A man named Drumheller is on a journey to trace and document his roots and made the logical stop in the valley.
 Wayne Drumheller and his wife Linda were through the valley last week. The writer and photographer is working on a book to discover his family and his connection to it, paralleled with his story growing up.
    “It hasn’t been easy tracing my family roots. Originally I was searching to see if I was a son of the American Revolutionary War," he explained.
 His search started with an innocent question from his grandson, asking where he came from.
    “I knew who my father was and my grandfather was but beyond that I didn’t know anything,” he said.
    At the time he was writing a book called "My Highway Home” the story of his coming of age. He left home at 17 in Nelson County, Virginia and joined the military. After his service, he became a newspaper photographer in California.
    “I wrote that and finished that and began digging into the question of who I am,” he said.  “I need to find out who we are because I grew up with Drumhellers that my mother told me I was not kin to, now I am finding out they are my first cousins.”
    In 1985, his great aunt gave him a book of his genealogy.  He is able to trace back the male direct lineage to 1588. He comes from skilled craftsmen.
    Along his journey tracing these roots, he hit a roadblock. He came across a Samuel Coulter Drumheller born in 1801. This is not the Sam Drumheller that founded the town, but he speculates he could be a relative.  The story he learned is that Samuel went west and disappeared from roughly 1819 to 1828.
    “The speculation is that he was so enamored about the Lewis and Clark Expedition that he travelled west. That is who I have been trying to track down. We know he got as far as the Missouri River,” said Wayne. “He returned to Virginia in 1857 and died in 1958.
    Wayne is trying to connect this Samuel Drumheller to the Town of Drumheller’s founding Father. While in Drumheller, Wayne spent time doing research with Linde Turner, Deb LaPlante and even Dorothy Bergos.
    The Town of Drumheller’s namesake is known to be the son of Jesse Drumheller and was born in Walla Walla County, Washington in 1864. Jesse may have been the son of Nicholas Lafayette Drumheller of Virginia. The legend of Sam Drumheller was that he won a coin toss with Thomas Greentree to become the namesake of the town.
    One thing that Wayne has learned about his family is they were cunning.
    “There is some question about the toss of the coin, that possibly that Drumheller could have set it up for Greentree because he was after fame rather than fortune,” he said. “This is a common thread all the way back to 1627.  Craft and cunning has been a common thread throughout the Drumhellers.”
    “Coming to Drumheller I didn’t know what I was going to find. What I have found is some essence of what the Drumhellers were. They were persistent, hardy people, and I know they made it everywhere.”
    At first when writing his book he was planning to skip over the small era between the two Samuel Drumhellers, but now he is more determined to bridge this gap.
    He appreciates any feedback he he can receive from those who know more about the Drumheller family and encourages them to email him at wd2999@yahoo.com

    Drumheller and the surrounding area were hit by a destructive hailstorm Saturday, July 19.
    Developing in the Rocky Mountains, and heading Eastward throughout the evening, the summer storm that blew through Drumheller brought alarming amounts of damage to the area due to a large volume of hail, intermingled with rain and high wind speeds.    
    Bill McMurtry is a meteorologist with Environment Canada and oversees Alberta’s weather patterns for the summer months.
    “It’s fairly typical, what we’re seeing this time of year. We’re right in the summer’s severe weather season right now,” explains McMurtry.
    Around eight-thirty p.m., as the storm began to approach, Drumheller’s temperature dropped from 22 degrees to 13 degrees within half an hour. Wind speeds began to peak to almost 90 km/h while chunks of varying size hail began to mix into the oncoming downpour.
    The storm hit Drumheller full throttle and left everything in its path in disarray.  Dinosaur Golf and Country Club seemed to be caught in the middle of the destruction. 
                Within a twenty minute time frame, there were five full grown trees uprooted due to strong wind gusts and large branches were whipped around the golf course’s front nine. Hail damage on the greens and the clubhouse were discovered after the storm’s passing. The golf course has lost two days worth of revenue in order to clean up the mess and hoped to reopen Tuesday, July 22.
    As some Drumheller businesses struggled to open Monday morning, farmers in the area faced a more permanent loss of their own. Cropland ended up seeing the brute end of the storm, as some farmers ended up losing almost 100%  of their yield to hail damage.
    Joe Rowbottom has been farming in the Drumheller area for twenty years and has experience handling situations like weather damage.
    “I’d say that a third of our acres are a 100 per cent write off. But it was getting to the point that we needed rain fairly badly, and we got moisture, maybe not the preferred form, but we did get it, and now we get some relief for the cow feed, since we’re going to try and bail a bunch of it,” says Rowbottom. “It’s still disappointing because we had a really nice crop coming and we put a lot of effort into it to get it that way. I mean, your goal as a farmer is to harvest the crop, not collect hail insurance.”
    The storm that ripped through the area seemed to have limitless destruction. Alan Kendrick, director of infrastructure for the town, oversaw the aftermath of the storm’s blows.
    “I don’t think we have a complete list of all the damage, but from what I’ve seen it’s been mostly trees,” explains Kendrick, “my understanding is that many residents have experienced cracked siding, shingle damage, and broken windows.”