Category: 52 Ancestors 2023

52W Mark II – Week 4: Education

My maternal grandmother, Helen Lerner, originally wanted to be a teacher. After finishing high school, she moved to Regina, Saskatchewan to work and earn money to pay to go to Normal School (teacher’s college). Helen applied to the school in Regina run by the Sisters of St. Martha, who were based out of Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Waiting for her interview, Helen fell into a conversation with an older nun. After chatting for a while, my grandmother was called in for her interview. Following the interview, Helen was told she would not be admitted to the program. However, she was offered the opportunity to train as a lab technician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta, which was operated by the Sisters of St. Martha. Helen accepted.

Helen in the uniform she wore as a lab technician.

One day at the hospital after my grandmother had begun working in her new occupation, there was a great commotion in preparing for a visit by the Mother Superior. When the Mother Superior arrived, Helen recognized her as the nun she had been chatting with before her Normal School interview. It turned out that based upon what Mother Superior learned of Helen during their conversation at the school, she advised the interviewers that she believed Helen was an ideal candidate for the hospital and told them to deny her admission to the Normal School.

St. Michael’s Hospital in Lethbridge, Alberta, which opened in 1931.

The Mother Superior’s directive was significant for me, because St. Michael’s Hospital is where Helen met my grandfather, Leo Burgess. Leo worked as an orderly at St. Michael’s at the time my grandmother was a lab technician. Many years later, I was born at St. Michael’s.

My grandparents, likely sometime in the mid to late 1940s.

52W Mark II – Week 3: Out of Place

My great x3 grandparents, Robert Nelson and Elizabeth Joseph, were originally from Ireland. Shortly after they married in 1842, they moved to Scotland and lived in Renfrew. Their first three children were born there. In December 1848 Robert and Elizabeth joined the Mormon church. They emigrated in 1850, with the intention of travelling to Utah.

Robert Nelson (1818 – 1902) and Elizabeth Joseph (1818 – 1902)

For years, the only information I could find was that they had travelled the North Atlantic. It was a few years before I learned that “North Atlantic” wasn’t their route – it was the name of the ship on which they travelled! The North Atlantic sailed from Liverpool to New Orleans.

Excerpt of the “Invoice of Passengers” for the ship North Atlantic, which left Liverpool on September 3, 1850

At first I was surprised to learn that the family had landed at New Orleans. Without giving it much thought, I had expected that they would have sailed to the Atlantic seaboard – someplace like Boston, New York, or Philadelphia. Sailing around Florida would have added thousands of miles to the trip. However, I quickly realized that New Orleans was closer to their ultimate destination and saved them hundreds of miles of overland travel.

After arriving in Louisiana, the family travelled up the Mississippi to St. Louis, Missouri, where they lived for a year or two. Robert and Elizabeth’s first daughter, Mary Elizabeth Nelson, was born in 1852 during the sojourn in St. Louis. Shortly afterwards, the family finally relocated to Utah. My great great grandfather, John Alexander Nelson, was Robert and Elizabeth’s first child born in Utah. Later in life, John found his place in Cardston, Alberta.

52W Mark II – Week 2: Favourite Photo

Happy New Year!!

Hold on, that was already two weeks ago – or was it? It was under the Gregorian calendar, but under the Julian calendar, it’s…five minutes from now as of the time I write this. Break out the bubbly!

So if this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Favourite Photo”, why all this talk of the new year?

I’ve written about my great grandmother, Emelia Anton, many times. She was born on January 1, 1903; however, to this day I am uncertain as to whether it was under the Gregorian or Julian calendar.

Emelia Anton (1903 – 1997), most likely around 1920.

The maternal side of my mother’s family were Germans from Russia, German colonists who settled in the Russian Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. For the most part, my ancestors all settled in the Beresan district of Kherson province in what is now Ukraine. By the 18th century, all parts of what is now Germany had adopted the Gregorian calendar. However, the Julian calendar was in use in Imperial Russia until the early 20th century.

From time to time over the years, I have tried to determine whether the German colonies used the calendar of their homeland or had adopted the calendar of the Russians, particularly given that the German colonies were of many decades’ duration. However, most of my inquiries have been inconclusive.

While I have recorded Emelia’s birth in my database as January 1, 1903 under the Gregorian calendar, it might be more likely than not that her birth was recorded under the Julian calendar. While Emelia’s parents were born in the Beresan colonies and five of her older siblings were born in the Beresan as well, by the time Emelia was born the family had migrated to Russia, albeit with other Germans. The family spent about twelve years in Selo Suchoi, Veronesch, Russia, where Emelia was born.

I only discovered this photo of my great grandmother a few weeks ago, when I was visiting my parents over Christmas. While I was there, she pulled out a box of some of her parents’ possessions, looking for some photos of her mother. While many of the photos my mother pulled out I had seen before, I had never seen this one before. Given the composition of two photos side-by-side, it appears that it is a stereogram. If you’re good at those Magic Eye pictures that were the craze in the 90s, you might be able to see the stereo image without using a stereoscope.

Whichever calendar Emelia was born under, this month would have been Emelia’s 100th birthday. Happy 100th!

52W Mark II – Week 1: I’d Like to Meet

Happy New Year! It’s time for another trip around the sun and another year of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks“! We’re starting off the year on the theme of “I’d Like to Meet”.

I’m grateful that the challenge is not which ancestor we would “most like to meet”, but simply an ancestor we’d “like to meet”. For anyone who has been doing genealogy for a while, it would be hard to narrow it down to just one. Rather than choose a single ancestor, I’ve selected a category of ancestor: my great grandparents.

