Cherished memories

By Christopher Yip

Ferne Robb holds a photograph of her century-old family farm.                  
                                                                                                            Photo: Christopher Yip 







REGINA - Although there are many pictures hanging on the walls of Ferne Robb’s apartment, one outside her bedroom is particularly important to her. It is a photograph of the sky, taken at the centennial celebration of the Jolly family’s settlement in Mossbank. The event marked the family’s rich history in the small town southwest of Saskatchewan.

As Ferne approaches the photo, her thoughts begin to slow, turning back the hands of time to that summer four years ago. Looking deep into the frame she becomes lost in recollection and finds herself standing in the fields of the Jolly family farm.

The grass is brilliant green under the beaming June sun. A gentle breeze brushes her hair over her eyes. Ferne begins to hear the voices of her family members singing a familiar church hymn. She is surrounded by relatives, a 100 people, all part of the Jolly line.

The hymn’s chorus begins and the moment regains its full reality. Ferne hears the voice of her niece rise above the music. “Look!” the girl shouts, pointing in the air.

Ferne gazes upwards with all the wonder she felt that summer afternoon. The clouds have formed a giant hand with long, wispy fingers, reaching towards the heavens. Every member of the Jolly family looks in silence and awe. The 85-year-old woman finds tears forming in her eyes and reaches up with her hand to wipe them away.

* * *

“It was amazing.” Ferne’s voice cracks. “There were many tears shed right at that time.”

It is the present. We are inside her apartment in downtown Regina. Ferne and I are walking through the second-floor suite, looking at photographs, letters, and memorabilia that punctuate her life.

Ferne was born in 1926 in a small community southwest of Regina known as Mossbank. She grew up on a farm a mile out of town. Her future husband’s family, the Jollys, lived four miles away. The two met in 10th grade at the local public school, though she had always known of the Jolly family because of Doug’s father, Alex Jolly – when she was a child, Mr. Jolly paid a dime for every gopher tail she and her siblings brought him. In 1949, two years after Ferne began work as a teacher in Mossbank School, she and Doug were married.

There is a wedding picture, black and white, from 1949 sitting on Ferne’s dresser drawer. Inside the glass frame stands a youthful farm girl and her husband, Doug, with whom she shared 48 years of union with before he passed away in 1997.

It was through her husband that Ferne found history and welcome in the Jolly family, which she came to love as her own. It was through the Jollys that she was able to learn about the little town of Mossbank, where the family been rooted since its humble beginnings more than a century ago.

* * *

In 1882, Ferne’s grandfather-in-law Samuel Jolly emigrated from Scotland to Canada in hopes of finding a land of opportunity for his family. When he and his second-eldest son Robert arrived north of the Qu’Appelle Valley, they found adjusting to their new home incredibly difficult. What land was suitable for agriculture was in short supply or only available for lease. This was a great burden for the new settlers.

However, the Jolly men worked hard for their family’s sake, and in the summer of 1883, they raised enough money to bring the rest of the Jolly family over to Canada, which was a hefty amount as the Jolly clan had 12 children. Samuel and his second wife, Katherine, had two more children in their new home before he and his wife passed in 1891.

At 14 years of age, the youngest child in the Jolly clan, Alex, decided it was time to make his own and left the family home. On May 29, 1907, he settled on a small piece of land over a hundred miles southwest of Qu’Appelle and south of Old Wives Lake, claiming it as a homestead. He returned to his family to gather supplies. His older brother, Robert, joined him for the trip back, and together the Jolly brothers began another new home. The brothers split the land and built a house on Robert’s side and a barn on Alec’s.

As the community began to grow around them, Robert and his wife, Louise (affectionately known as Aunt Lou), offered their house for use as the local post office. Robert, or Uncle Bob to Ferne, would travel to and from Moose Jaw collecting mail and taking it there. As the community continued to expand, the demand for the Jolly house post office got bigger. Farmers traveled miles to their humble quarter to send and receive their mail.

Business grew and grew. Louise became the new post-mistress, and it was then that the Jollys realized their post office should have a name. The community gathered names in a hat and decided that whoever’s name was picked would choose the post office’s new moniker. Luck was with the Jollys that day and Louise was picked. The name she chose was “Mossbank,” which was derived from “Mossgeile,” a place from her Scottish homeland.

The small hamlet continued to expand, and in 1913 the Canadian Pacific Railway was being built through the Mossbank townsite. A year later, the Canadian National Railway was constructed outside a farming town three miles north of the post office known as Reycraft. The two railways were set to divide the post office and Reycraft, and the locals did not like the idea of separating the two.            


Instead, they decided to move the post office into town. Not only that, but, with the move of the post office into Reycraft, the community decided to change the town’s name from Reycraft to Mossbank. It is easy to see, then, how the beginning of the town of Mossbank was a thoroughly Jolly affair.

