At Lakehead Orillia’s 2024 graduation ceremonies, 83-year-old Virginia Majury walked across the stage to accept her Honours Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology degree, to the great pride of her family and friends.
Among them were Virginia’s three daughters, five grandchildren, a niece, and a lifelong friend she’s known since 1949. Some had travelled from as far away as Alberta and Texas to celebrate her achievement.
“I didn’t think that anyone would want to come, so I was surprised,” Virginia says.
Going to university didn’t seem possible to Virgina when she was in high school studying subjects like shorthand, commercial machines, and bookkeeping. Instead, after completing her diploma early, she found a good job at Clarke Motors, a car dealership in Orillia. “There weren’t a lot of high-paying positions for girls in the late 1950s,” Virginia explains.
She stayed at Clarke Motors for over a decade until the first of her three daughters was born.
The succeeding years were spent raising her children, doing part-time bookkeeping, and running a boarding kennel for dogs. Virginia also became a Brownie leader when her eldest daughter turned six. Later, she would become a Girl Guide captain and start Girl Guide, Pathfinder, and Ranger units at the Marchmont Public School in Severn, Ontario.
“I’ve been involved with Girl Guides for 48 years now,” she says.
In her seventies, though, Virginia wanted to try something new and began taking history courses at Laurentian University.
“I was very nervous about going to university,” she says. “I didn’t know how to write essays and I was also very worried when I took my first test. I thought, ‘Oh my goodness!’ But I did well.”
In 2016, three years after ending her studies at Laurentian, Virginia enrolled at Lakehead’s Orillia campus at the urging of a fellow church member who happened to be a Lakehead student.
“Plus, I really missed university,” Virginia says.
She started out as a history major but switched to anthropology after taking an archaeology class with Dr. Tim Kaiser.
“I just fell in love with it. I’m intrigued by how things happened and how things worked in the past—like the way the Egyptians transported stones up the Nile to build the pyramids.”
An anthropology course with Dr. Scott Hamilton was also a turning point for Virginia. “We learned about huge burial mounds created by Indigenous people in what’s now the southern United States and about how they domesticated crops like corn, which I found fascinating.”
“All of my Lakehead professors were great!” Virginia adds.
Among these professors she also includes Dr. Frederico Oliveira, who supervised her thesis and with whom she took several Indigenous and cultural anthropology courses, and Dr. Tamara Varney.
“One August, Tamara spent many extra hours voluntarily tutoring me and my study partner Holly Gray so that we could pass a difficult genetics course we needed to earn our degrees. We’d already dropped it twice because neither of us had taken biology previously, but Tamara was so patient with us.”
Although Virginia is humble about her accomplishments, she’s become a role model. “Some of my former boarding kennel customers have told me that I inspired them to go to university.”
Virginia intends to keep studying, too, and plans to take courses in forensic archaeology and plant and insect biology.
“I’m even considering doing a master’s degree at Lakehead!”
For Virginia’s fourth-year honours thesis, she researched the culture of the Algonquin- and Iroquoian-speaking peoples in North Simcoe County, Georgian Bay, and its lowlands.