be a hybrid Zoom meeting held at our Resource Centre (Suite 251S, 8500 Macleod Trail SE in the Heritage Square building). If you are in Calgary and area, we’d love to have you join us in person.

The zoom invite for this meeting has been removed since this meeting has now passed.

We welcome guests!

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For more AFHS events, see our calendar.

To see our other two society websites, browse to https://albertaancestors.ca or https://familygenes.ca.