Family of long-ago plane crash victim found

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This article was published 09/03/2012 (5273 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The long-lost family of a Hudson’s Bay clerk who died in a fiery plane crash 53 years ago was found this week.

Eight people died on the 120-kilometre Transair flight from the First Nations of Big Trout Lake to Kasabonika, north of Sioux Lookout, Ont., on June 12, 1959.

The Wapekeka First Nation in northwestern Ontario spent two years looking for the family of Hudson’s Bay Company clerk Denis John Martin, 23.

The Oji-Cree village is raising a circle of stone around the crash site to the memory of the dead and was holding off until they could located surviving relatives.

When the trail went cold for the Martin family in Transcona, they approached the Free Press and a reader in Anola found the relatives within hours of reading an account of the search. The Free Press story ran March 3.

“I read the story and I knew I had to do something,” said Bill Paulishyn, whose school chum half a century ago was Martin’s brother, David.

The retired councillor from the RM of Springfield tapped into his network across Manitoba, locating Denis Martin’s two surviving sisters and his old school chum.

Ruth Kerda, 83, is the eldest of the three surviving siblings. She shed a few tears, grateful and overwhelmed by the community’s compassion.

“After all these years, I’m really impressed that the natives would want to include us,” Kerda said from her Emerson home.

It’s her memories that fill in crucial parts of the story, too, about her brother’s state of mind back then.

Her brother Denis’s whole life stretch ahead of him that day. He’d just become engaged to the daughter of a manager of a Hudson’s Bay Company post and he’d planned a visit home that summer after two years away in the bush, she said.

“He was a sweet, gentle person. He wouldn’t hurt anything or anyone. He was my little brother,” Kerda said.

Lynne Schultz, one of Kerda’s nieces, said she’d love to travel north with her aunt for the memorial’s dedication later this summer.

In Wapekeka, the discovery capped a sad chapter in the community’s history with a happy ending.

“For the 400 people located in this remote northwestern community, the article was a welcome boost… Chief Norman Brown expressed the community’s happiness,” said Canzeal Consultants president Rob Bruce-Barron, the community’s Winnipeg spokesman.

Jeremiah MacKay, an elder who lost his wife, son and newborn in the crash, said the discovery of the Martin family after so many years makes him feel very grateful.

“There is joy that the relatives now know that a permanent memorial for their loved ones is soon to be erected and commemorated,” Bruce-Barron said.

All but two of the crash victims were friends and relatives from neighbouring First Nations and the community easily tracked down those relatives.

They found the family of the pilot, Maurice Dubois, who’d been based in Sioux Lookout, the remote service centre that’s 450 kilometres south of Wapekeka but the closest town for that part of northern Ontario.

Martin and the pilot were the only non-natives aboard that day.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca