Cook, Emma (Woodward)

Emma Woodward was born in Ontario, May 23, 1873.  Her parents were Henry Woodward and Rachel Tarzwell.   She arrived in British Columbia in 1874 when she was just one year old.  Her father purchased a homestead from T. Carrington in Nicola.  It was in Nicola that she met Foxcrowle Percival Cook and they wed on June 15, 1892.  Emma was 19, F.P. Cook was 31 years old.  She had five daughters:  Adeline and Emily (both born in Nicola) and Frances, Eda and Agnes (all born at Granite Creek).  Frances died aged 3 ½ years when she pulled a pot of boiling water onto herself.  She is the first Cook member interred at the Granite Creek Cemetery.  Emma Cook gave birth to one son, Edward Henry Lumley.  After F.P.’s death in 1918, Emma supervised the Cook stores in Princeton (operated by Perley Russell) and Coalmont.  The Granite Creek store closed after F.P. Cook’s death.   Emma ran the Coalmont store in the 1930s after her daughter Adeline and husband Wes Rossiter (who had been managing it) moved to Oliver.  When Ed Cook was old enough, he ran the Coalmont store.  In the late 1930s she retired to a home on Fenchurch Avenue in Princeton, where she had extensive gardens.  In about 1950, she moved to Oliver near her daughter, Adeline.  She died at 84 years old on August 13, 1957.  She is interred in the Cook family plot at the Granite Creek Cemetery.