* * *

Ferne knows this story by heart. She and her relatives – siblings, cousins, and more – were major contributors to the communal effort behind Furrows and Faith, a book recording the history of Mossbank and its surrounding areas. It was an undertaking in hopes of preserving the small town’s history, so important to close-knit prairie collectives. When the book was published in the 1980s, Ferne’s love for history and family found a timeless place to dwell.

There are two copies of Furrows and Faith in her apartment. One is for guests to read through and the other is Ferne’s personal issue, which has “2nd Copy” printed in gold on the cover.

Ferne has also kept a book written by Samuel Jolly himself. It is a collection of letters and other documents by or on the Jolly family dating back to the late 1800s. Flipping through the pages, Ferne points out small notes and additions she has made in blue pen. These are updates to the Jolly family tree, noting when brothers, sisters, and cousins have passed away and when children and grandchildren have been born.

Simply retaining family history is not enough for Ferne. Rather, she does her best to pass it down. And although Ferne no longer lives in Mossbank, her heart is still at the farm. There is a large framed photograph in the apartment entrance with the phrases “The Jolly Farm” and “Four Generations.” Ferne points at the four men in the picture. Doug Jolly leans with his arm on the window of his red truck. Their son, grandson, and great-grandson occupy three other farming tractors in a sea of yellow wheat.

“Once you’re a farmer, you’re always a farmer – no matter where you live,” smiles Ferne.

* * *
Cherilyn Nagel-Jolly holds a photograph of her grandparents.                  
                                                                                                            Photo: Christopher Yip

Cherilyn Nagel-Jolly places the photo album down on the marble kitchen counter and opens it with care. Under a caption reading “Family Photos in our home” are photographs from decades ago of her parents, her two brothers, and a baby Cherilyn, smiling a toothless grin. Beside it is a picture of her grandparents, Doug and Ferne Jolly.

We are sitting in Cherilyn’s home near Mossbank, just down the road from the Jolly family farm. The room is spacious and sunlight streams in from outside where three tiny kittens and a big golden dog enjoy the mid-October weather. As we turn through the pages, Cherilyn reflects on her earliest memories of her grandma and grandpa.

“They lived through the trees, (and) I always felt like Little Red Riding Hood, because I could just skip through the trees over to grandma’s house,” says Cherilyn.

She turns to a photograph of a young Grandma Ferne from 1982. Ferne sits facing the camera, her hands folded in front of her. Her hair is auburn instead of snow white, but her quiet smile is the same. Cherilyin recalls a particular conversation she had with her grandmother on marriage.

“I asked my grandma at one point what the secret to a happy marriage was,” begins Cherilyn, “She told me, ‘You let them win at cribbage.’” A smile spreads across her face.

“We laughed about it for a long time, but I really got it,” said Cherilyn. “I really got that she meant that there was times to be competitive, and times to be supportive, and times to just have fun.”

One starts to understand the closeness of the Jolly family by listening to the way Cherilyn speaks about her grandparents. It is full of reverence. Her grandmother and grandfather were role models for the rest of the family, setting an example in their marriage in their dedication to their children and to the farm.

When Doug Jolly passed away, the family that was so close to one another mourned his loss. Soon after his death, Ferne stayed in Mossbank for a couple years but chose to move to Regina soon after. Before she left, however, she married again. Alec Robb had been Ferne’s close friend for decades. Having lost his own wife years before, both he and Ferne married and decided to move to Regina together.

There is a picture of Alec sitting with her daughter’s puppy. Ferne looks at the photo and smiles.

Alec passed away four years ago. Ferne decided to stay in Regina.


“The two best men God ever made, and I got them both,” says Ferne in a near whisper.

* * * 
The photograph taken at the Jolly Family Reunion.                 

                                                                                                            Photo: Christopher Yip

We stand before the photograph of the sky hanging in the hall leading to her bedroom. Her description of that captured moment is vivid and intimate.

“We were just singing the last hymn, and we thought, ‘Wasn’t that an amazing thing to happen?’” says Ferne. Her eyes, which are quietly retrospective, begin to moisten with tears.


“My second husband had died just two weeks before that. And it just seemed to be, you know, joining us all together again.” Grandma Ferne opens her arms wide and closes them in an imaginary embrace.

Ferne pauses. “I think it meant something different to anybody who saw it.” She speaks with finality and walks towards her bedroom.

Ferne’s memories are overflowing with photographs, lining the walls of her heart. The reason she holds on to those pieces of history – those photographs – is because she loves the people that fill them.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for this article. I learned a lot about my great aunt, and this information will aid my genealogical research.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My grandfather was a British Home Child who went to live with the Cookes on Hill Farms in 1903 and later listed Robert jolly as his next of kin.

    ReplyDelete