The Halifax Explosion: A Tomlin and Moreland Update

On the morning of December 6, 1917, there was an explosion in the Halifax Harbour that injured 9,000 people and killed 2,000.

This blog post is an update to previous posts about the impact of this explosion on our ancestors:

1. My grandmother Dorothy Moreland was only seven years old and was living with her sister Florence at a foster home because her father John Miller Moreland was overseas fighting in WWI. The foster home at 500 Gottingen was destroyed.
2. My 2nd great-uncle Francis Clifford Tomlin was a tinsmith at the Hillis & Sons Foundry and searched day and night through the ruins of north end Halifax and the next day's blizzard looking for the bodies of his daughter, mother-in-law, 4 sisters-in-law and their families; 3 brothers-in-law; all those who worked with him at the Foundry. He died of meningitis on March 21, 1918 and when the Halifax Relief commission refused to give his widow, Maggie a survivor's pension, she was angry and made a point of carving into her husband's headstone that he was a victim, putting the date of the explosion before the date of death. This post is the story about his family that survived.