55 years ago

 My Mother died today. The hospital is a few blocks north of our old house on McConnell Avenue. She walked me up the street to school the first day of Kindergarten in 1965. I always saw the hospital on the hill from the school. 

Olive Bellis, July 10, 1927 - February 8, 2021

Peacefully on February 8, 2021 at the age of 93 after a brief illness at Cornwall Community Hospital.

Born Olive Thomas, one of twins, in East Brighton, Brighton, England, July 10, 1927, and raised as Olive Williams with her brother Leslie and sister Daisy in Bethesda, Wales, a mostly Welsh speaking slate mining town in what is now Snowdonia National Park. Her adoptive father, Thomas John Williams, served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in WWI and owned the first motor taxi in Bethesda. He once drove a customer all the way to London. She married the late Raymond Lewis Bellis in 1949, had two girls, and emigrated to Canada in 1957, where she had a son.

Olive was active in the Cornwall Ceramics Club, volunteered at Cornwall General Hospital, and attended Good Shepherd and Trinity Anglican Church.

Mother to Miriam, Mary, now deceased, and Mark, Grandmother to Valerie, Andrea, Jennifer and David, Great-grandmother to Andrew, Stephanie, Haley, Alexander, Samantha, Christina, James, Amy, Joseph, Ian, Jenna, Hayden

and Emily and Great-great-grandmother to Chloe, Noah, Liam

and Greyson. Sister-in-law to Anne, Aunt to Christine and Ruth, and Arfon, Steve, Karen and Chris and Great-aunt to Iwan, Tom and Hannah.

Thanks to everyone at Cornwall Community Hospital for their kind care.

She used to volunteer as an usher during the war years and saw Julie Andrews and Petula Clark as child stars. She also saw Dame Sybil Thorndyke do Medea for a week - she said most of the performances were dull but one was electrifying.

She had furniture made from slate in the house she grew up in - the dinner table had  a slate top and they used it as a pool table as well. I saw cabinets for dishes made of slate and even a folding fan. She said when she was in school during the war, an airman who was a friend of the principal gave him something he got in Africa and the principal brought it to school. None of the students had ever seen one before and they lined up to look and one lucky girl got to take it home. It was a banana!

She kept some secrets - she knew Wilbert Coffin's sister but never told me she was his sister until after she died. Coffin was executed in Quebec in 1956, after a murder trial that was considered unfair by many. 

Interred at St. Lawrence Valley Cemetery, Ingleside, Ontario - Find-a-Grave entry This is also where my father, Raymond Lewis Bellis (1925-1990) and sister Mary Wyn Bellis (1955-2015) are interred.