Fearless Females: Recipes

March 7 — Share a favorite recipe from your mother or grandmother’s kitchen. Why is this dish your favorite? If you don’t have one that’s been passed down, describe a favorite holiday or other meal you shared with your family.

You can tell that this recipe has been pulled from my mother's recipe index many times. I remember asking Mom who Beth was and she thought it was some relative. I do not think she ever met her mother's cousin, Beth.

Elizabeth (Beth) Carr

I recently met Beth's daughter, Andrea, and her sister, Karen, over the internet and we got into a conversation about a bun recipe that has been passed around the family.  While going though the recipe file looking for Granny's bun recipe, I came across the card pictured above and the connection with the name Beth hit me.  Sure enough, Karen has the same recipe with the exception of the spices added at the bottom.


Beth's Ginger Snaps are my absolutely favourite cookies and my recipe is just as messy looking as Mom's.  Running a close second to Beth's Ginger Snaps is an oatmeal-coconut cookie called Mother's Cookies.  Who's mother?  My maternal grandmother was always referred to as Mother, not Mom, or Mum, perhaps that is where it started, or could it be Granny's mother, Maria Moyer Butchart?

The Carr Family

This is a picture of my grandmother, Vinetta Tremaine Butchart Bellamy (left) and her aunt, Laura Moyer Carr (right).

So often, I connect with family by finding an obituary or memoir when it is too late to know the person who has died. Such was the case yesterday when I found a wonderful website while searching for Mary V Carr of Medicine Hat, Alberta. Mary was 98 when she died in October 2006.

I have many letters written by Mary to my parents from 1982 until a Christmas letter in 1999 which ends with the following sentence: "I hope that the millennium will bring you joy and prosperity in the year 2000."

Mary and her brother, John, were my grandmother's cousins. Their mother and Granny's mother were both the daughters of Aaron Moyer and Veronica Bowman. My grandmother, Vinetta Tremaine Butchart, was the daughter of Maria Moyer and Edward Neil Butchart; Mary and John Carr were the children of Laura Moyer and Frederick Carr. Maria and Laura were part of a large family of twelve children.

Many thanks to the Carr family for creating a memorial website for Mary Veronica Carr and John Lawrence Carr, especially the webmaster, Doug Carr. I have spent hours reading the memoirs and tributes for these interesting people.