Notable People

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John Austin MacLeod

"Johnnie Bard"

 (1911-1979)

Author of Memoirs of Dell, unpub. typescript, 1971, 264 p.

John Austin MacLeod

John was born and raised in Dell, Quebec, the son of Kenneth D. McLeod and Catherine Nicholson, both of whom were immigrants from the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. This family was known ad the "Bard" McLeods. Johnnie Bard lived at home on the family farm in Dell with his parents and brother Donald until the age of 25 (1936) when he left Dell to take a farm hand job in Lacolle, Quebec just south of Montreal, where he met a local girl named Thelma Irene Boyse. Johnnie went to northern Ontario where he worked in the lumber camps, but returned to Quebec to marry Thelma on December 23, 1937 at the St. James Church in St. Johns, Quebec, not far from Thelma’s home town. They went together to Ontario and eventually settled in Kingston in southeastern, Ontario where they raised their three children, Ruby, Jim, and Jean. John died in Kingston in 1979 and his wife Thelma died there in 1996. Both are buried in Cataraqui Cemetery, Kingston, Ontario.

In 1962, 26 years after he had left home, John, then 51, returned to Dell for a visit. The vast changes in the community so disturbed him that he felt the need to finally write the book he had long wanted to write on the life as it was when he left Dell. In 1971 he finished his book which, as he states, "endeavours to recapture the bygone days of a place that was once caressed by the hand of god, --- Dell, which was also the place of my birth." 

Johnnie Bard finished his memoirs in 1971 and titled his collection of 15 essays simply "Memoirs of Dell." It was never published and only a few copies of it exist. I am fortunate enough to have made a copy of the one loaned to me by Duncan L. McLeod of Scotstown in 1994.

Children and spouses: James Kenneth "Jim" (Joan Wilson), Ruby Merilyn (William Pester), and Jean Thelma (Col. John Miller)