Davison, George William - (See Timothy Robert Turner)
Thank you to my birth mother for a double gift of life. Thank you for first bearing me and then having the courage to share me with a new family. As I go, I want to thank you for my life, express my love and wish you peace.
Tim.

Tim was born March 30, 1948.

Death Notice, The Toronto Star [Feb 19, 2000]

A re(con)FIGURE(d) 8 TRAINTRACK navigates through THE BAD BLOOD & GHOST LIMBS GRAVEYARD — a dreamscape of the Falconbridge smelter in Northern Ontario. Its meandering labyrinth of tubes & channels joining containers & buildings — piercing billowy steam pillows — calls up the network of veins & arteries traversing the body. The traintrack, spread out & disjointed, suddenly becomes skeletal.

A Graveyard Tale of a missing funeral. Can you mourn the death of someone you never met?

An irony. Death lead me to meeting my birthmother. The death of my birthmother's mother — my grandmother — provided me with clues in her obituary.

Birth, death and marriage announcements from newspapers can
be particularly helpful when searching. Old newspapers are available on microfilm at libraries, archives and sometimes newspaper offices.

If you can find the obituary of a relative, (ie. maternal grandparent)
an obituary usually gives the name of the spouse and children often with married names and towns. I had only the first letter of my birthname "L" and the fact that my birthmother had three siblings but found a match through a long process of elimination.

The words MOTHER/OTHER, inscribed on tombstones, echoes the confusion swirling around the discovery of additional family members as I try to label the people around me in a vain attempt at order. It is a slow discovery that the words adoptive/birth mother/father or adoptive brother, stepbrother, half-sister, are labels which can divide my parents & siblings. In truth, all my various family members [through adoption & remarriage] are not linked solely through blood ties, but through memory, time & experience. The nuclear family has expanded/blown up and from the pieces thrown about, I am creating my own unique structure: an assemblage, a collage, or a patchwork quilt to call FAMILY.