Stories About My Family

The bombing of Berlin was a horrific ordeal for German civilians. My mother-in-law Gerda Drews, who turns 98 years old on December 1, 2025, lived to tell her story.

I have a personal connection with one of the oddest events in wartime history, when the German navy deliberately sank its own fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. My husband’s grandfather was serving on one of those ships!

My husband was a twelve-year-old boy living in a peaceful suburb when the Berlin Wall went up almost overnight, just two blocks from his home. Thankfully, his family lived on the western side. Here are his memories of growing up in the shadow of the wall.

Dear Friends: When our youngest daughter Melinda became engaged on Christmas Day, my thoughts turned to my simple yet elegant Thousand Dollar Wedding, held on New Year’s Day 1993.

Fred Sutherland of Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, is now Canada’s last surviving Dambuster — one of only two left in the world. He’s also a member of my extended family, because he was married to my mother’s cousin Margaret.

I had two personal reasons for visiting the museum at Peenemünde in Germany, where the Nazis invented their deadly V-weapons: because it plays a role in my wartime novel about aerial photo interpretation, and because my father-in-law Kurt Drews worked here during the war.

My mother-in-law Gerda Drews was a teenager living in Berlin during World War Two. She witnessed the ferocious battle of Berlin, and her family’s tragic experiences after her city fell to the Soviet Army.

Read these World War One letters written by my great-uncle Robert Burns Florence in 1916, and you will remark on the dramatic change between a young man shortly after his arrival in France, and the same young man just one month later, after doing battle at The Somme. In honour of the World War One […]

My godfather Colin Greener served in the Canadian Cavalry in the First World War. He stood five foot three in his boots, but he had the heart of a lion. He fought in the trenches, was wounded twice, and decorated for bravery. He always joked that if he had been taller he wouldn’t have survived. […]

Seventy-two years after my uncle RCAF pilot trainee Alan Light died in a training accident, I discovered a dramatic oil painting that shows the last moments of his life.