Regretfully I inform my husband's readers that Edward succumbed to his long illness on the 10th of April 2021. It has taken me nearly two months to write this blog post as I work through the process of losing him. He was the center of our lives and still very much missed and always will be. Every occasion we will think of that missing chair and how much he would have loved to be there with us.
Others have written about his contributions to the world of genealogy and other fields that interested him (and there were many) and I thank them all for their wonderful tributes to him. When Edward was taken severely ill in 2011, I very much feared for his life then and set about collecting material for the Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Medal. OGS took over the material that I collected and submitted his name and he was awarded the medal in June 2012. I much appreciated their doing so as I had intended to submit it on my own but their doing so brought more attention to his wonderful contributions to Canadian Society and I thank them for that. After a good deal of medical care and assistance, Edward had a pacemaker inserted in February 2012 which then enabled him to pick up the reins of his life and go forward and he did do that living life to the full for the next nine years.
His lifelong interest in his Kipp family genealogy has taken him so many places we probably would never have gone and in his seventeen years of retirement he spent most of his time working on genealogy either for himself or for the Ottawa Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society and the United Empire Loyalist Branches with research trips into New York State. He was rewarded by finding a family history that would excite even the least interested person in genealogy. His family tree included so many New Englanders and New Yorkers. The family names resound back through the ages to those brave colonists coming from Europe/British Isles in the 1600s to find a new life in the American Colonies. The names in his tree resound through early Colonial History much to his shock as all of that was lost over time. Each new discovery was amazing and thank you to Gary Boyd Roberts who helped him in his quest on one of the Getaways at the NEHGS in 2005. Up to then Edward had found his Canadian lines and traced them back into New England but wanted to be sure he was accurate. Hence the Getaway and we spent many many more days and hours at the NEHGS over the years following.
Scarcely was the pacemaker in his chest a month though and we discovered that he had a shadow on his lungs which was eventually diagnosed as sarcoidosis. He was treated for that but eventually it did spread to his liver where he suffered cirrhosis secondary to sarcoidosis. Again he was treated but eventually succumbed to this disease. I see him also as a victim of COVID-19 lockdown as he loved to get out and about shopping and walking and shopping and the lockdown kept us at home. During the summer before he was out gardening and walking about in the yard and it is a good sized yard but the winter snows shut him in sadly.
Most of Edward's books will be donated to the Ontario Genealogical Society Ottawa Branch, they have kindly accepted. We are preparing the boxes and lists now (more than 40 boxes). Another set of his books (the last of his National Geographic Books) will be donated as well (he had already given them most of his collection). His research was pretty much American and Canadian and I do not use any of his books with my research being all British Isles (mostly England) and I can always go and use the books there anyway. He would want them to be used by other researchers.
I will use this blog over time to publish any of his material that he has not yet published in memory of the work that he has done. I retain about 20 boxes of his research for that purpose. Very luckily he found a Link cousin who will take the material of that family (he is a half cousin so I will retain the Allen family history which was Edward's grandmother).
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