Elizabeth Thatcher Thornton: My journey, finding myself and love
Five Years later- late Oct 1915
Before I had married my Husband Jack Thornton the towns Constable and Mountie a few months ago, I was Elizabeth Thatcher and I had arrived in Hope Valley five years ago to teach the children of the town back when it was known as Coal Valley. I had grown up in the east in a big city and had chosen to come out west to find my purpose, what I was meant to do as my true calling of being a teacher while finding myself in the process, and have become independent along the way. When I had first arrived in town I struggled, but learned a lot along the way with Abigail Stanton's help over the past five years. She quickly became one of my best friends along with most of the other women of the town. I soon learned that most of them were widows after an accident had occurred in their towns mine a few months before I came. They wanted me to make sure their children would be able to end up with better futures when they get older.
With each passing year I have spent in what has become Hope Valley, I was able to start doing things for myself, eventually found myself, became independent, and decided to stay permanently in Hope Valley and teaching the towns children who I had come to love to teach and they loved me. The town and the community of Hope Valley had become my home and I loved living here.
As the years went by, I slowly started to fall in love without even realizing it and to the new Mountie who had shown up in town just days after I did. At first things started out rocky between us, we always got annoyed with each other, eventually started to tolerate each other, and eventually fell for each other after he realized I was determined to conquer the everyday life of living out west. He came to the conclusion he was stuck with me because I would not give up and I was determined to overcome anything. I could and would do anything with grace and dignity no matter how long it took me. We had met officially when I was getting ready for the school day back when I had to teach in the saloon since we did not have a school house and he had startled me when he came down from the rooms above which also served as the towns hotel and I was unaware anyone else was in the building. The year after this I learned it was Jack who had given the money to build the school house I now teach in. We recently started being on a first name basis with each other by this point. Over the next four years we had formed and were in a relationship with each other. One day about a year and half ago before he left on an extended assignment, he unexpectedly surprised me in the most wonderful way ever with dozens of candles lighting a pathway to the school house where I taught and he proposed to me, that of which I accepted so I could become his wife as he could not imagine a future without me and I felt the same way. We got married a few weeks after he had gotten back and the ceremony was the most beautiful, breathtaking one imaginable in front of all our friends and some of our family. A week later he was called again for an assignment and I went along with him since we could not have the honeymoon we had planned weeks before. When I got back to town after leaving him at his assignment I focused on teaching my students, but I constantly worried for my husband and his safety. Right before he came back home I found out I was expecting, and in a few months we are expecting our first set of children since we are having twins. We are both so excited and overjoyed to finally be starting our own family and grow our Thornton clan as my Husband Jack likes to say and right now he is building a nice big house for us on a land plot he had brought a few years ago which has the most magnificent view I have ever seen. I can't wait to start this new chapter in our lives as we become parents
Elizabeth Thatcher Thornton