Identity area
Type of entity
Family
Authorized form of name
Gass Family
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
History
The Gass Family lived in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia. Robert Gass was born in 1861 in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, to James and Nancy Gass. He owned a general store and lumber mill. In 1884 he married Nerissa Miller, with whom he had ten children. Their eldest child and only daughter, Clare, was born in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, on 18 March 1887. Clare was later known for the diary she kept during the First World War. As an adolescent, she attended the Church School for Girls, a private Anglican school in Windsor, Nova Scotia (later the Edgehill School). Three years after her graduation in 1905, she left home for Montreal to train as a nurse at the Montreal General Hospital School of Nursing from 1909 to 1912, afterwards taking up private nursing practice for three years. After a brief training period in Quebe, she left for Europe in May of 1915 as a Lieutenant nursing sister with the Canadian Army Medical Corps, No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill). From 1915-1918, she was posted mainly in France, with some time spent stationed in Cliveden, England, and Rhyl, Wales, and served in multiple hospitals. She spent the year after the war on transport duty, tending to wounded soldiers returning home. She was demobilized in 1919 and returned to Montreal, where she left nursing to pursue social work. She worked in the Social Service Department of the Montreal General Hospital for 28 years before returning to her hometown. Robert Gass died in 1937. Clare Gass died at the age of 81 at the Camp Hill Veterans’ Hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 5 August 1968.