How my son's project opened my eyes to family history, and led me to a shipwreck

You can almost touch it.

Not that many people would want to. It's just a mass of rusting steel and rotting wood at the end of a private dock in Embree.

But I wanted to put my hand on the rough lumber of the deck and touch the place where my grandfather once walked as a member of the Newfoundland Royal Naval Reserve.

The Embree wreck is what's left of HMS Calypso. She sailed into St. John's in 1900 to become the training ship for the Newfoundland Naval Reserve. Her masts were dismantled and a barracks was built on the deck. The Calypso would remain in St. John's harbour for 20-plus years.

Before and during the Great War, hundreds of Newfoundlanders would train in the ways of naval warfare to become sailors on British Royal navy ships all over the world.

But my family's connection is something I never knew until a few short years ago.

Family lore, not passed along

My grandfather Peter Gullage passed away when I was 12. I remember the crabapple tree in the backyard on Southside Road, the way the big tree in the front shadowed the living room and the a picture of the SS Caribou in the hall. For a kid living in Mount Pearl it was always a house that felt old, and my grandparents seemed to come from another time.

What I didn't know, and was never told, was the Gullage family history in the Great War. It would take my son Noah's heritage project in school to uncover the surprise.

I was the one who ended up with an oval framed picture of a soldier that had been in a storage room at my grandparent's place. I figured out that was great uncle Victor, whom my dad was named after. That's all I knew, and for years and for whatever reason didn't bother to look into his war record.

It wasn't until we were picking through war records at the Rooms for the school project that I found details of my family history.

The microfilm of the old papers revealed that Victor signed up when he was 19 years old on July 5, 1915.

A year later he died in the battle of Gueudecourt on Oct. 12, 1916.

The documents tell the tale of how the army had trouble passing on word of his death to his next of kin. They couldn't find his brother Peter, who was serving in the Royal Newfoundland Naval Reserve.

A letter from a pastor in Catalina filled in another detail about the young Gullage's road from Catalina to Southside Road in St. John's.

HMS Calypso: The story behind the wreck

6 years ago

Duration 4:43

Learn the history of the Newfoundland Naval Reserve, including the Calypso the ship on which each member trained

"Their late father perished with all hands on David Rennie's schooner on the banks in late September 1900," said the note from the parsonage in Catalina.

Reading that was a bit of a moment because that's a piece of family history that was never passed down through the generations.

A ship that served many, but didn't travel far

Or maybe it was. Maybe I was just a suburban kid who didn't care enough to pay attention.

Then again, I remember my grandfather as a quiet man and maybe the war and the loss of his brother had something to do with that.

It was just a few days ago I found myself back at The Rooms sitting in front of a microfiche machine, looking for more details. There's not much there in the Royal Naval Reserve records about Peter Gullage.

He was 20 when he enlisted on July 1, 1916, and served at British Royal Navy stations in England through the war and into 1919. That single record doesn't tell me anything about his experience.

Far from the wreck in Embree, at the Admiralty House museum in Mount Pearl, there are dozens of artifacts from HMS Calypso. During the war, the building was a wireless communication station staffed by sailors who trained on the Calypso in St. John's harbour.

Lauren Lambe, the museum's assistant curator, can talk forever about the Calypso and her place in Newfoundland's war effort.

"For a ship that didn't go many places after 1900, it definitely saw a lot of people and sent a lot of people all around the world," Lambe told me.

Slipping away from us

A personal experience turns to memory and slips into history over the generations.

Many times the stories are lost.

I`ve met many people in the past couple of years of the First World Warcommemoration coverage who were on a similar mission to find out their family history before it was too late and could not be passed on to another generation.

And that's why, standing on that dock in Embree, I wanted to reach out and touch the deck of the Calypso.

It would not fill in the blanks but it would at least make the connection to a story I never knew.

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