Olive Monica Dawson

Olive was the second daughter of Thomas Alfred Clement (Clem) Leblanc and Mary Ethel Sampson, born in Poulamon, Isle Madame, shortly after their return to Nova Scotia from a sojourn in the Chicago area. Olive grew up in Sydney but her heart remained in Isle Madame where she would spend summers with grandparents while Clem and Ethel continued to build a successful grocery business on Ashby Corner, despite the onset of the Great Depression. Their devotion to family and faith, and the dedication and integrity they demonstrated to their customers and community, served as a model to shape the caring, adventurous, and sincere person Olive would become.

In her 20s and looking for adventure, Olive moved out west to Calgary, where she developed a love of the outdoors, canoeing, horseback riding and skating with her new friends. She came close to settling down permanently and starting a family, but a last minute change of heart brought her home to Cape Breton. Despite the return home, her love of the West remained, and was the driving force behind a later epic family trip where she wanted to show her own family all the places she loved in Western Canada.

On her return to Sydney she went to work assisting dentist Connie Cusack, a friend of her parents, with his mobile dental clinic serving remote areas of Cape Breton. She had many fun stories about this time, including the fact that one of her uncles “got her a driver’s licence” so she could take the job, and her first driving lesson was the trip up the tortuous old unpaved road over Cape Smokey to Ingonish. When Olive eventually obtained her own car she was out with it year round, with tire chains in the winter, travelling with friends, going skating whenever and wherever possible. She in fact still had her drivers license until her 97th birthday, although it had been several years since she had actually been behind the wheel.

Her real calling soon pulled her back into teaching. She had a deep love and innate understanding of children. When, as the junior young teacher, she was handed a class stacked with most of the troubled pupils in that grade, she realized that giving them special “jobs” around the classroom could give a sense of purpose and direction. She dedicated much of her own time and money to getting extra resources for her young students. For fifty years after she finished teaching she would frequently meet former pupils around town on whom she had made a lasting impression.

On meeting her husband Victor in the mid 1960s and starting her own family, in accordance with an unofficial “rule” of that time, she gave up teaching to care for her own children and Vic’s elderly mother who lived with them. While her retirement from formal teaching may have been a loss to the young students of the community, it meant she could devote all her time and resources to guiding and caring for her own young family. Her children fondly remember fun home lessons and storytelling, and how she fostered curiosity and always took an active interest in the varied enthusiasms her children developed over the years.

She passed on her love for being outdoors to her children. Olive and Vic explored almost every inch of Cape Breton with their kids, hiking along remote beaches and old roads, cross country skiing in the winter, invoking a sense of wonder and connection with the past when encountering old stone walls and wells in the middle of the forest. After obtaining their beloved yellow camper van these trips expanded to family excursions across the entire country.

As her own children grew and became more independent, she was again able to channel her passion for teaching young ones into volunteer work with Brownies and catechism in schools.

After Vic's early retirement they together helped build the St. Theresa’s parish chapter of the Saint Vincent De Paul society. It became an amazing volunteer organization that was for 15 years far more than a food bank. It was a place where former clients would return as volunteers, a welcoming, fun and purposeful environment where young single parents and 80 year old nuns all could laugh together and enjoy each other's company while working. She became almost a Grandmother to many young women struggling through very hard situations, providing a shoulder for them to cry on, someone who was genuinely empathetic to talk things over with. She often came home crying from her efforts to in some way help ease the burdens of others. There was in fact a half-serious jest among some of her siblings that none of them had to worry about anything because Olive would do it for them, a humorous nod to her deep empathy for others.

Olive had a strong connection with the past which in her final decades bloomed into a major passion for Genealogy and local history of the Isle Madame area. She spent years scouring the old church records in all the parishes of the Acadian region of south Cape Breton. With anyone she could convince to come with her, she transcribed essentially every parish record still existing from the past 200 years. Olive, with her new genealogical friends on the nascent “interweb” of the late 1990s, made all these transcriptions freely available to the entire world. Anyone now doing genealogical research into the Isle Madame area is benefitting from her work without knowing where it came from. Olive and Vic became an unofficial summer welcoming committee for numerous Acadian researchers from away, and were key participants in the year 2000 Isle Madame genealogical summit arranged on “the listserv”.

Olive and Vic were still able to spend time at their summer place in Isle Madame (her Grandparents’ old home, in which she was born in 1928) until their late 80s. When Vic stopped driving they could still get there with family, and Olive was able to visit Poulamon for the last time just before her 97th Birthday.

After Vic’s death in 2023, Olive was never alone for even a minute. Her son Pat and devoted caregivers Frances Hall, Anne Vassalo, Glory Benjamin, and Jisha before her reassignment, made certain she felt safe, secure and, most importantly, loved at all times. Despite advancing cognitive decline, she had much happiness to the end, tapping her feet to music, playing her piano or electric keyboard, going on road trips around the Cabot Trail every October, or just sitting in her beloved comfy chair. Her caregivers will forever treasure her smiles, and the way she would take your hand and hold it giving loving squeezes, and at times lift it and give a precious little kiss.

Olive and Vic both demonstrated by their actions throughout their lives that there is nothing more important in life than what you can do for others.

Olive was predeceased by her older sister Bernice, younger brothers Raymond, Lorne and Jimmy and granddaughters Kiley and Monica.

She will be fondly remembered by her children Ronald, Patrick, Brian and Monique, Granddaughter Kaitlyn, Sisters Eunice, Lorraine, Andre and Lucille, nieces and nephews, extended family, and all who were touched by her immeasurable love and generosity.

As per Olive’s wishes funeral arrangements will be taking place under the care of T.W. Curry Parkview Chapel. Visitation will take place on December 1st from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at T.W. Curry Parkview Chapel, 755 George Street, Sydney. Funeral mass will be held on December 2nd at 11 a.m. at Saint Theresa Catholic Church, 381 Whitney Avenue in Sydney followed by a reception.