Where My Roots Go Deep

Richard Wilbur is supervisor of the Legislative Research Service at the
New Brunswick Legislature, and the author of The Rise of French New
Brunswick.

With the publication of We Keep a Light, which received a Governor
General’s Award, Evelyn Richardson quickly became one of Nova
Scotia’s most widely read writers of the post–World War II era
(1949-77). This collection of articles, compiled by her two daughters,
shows why.

The book is divided into four sections: “Early Nova Scotia
Founders,” “Sea Stories,” “Vignettes and Voyages,” and
“Memoirs.” The latter two sections contain some of the volume’s
most personal and vivid writing. Three articles in the memoirs section
provide a witty and warm account of the author raising a family and
helping her husband tend a lighthouse on Bon Portage Island at the
southwestern tip of Nova Scotia. All three articles originally aired on
the CBC.

The final article, “The Halifax Explosion—1917,” was first
published in the Nova Scotia Historical Quarterly in December 1977.
Based on Richardson’s eyewitness account as a girl of 15, it is a
gripping narrative of what happened to her as she and her father, a
school principal, left their Bedford home that fateful morning.