While I would love the opportunity to meet ancestors further back in my tree, they seem so much more remote and abstract than my great grandparents, who seem more tangible and real. I know people who knew them, and I even had many visits with one of them. My great grandparents would be able to shed a lot of light on things I don’t know about them and their immediate families. It would open a gateway to improving and expanding my research.

1. Johannis Albertus van der Fluit (my father’s paternal grandfather)

Johannis was born in ‘t Veld, North Holland, in 1894. He was an agricultural worker most of his short life. While I don’t have a lot of the details, he sustained a head injury that resulted in a mental disorder. He spent the following years suffering from delusions and passed away in a sanitorium in 1932. My grandfather was eight years old.

2. Theresia “Teetje” Pater (my father’s paternal grandmother)

Teetje was born in Waarland, North Holland in 1894. That is the same village where my father was born. Teetje was 37 when she was widowed and was left to raise eight children on her own, the youngest of whom was one year old at the time. I don’t know how she supported herself or the family. She passed away in 1947, a few months before my father was born, so he never knew her.

3. Adrianus “Arie” Komen (my father’s maternal grandfather)

Arie was born in Zuid-Scharwoude, Noord Holland in 1888. Arie spent his whole life as an agricultural labourer. Arie was only 59 years old when he passed away in January 1948, when my father was only a few months old. I don’t recall my grandmother ever speaking about her father, so most of what I know about Arie is from the documentary evidence I have found over the years.

4. Elizabeth Bakker (my father’s maternal grandmother)

Elizabeth was born in Den Helder, North Holland, in 1888. I have little information about her prior to her 30s. Prior to marrying Arie Komen in 1921, when she was 32, she had worked as a domestic servant in Den Helder and Amsterdam. While Elizabeth died in 1976, when I was in grade four, I never met her, but I was quite familiar with “Oma Komen”. She wrote often to my parents and every December she would send us a package of goodies for Sinterklaas and Christmas. My father remembers her well. During a trip to the Netherlands in 2017, my father showed me where she had lived.

5. Milton Leo Burgess (my mother’s paternal grandfather)

Milton was born in Vernal, Utah, in 1891. He came to Canada with his parents when he was 14. Milton was Mormon, so when he was 20 he spent two years in Adelaide, Australia on a mission. Even today with air travel, Australia is pretty far away, so it must have felt even more so when Milton went there. A few years ago, someone reached out to me on FamilySearch and said that he had some of Milton’s calling cards from his time on the mission. I was quite surprised and very grateful when he sent me one of the cards through the mail!

In his 20s and 30s Milton was a farmer. Later in life he had several other occupations. Sometime before 1941 he as a plumber. He worked in a woolen mill, where he lost a finger of his left hand due to a work injury. Milton also worked for a short time as a grave digger around 1950.

Milton died in 1964, a few years before I was born. My mother has told me many stories about Milton over the years. I also have a small cache of letters he wrote to my grandfather in the 1940s. Most of them were gentle admonishments, such as disapproving of my grandfather working in establishments that served alcohol, coffee, and tea, or telling him that it was time to stop seeing the Catholic girl he had been dating and to find a nice Mormon girl to settle down with. Fortunately for me, my grandfather did not follow that advice, as that Catholic girl became his wife and my grandmother!

6. Hazel Nelson (my mother’s paternal grandmother)

I’ve written a lot about Hazel in this blog (in particular, in this post about “Sisters”). She and her sister Irene were twins, born in 1899, and were the first twins to be born in Cardston, Alberta. Sadly, Irene died a little over a month after she was born. Hazel passed away in 1967, three days before I was born. While she might not have met me, she knew I was coming. My mother literally went from her grandmother’s funeral to the hospital to give birth to me. As far as I’ve been able to determine, I was Hazel’s first great grandchild. I’ve often asked my mother about what Hazel might have thought about her approaching status as a great grandmother. My mother has lots of stories about Hazel. It sounds like she was the quintessential grandmother.

7. Heronimus Michael “Jerome” Lerner (my mother’s maternal grandfather)

Jerome Lerner was born in Henrietta, Texas in 1895. His parents were Germans from Russia and Jerome was the first of their children to be born after they emigrated. Jerome immigrated to Canada when he was 22, where he took up farming outside Fox Valley, Saskatchewan. Many of his siblings, as well as his parents, followed Jerome to Saskatchewan over the following few years.

Jerome developed a mental health condition in later life, which contributed to the breakdown of his marriage. Nevertheless, Jerome managed to continue farming until he died in 1954. My mother never met her grandfather. Fortunately, I had the foresight to interview my great aunt about her father.

8. Emelia Anton (my mother’s maternal grandmother)

Emelia was born on January 1, 1903; however, I don’t know if that was by the Julian or Gregorian calendar. Emelia’s parents were Germans from Russia, who lived in one of the many German colonies in Imperial Russia, in what is now part of Ukraine. Sometime in 1900, Emelia’s parents and older siblings moved to Selo Suchoi, Veronesch, Russia, where Emelia was born. The family emigrated to Canada in 1912 and settled in Rastadt, Saskatchewan, just outside Fox Valley.

Emelia lived to be 94, outliving my grandmother by 13 years, so I knew her quite well. When I was a kid we visited her every time we were in Lethbridge, Alberta, which was at least once or twice a year. To this day, I am perplexed as to why I did not ask her more about her family and her life story, given my interest in genealogy since childhood.

I will never forget my amazement when I learned that she was German. During a visit when I was in grade eight, my mother said, “Grandma, guess what? Sean is taking German in school!” My first thought was to wonder why great grandma would care. To my great surprise, her reaction was to start speaking to me in German. Until that time (for many good reasons), I thought she was English!