Tales of True North: #1 Jason Schlombs
TRUE NORTHTrue North is what guides everything we do - and don’t do - at REW. It’s an internal compass with our deepest-held beliefs, values and principles at its pole. In these True North Tales, our CREW share the stories that they believe echo what we all stand for.
The Watch
At the end of August 2021, my wife and I moved into our new house. Built in 1927, it was the first one constructed in the area. As we carried in our belongings, we knew we were taking into our care a nearly-empty home packed to its rafters with history.
What we didn’t know about was the old watch pinned to the top of the corkboard beside our fridge.
Alongside the aged and patinated watch was a note. It spoke of how the previous owner had found and held onto the watch for 26 years, and that they were leaving it behind in case its original owner ever returned. The owner’s daughter had come back once after moving out, but the watch had yet to be discovered, and she had reportedly embarked on a three-year around the world sailing trip, never to return.
For the first two months, we didn’t pay much attention to the watch as we settled in. Its age and story made for good conversation when people visited, and it even seemed to work when wound up. But I’m a bit of a history geek with an appreciation for older things, and the stories behind them.
The watch was small, perhaps belonging to a woman, or maybe a child. The initials “JVF” were inscribed on the caseback, while the face was lettered with “Oyster Lipton”. A quick Google search uncovered that it was manufactured by Rolex for the Canadian (and I think British) military market in the 1930s and 40s.
This was around Remembrance Day, and we decided that we would track down the aforementioned daughter and return this piece of her history to her. The watch suddenly had its own story to tell. Maybe it belonged to her father, or grandfather? We had her first and last name from the note. How hard could finding her be?
The game is afoot.
I began by contacting our house’s previous owners. They told us that the daughter had married a local secondary school teacher who had retired in the 90s. I wasn’t sure if her surname was her married or maiden name, and the search results weren’t pointing me towards anything that looked like a match. I looked up teachers who had attended the school and retired in the 90s, ex Vice Principals, program heads and authors, but soon hit a dead end.
Then I stumbled onto a BC City Directory (which in of itself is really cool as it provides digitized copies of directories from as far back as the 1860s). After a bit of searching, I located the name of the person who first lived in our house, but these records are only available online up to 1955, at which point the first owner still lived in this home. I also learned that I could go down to the city archives and root through actual physical copies for the directories that might be able to help me locate the daughter.
British Columbia City Directories (1860 - 1955)
I did explore other options: Rolex doesn’t keep records that far back, a title search didn’t reveal anything, and the listing agent (who had retired in the early 2000s) couldn’t help me. But the original listing sheet did at least reveal something important - we’d had the wrong spelling of her last name the whole time.
Again, dead end.
It takes a village.
We decided to go knock on some neighbours’ doors. A few of them had lived here for a long time, and maybe there was a chance that they’d be able to give us some small clue.
Two doors down, the trail came alive again.
Our neighbour remembered the first and last names of the daughter’s parents, which was huge. She was also able to tell us that the father worked at a local hospital that provided medical care and rehabilitation services for World War I and II veterans, and that she thought the daughter still lived in the lower mainland.
Armed with the parents’ names, I was finally able to search for birth, death and marriage certificates, all the time worried that her name might pop up and all of this would have been for nothing. Thankfully, she remained as elusive as ever.
At last, I found her again on her father’s death certificate. He was born in Scotland in 1916, making him 23 when the world went back to war again. His daughter had been named after her grandmother on her mother’s side, and the initials on the back of the watch matched those of her grandfather.
I returned for another Google search. All of a sudden I had what looked like a match. A corporate profile, but worth a shot. It was late on a Sunday evening, but I fired off an email to her account.
The grandfather watch.
Over the next couple of days, I constantly refreshed my email. Nothing. But there was a phone number on the profile. I ran through what I’d say to her, hoping not to sound too much like a lunatic. Her phone rang. A woman picked up.
“Are you…?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Did you ever live at…?”
“Yes.”
At last I had found her. She had inherited the house from her parents and sold it in the 90s. I told her the story of how we’d recently moved into the house and found what we believed was a family heirloom that belonged to her. There was a pause.
“Did you find a watch?”
I explained how the previous owners had found it and held onto it for her for all these years, and how we had been so determined to reunite her with it. She was close to tears as she told me that she had always thought about the watch, and had just spoken about it with her partner.
We agreed to meet up at the house so she could tell us more about the watch and the house that she grew up in. COVID, the Vancouver winter rain and a three-year-old with a never-ending cold delayed our meeting, but eventually she opened our door and crossed a threshold that hadn’t felt the passing of her feet in decades.
I’d like to believe that in some small way we helped to reunite her with her parents who passed away when she was young. She regrets not listening to more of the story behind the watch, but it’s something that we both hope to explore together.
I think that our homes are founded on memories. They hold onto them despite time, and rain, and new footsteps. And every now and then, if you look hard enough, they will allow you to share in them.
Jason Schlombs
Senior Experience Designer
