The Sturminster Newton Museum and Mill Society have just received a £14,000 grant to research the town's connections with Swanskin and Newfoundland.

Jim Case is from Newfoundland, Canada and discusses his family's connections with Dorset and the cod fishing and swanskin industries and the novel he has written based on the family history

Ananias, James Case’s debut novel, was published in October of 2020 by Nevermore Press of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. A second novel Vicory is his work in progress.

https://www.jamescaseauthor.com/

The event is free but donations (for Sturminster Newton Literary Festival) are appreciated.

James Case – A Biography

I was born and raised in St. John’s, Newfoundland – “North America’s Oldest City”.

In my forty-year career as a professional architect, I travelled extensively, and, at various times lived on four continents. I was fortunate to explore England and Scotland as very young man. It was an age of backpacks, hostels and BritRail passes. In recent years, I have visited Ireland – three times in fact, owing to a short-lived direct flight to Dublin – in an attempt to also embrace the Irish legacy of Newfoundland.

In 2017, I retired from architecture and moved with my wife and Irish Wolfhounds to the family property on the “North Shore” of Conception Bay to begin a new career: my writing odyssey. I had only recently completed the internationally acclaimed Fogo Island Inn, and my many sojourns to that largest island of the largest island during the Inn’s concept and construction, only fed my appetite for new-world / old-world interconnections. Fogo was, and still is, a place where Dorset and West Country accents of the 19th century remain remarkably and beautifully preserved.

In 1965, my great uncle Samuel Amos Case recalled the history of the family so that it could be recorded for posterity. He was 86 years of age at the time, living in Suffolk County, Massachusetts. He told of his grandfather who immigrated from Dorset under extremely suspicious and trying circumstances. That history was handed down in rough files and scraps of paper until it ended up in my hands just before my father died.

In exploring these documents, numerous revelations led to many questions. But thanks to this new thing called the internet, my uncle’s recollections could now be substantiated or disproven without having to spend months combing through documents at the Dorset History Centre. A pleasurable inconvenience for me at best!

What began as an amateur’s attempt at genealogy, evolved into a fervent desire to connect the dots - for as the facts were laid bare, it became apparent to me that the everyday linkages that tied them together would be forever lost to history. The facts were intriguing enough. I soon concluded that a story immersed and saturated in those facts would be worth telling.

And so I began to write, researching every name, event and social nuance for what was to become (I had hoped) a work of historical fiction. Only the personal interactions of the characters are fiction. Everything else relies upon the recorded history of southern England and the north shore of Newfoundland … and how those two seemingly disparate histories are colourfully and inextricably intertwined.

That is how the tale of my great-great-great grandfather began. It is how Ananias spoke to me, and it is how I hope he will speak to you.