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I admit to self-medicating for some time now with images of late Edwardian England, transported into my living room nightly via Netflix, mainly in the form of old episodes of Downton Abbey. After watching the evening news, there’s something positively soothing about taking in visuals of that gilded age (in spite of all the drama with footmen!)

And so it was with great interest that I took in chorister Stephen Wright’s excellent presentation December 8th on the musical history of Christ Church Cathedral, particularly images of a church picnic from that era, with some rather amazing hats and moustaches.

Afterwards, I chatted with Stephen and somewhat magically he was able within a matter of minutes to help me locate something that I’ve been trying to find for many years: the marriage certificate of my great grandparents, Ruth and Arthur Jones who wed at the cathedral in 1910.

Theirs had been a shipboard romance. He was a steamship engineer from Liverpool and she was a girl from Northampton, a teacher who would go on to work at Strathcona School and at Aberdeen School at Burrard and Smythe.

They settled down at 1616 Alberni in what is now the street’s last Victorian house still standing. It has since become a restaurant called the Red Accordion, run by a young man I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago, whose great-grandparents were also from Liverpool. As it turned out, I attended UBC with the daughter of the former owner, the restaurateur of 1616 Alberni’s earlier incarnation as Le Gavroche. At the time, I had no idea that the house had once belonged to my ancestors.

In the Edwardian era, the West End  was almost named New Liverpool and the cathedral would’ve been a short walk away- almost like a new world village close.

Now my great grandparent’s old house, where my great uncle Rob used to gaze out from the living room at the shingle mill on the site of the present day Bayshore Inn, is being stared down by Kengo Kuma‘s new high-rise tower. Across the street is the site of the old White Spot on Georgia – now a vacant lot, possibly awaiting re-development, that was sold in 2017 for $245 million.

The old Victorian house where my grandmother Frances Penelope Jones spent her early childhood didn’t stay in the family. They left 1616 Alberni for a new home at 5th and Tolmie in 1925.


According to family lore, my great grandfather Jones worked as a heating engineer in the old Birk’s building on Granville Street, and after an unfortunate incident where his wife surprised him one day at lunch and caught him buying jewellery for an elevator girl (!) he took the ship back to England the very next day, abandoning his family during the Depression.

When World War II started, he was unable to return and only came back in 1945 to the rather incredibly welcoming arms of his wife, Ruth. She had survived by transforming the family home at 5th and Tolmie into a rooming house where Jack Shadbolt was once a lodger. 

All these family stories came back to me when I saw the marriage certificate from 1910.

It made my current connection to the cathedral feel like a continuum, historically and ancestrally. While my great grandfather WC Ditmars and his first wife Winifred Calvert were married at Saint Mark’s Anglican in Kitsilano (whose last incarnation was sadly demolished to build an apartment tower) and my father’s parents Frances Penelope Jones and William Carey Ditmars were married at Saint Helen’s Anglican church in West Point Grey (happily still standing), my great grandfather Ditmars and his second wife both had funerals at Christ Church Cathedral. 

In this 135th anniversary year of the cathedral, it’s a wonderful feeling to be able to connect the dots between my relationship to the church community today and my ancestral stories. (more about those here for the curious)

I’m now keen to know who else in the congregation has third and fourth generation roots at the cathedral. I’d love to meet you at coffee hour and have a chat. Perhaps our ancestors once rubbed shoulders at church picnics?

The whole experience has given me a greater sense of the cathedral, not just as a place of worship, but as an integral part of Vancouver’s history and increasingly vulnerable heritage.