Charles Alfred Turple

Island story

Charles Alfred Turple is commemorated at R6-001 in the Pioneer Cemetery with his wife R. Jane Harris Turple and granddaughter Jean Marcella MacMillan. A 1947 Nova Scotia civil marriage record for their daughter Eleanor Mary Turple names her father as Alfred Charles Turple and her mother as Jennie Rebecca Harris, showing the different forms of their names used in family records. Contemporary evidence also places a Charles Turple in the Pictou Island fishing economy in 1933–34 and identifies Charles Turple as the Pictou Island ferry operator in July 1937. Ruth Munro later associated Charlie Turple with the Island ferry sequence involving Dot, Dinty and Jennie R.; the ownership and sequence of those vessels have not been established. The 1931 census records a Charles Turple aged fifty-seven, but that age does not align neatly with an 1869/1870 birth, so it remains uncertain whether that census entry refers to the same man.