James had been a skilled hewer of timber in a shipyard in New Brunswick, when he got word from Mary that her husband Mr. James Hunt was dying of tuberculosis. He came on the train, arriving just in time to attend Mr. Hunt’s funeral and so his course was decided. He switched from shipbuilding to farming, helped raise Mary’s three children, and might’ve returned to shipbuilding but was entranced by the schoolteacher across the road. She was a spirited young woman. She and her twin sister, Della, had learned Morse code as children so they could chat in class and when they moved to Minnesota from Thornton, Iowa, they became two of the first female railroad telegraphers in the country, working at the Anoka depot. They posed as one person named D. Powell. One worked the morning shift, came home for lunch, changed clothes with her twin who then worked the afternoon.

Dora liked that James was a reader of history. She told her daughter Ruth: “He was a tall handsome man with a brushy moustache and I was told he was part Indian and I liked that. He was very good to Mary and he raised her three children and then he started paying attention to me. He crossed over the road to the schoolhouse after the children had left and followed me around washing the blackboards and clapping the erasers and I moved away from him but not so fast that he couldn’t catch up and then he kissed me. I hadn’t been kissed like that before and back then it meant something. I agreed to go with him to town and get married and as soon as he told Mary, then we got in his wagon and went away and did that.”

Mary Hunt moved to her sister’s up the road and James and Dora came back to his house, and he carried her into the house and left the horses standing hitched to the wagon, their reins hanging down, until morning. He had attended to his sister’s family for 20 years and now he intended to start his own. He doted on Grandma. She was the only farm wife around with a serving girl to help her with chores. He called her “My Girl” and sang to her in a clear tenor voice and, until he was very old, carried her up the stairs at night to bed. The union produced Ruth, Robert, Josephine, Jim, John, Lawrence, Elizabeth and Eleanor.

We trace our Keillor ancestry back to William Evans Keillor, a schoolteacher, born in 1837. And, before that, back to Robert who sailed from Yorkshire in 1774 to Halifax where Keillors mingled with Trenholms, Crandalls and others, but our Canadian history is sketchy. Our knowledge of James and Dora is clearer, since we cousins heard it from Aunt Ruth and Uncle Lew Powell when they came to visit. We lay on the floor and listened closely. She told us that Grandpa bought the first Model T in Ramsey township. He drove it home and went to turn in at the yard and forgot what he was dealing with, and he pulled back hard on the wheel and shouted, “Whoa!” The car went in the ditch and he had to hitch up his horses and pull himself out. He was laughing when the car went into the ditch and he was laughing as he towed it out. 

She told about Grandpa Keillor rousing his brood from their warm beds on a winter night, bundling them up and leading them up the road to the pasture to see, on a nearby ridge under the full moon, a silver wolf, sitting on his haunches, gazing back at them. She was scared and asked, “What if the wolf attacks us?” and he said, “He won’t so long as we stay close together.” She told about the day the house burned down — Dad and my aunts and uncles looking out the schoolhouse windows and seeing their house in flames. Ruth was home sick from school with little Eleanor. They heard Grandma cry out and ran downstairs to see one wall of the house in flames. Ruth pumped a kettle of water and threw it at the flames as Grandma hauled an armload of bedding and books and pictures out on the lawn and was about to go back for Grandpa’s desk drawers, but he grabbed her, he’d run up from the field, and he wouldn't let her go back in. The children formed a bucket brigade but it was too late. A chimney fire. “I never saw him so sad,” Ruth said. “He and the neighbors shoveled out the debris and Uncle Allie built us a new fireproof house with concrete walls, covered in stucco. Mother missed the old house so much. But Dad wanted one that was fireproof.”

They were a remarkable family, faithful Christians, hard workers, loyal to each other, and we remember them tenderly: the loving Ruth, witty Bob, the beautiful and stalwart Josephine, steady Jim, the brotherly John, beloved Lawrence, studious Elizabeth and playful Eleanor. Looking at that sentence, I see that any of the adjectives could be applied to any of the others.

This attempt at family history doesn’t come to you on paper because it is not a final draft. Add your own recollections and distribute as you see fit. GK