Jean and Bill McLean sit down to view a century of memories. Yellowed photographs, peeling postcards and original family records dating back to the late 1800s are spread out before them at their kitchen table.

Jean grasps a photo of laughing people knee-deep in a lake, her index finger pressing against each smiling face.

“That’s my sister Marie, that’s Eleanor…that’s our dog Buster,” she remembers.

“For the first two years I knew her,” Bill laughs, “just about the only thing I knew was she grew up on Pen Lake – that’s all I heard about.”

After 60 years of marriage, Jean’s countless memories of Peninsula Lake, located 15 kilometres east of Huntsville, are still a popular topic of conversation — and decoration, too. Paintings of the lake hang on the walls of the couple’s Bracebridge home.

Jean’s eyes sparkle as she talks about her earliest memories. She spent her first five years in bathing suits and bare feet, her days a mix of swimming, playing in the woods with her three sisters, and getting into the usual mischief of just being a kid.

“When I was just a little thing, and I wanted to swim with the big kids, my mom tied a rope around my middle,” she smiles. “When I got too far out, she’d give it a tug and reel me back in.”

Each memory sparks another.

“My father worked very hard and was always on the go,” she says. “Oh! Did I tell when the logging horse and carriage came through? My sister and I hopped on the back and got halfway across the frozen lake until Dad came out after us!”

She remembers Jack Frost painting the windows in the winter, and wading in the warm lake to catch leeches in the summer.

When she was just five years old, an aboriginal family friend they called Old Ben — a photo of him and the children on the front porch is one of Jean’s favorites — taught her to canoe.

In a few weeks, she was paddling solo.

Her father ran a general store from their home, selling groceries and providing mail service to travellers coming into the port by train or boat.

“He did so well for our family that I didn’t even know about a Depression,” says Jean.

In 1931, the family moved to Bracebridge for easier access to a school for Jean and her sisters, but they spent “every minute of each summer” at their home on Pen Lake.

Jean says she can still hear her grandmother telling the story of how the property was purchased.

A gunnery sergeant in the First World War, William Hood, Jean’s father, bought land on the South Portage with money he had sent to his mother while he was overseas.

“She saved it all for him, you see,” says Jean. “My grandmother knew he would want his own place on that lake when he came home from the war.”

But Jean’s family connection to Pen Lake runs much deeper. On the other side of the water, on the North Portage, Jean’s great-grandfather John Hood built a small wooden home and raised a family of three.

He left Scotland for Canada in 1876 with his wife and three children. They first settled in the flatlands of Manitoba, hoping for rich soil and opportunity. But when his crops failed, he looked eastward to Muskoka for better ground.

“After weighing the advantages and disadvantages of this country, he has decided that Ontario is preferable to Manitoba,” Jean reads from an 1876 diary entry.

She studies the photo of her great grandfather’s wooden home, a simple dwelling made of skinny wooden boards. For a moment, she’s quiet.

Jean hasn’t gone back to Pen Lake in many years. “The whole thing is just too sad,” she says of the condominiums that now stand where her father’s grocery store once did. She’s also referring to the expansive golf course that caused her great-grandfather’s home to be destroyed.

She says she’s blessed with the memories, and photos, of her past, and that’s all she needs. “I’m so lucky to have all this rich history around me — my history,” she adds.