Carl Reginald Mason, KStJ

Carl was born January 3, 1934, in Honeywood, Ontario, son of William Wilfred Mason and Elizabeth Copeland. He went to school in Honeywood, then — after the family moved to Barrie in 1946 — to Victoria Public School and Barrie Collegiate Institute. At seventeen he joined the Royal Bank of Canada as a teller; at nineteen, on August 10, 1953, he started at Ontario Hydro, where he would spend the next twenty-five years, rising to Senior Cost Clerk for the Georgian Bay Region. In 1978 he moved to the Ontario Hydro Employees' Union as Job Evaluation Officer for Ontario, and on February 1, 1989, he began what he carefully recorded in this very tree as his "first day of retirement."

On September 5, 1959, he married Grace Margaret Lowry in Barrie. They were members of the United Church, and together fifty-eight years. Carl's own notes list his pleasures plainly: skiing, boating, canoeing, camping, golfing, woodworking, photography, and travelling.

Retirement, for Carl, mostly meant service. He had joined St. John Ambulance in 1965 as treasurer of Barrie Division #107; by the time he stepped back four decades later he had superintended the division, the Simcoe–Parry Sound Corps, and the South Simcoe County Branch, chaired two districts, and served the Council for Ontario as director, vice-president, and finally President from 2003 to 2005 — with seats on the Priory Council and Priory Chapter of the Priory of Canada. For twenty-two years he was also an instructor and examiner in first aid and CPR.

The Order of St. John admitted him as a Serving Brother in 1972 and promoted him step by step across thirty-three years: Officer, Commander, Knight of Grace, and in 2005 Knight of Justice — the year the Canadian Heraldic Authority granted him arms. He volunteered, too, with the Barrie Jaycees, Simcoe–Barrie Emergency Measures, the United Way of Barrie–South Simcoe, and the Ontario Hydro Pensioners Association.

And through all of it he kept the family's records — collecting dates, places, war diaries, and obituaries from every branch, and entering them, one relative at a time, into the tree that became this site.

Sometime after his retirement, Carl set out to write down where the family had come from. He worked at it for decades — through Ancestry.ca, censuses, parish registers, cemetery transcriptions, and letters to distant cousins — and the file he left holds 679 relatives across 9 generations, annotated in his own words: who farmed which lot, who kept which store, who stood guard at Mons. Nearly every fact on this site, from William Fead's birth about 1690 to his own father's war diary, was gathered by him.

His full record in the tree, exactly as he kept it, is at his person page — one entry among 679, which is surely how he would have filed himself.