Born a Newfoundlander, Carolyn Muir Helfenstein began teaching in a one-room schoolhouse near King City, Ontario, then in Toronto. Carol and her husband, Harry, purchased a Bruce County dairy farm in 1963. With their three children, they worked the land and cared for a high-producing herd of purebred Holsteins. They approached varied opportunities–hosting exchange students,...
Barbara Aggerholm was born in Kincardine, Ontario, and spent her childhood there and in other Bruce County communities. She has been writing all her life: from high school yearbooks to more than thirty years as a newspaper journalist. Among her credits are thousands of articles, often on health, social services, education and ethnic issues. Barbara’s...
Lillian Burgess is an artist, an author, and a farmer. Her passion for the natural world began with a childhood spent in Angola. One of five children in a Canadian missionary family, she left home at age seventeen to study in New Brunswick. After two years towards a BA, she began the hands-on learning that...
Anne Duke Judd writes, edits, and gardens in Saugeen Shores, Ontario. A freelance writer and editor since 1974, her work appears in a number of regional periodicals, such as The Rural Voice, The Country Connection and Mosaic. She is the author of Bruce Township Five Ghost Towns, published in 2012. In May 2008, She was...
Son of a high-school history teacher, Ken Thornburn says, “Perhaps a little more love of the past rubbed off on me than I expected.” Trained in commercial art, illustration, and photography, Ken taught at Ontario College of Art and worked in the feature and commercial film industry in Toronto before returning to his Bruce County...
As a suburban stay-at-home mother of three in the 1970s, Suzanne Sloan began writing stories of her earlier years, many of which were published in periodicals and anthologies or read on CBC Radio. A participant in the Highway Four Writers, she has shared her work at venues around Grey and Bruce counties. Born Suzanne Smith,...
Shelley Norman has lived all her life on a family farm near Kincardine. She attended local schools, often writing stories and comic strips for fun. Shelly says, “I wrote Bruce County Counts because I’ve had trouble finding good counting books to use in my childcare business.” Farming is important in Shelley’s life. She and her...
As one of ten siblings, Michael O’Neill lived his childhood years on a farm in Middlesex County, Ontario. For more than thirty-five years, Mike and his wife, Kerri, have farmed a few miles north in Bruce County. “I have a wonderful family and home life, and can find treasures in the darndest places,” Mike says....
As a girl, Cori Mordaunt lived for six weeks at the Point Clark lighthouse, where her sister and brother-in-law were keepers of this important light on the Lake Huron shore. That experience, the stories told by her dad, and her lively imagining of what could have happened there during the “white hurricane” of November, 1913,...
