52 Weeks – Week 21: Yearbook

It feels like I haven’t posted in weeks and it feels like I missed a week or two somewhere. However, that isn’t the case, and I’m just in time for the latest topic for the 52 Ancestors Challenge, “Yearbook”.

It inspired me to pull out my own yearbooks and share them with our kids. Happily, they did not find my high school photos to be funny or old fashioned. Rather, our seven-year-old, looking at an old Apple II in a photo taken in the computer lab, exclaimed “is that a computer?!?”

My high school yearbooks.
(This is not me in grade nine, baby. ♬♪♪)

I never received my copy of my grade nine yearbook, even though I paid for it. I’m particularly annoyed by the lack of a grade nine yearbook, because The Barenaked Ladies’ Grade Nine – which is pretty much set at about the same time I was in grade nine – perfectly describes life that year. Happily, they tore down the awful place where I started grade nine shortly after I moved, so I take solace in that fact. I much more enjoyed the school in our new town.

I love yearbooks. I discovered my parents’ yearbooks in a closet when I was about nine-years-old. I read the hell out of them, I practically had them memorized. I loved seeing how my parents looked when they were in high school and finding my aunts and uncles in their yearbooks. My parents were always happy to indulge my questions about their high school experiences.

My mom’s grade twelve yearbook, with her grad photo. Her high school seems to have been adverse to alphabetical order.My father’s grade six yearbook. I was surprised that his school had yearbooks available for grades prior to high school. I assume it was because his school went from grades one to twelve.

I’ve also found yearbooks to be a very source for family history research. In addition to my aunts and uncles who appeared in my parents’ yearbooks, I’ve found many of my cousins in yearbooks available online. As my parents are the oldest and second oldest of their families, I’ve found their siblings in later editions of their schools’ yearbooks that are also available online. As a lot of my extended family lives in Alberta, a great resource for me has been the Bruce Haig Collection of the University of Alberta Library.

My aunt Diana when she was in grade nine, as found in the yearbook for the year my mother graduated from high school. Aunt Diana did go on to have a successful career as a scientist, which I’ve written about many times, particularly in Week Nine.
One of my other aunts graduated from nursing school in 1970. I found her graduating class in a compilation yearbook for all the years her school was in operation.

In addition, I have found relatives in university yearbooks, which has helped round out my knowledge about them. This has been of particular help on my wife’s side of the family. Her family has a much earlier post-secondary academic history. For my mother, her brother and sister were the first generation to go to university. For my father’s side, I was the first to attend university. However, my wife has quite a few ancestors going quite a way back who had university educations. For some of them, I’ve found the Internet Archive to be a great resource for some of their yearbooks.

For example, one of my wife’s great grandfathers graduated from the University of Toronto Medical School in 1906. Other than during World War I, when he served as a Captain in the Canadian Army Medical Corps, my wife’s great grandfather spent his entire career working at Toronto General Hospital specializing in internal medicine. My knowledge of his university career was sketchy until I found, among other things, the yearbook for the year he graduated with his medical degree.

A helpful companion to yearbooks are university convocation programs. Many universities now have them available online. I’ve found a lot of information about many members of my and my wife’s extended family through those programs. While I still have my hard copies, I’ve even found the programs for both of my degrees, as well as of many other family members, published on the University of British Columbia’s website.

Meanwhile, I had intended to post an image of my photo in my yearbook for my graduating year. While perfectly harmless at the time, my write-up did not age well, so I’ll be posting just the photo. As well, they always posted the grads’ baby photos in the yearbook. To this day, decades later, I am still unhappy with the fact the yearbook committee lost the original of the photo I submitted, so all I have now is the copy I’ve made from the yearbook.

Me in my graduating year.
I have copies of other photos taken this session, but they weren’t as good as this one. It’s why I selected it for the yearbook.

52 Weeks – Week 20: Textile

Week 20 of the 52 Ancestors Challenge and the theme is “Textile”. It’s not really anything that has much relevance to my family history. At most, what I can share on the topic is essentially a co-incidence.

My wife has deep roots in Maritime Canada. Her grandmother ran a small arts and crafts store, selling items by local artisans. One item her grandmother sold were quilts made my a woman who lived in her community. When my wife was little, she got one of those quilts.

Years later, on the opposite side of Canada, I learned that one of the partners of the firm I worked at was the son of the woman who made those quilts.

My mother-in-law still had that quilt, so she pulled it out when we were visiting her one Christmas for our son to see. So here are two photos of the quilt.

Next week’s theme is “Yearbook”. That’s something I might have more to write about.

52 Weeks – Week 19: Food and Drink

This week’s topic for the 52 Ancestors Challenge is “Food and Drink”. Finally, a topic I can really sink my teeth into!

Soup of the Day

Last year on The Great Canadian Baking Show (a direct adaptation of The Great British Bake Off), one of the contestants said she was using her great grandmother’s recipes. There are things my grandmothers made that I have been trying to recreate or emulate for years, but nothing from any of my great grandmothers. I also realized that if I had recipes from my great grandmothers, my kids would have recipes from their great great grandmothers. I love to cook, both my kids really like being in the kitchen with me, and my eldest shares my love of genealogy, so it would be special to have those kinds of recipes.

I asked my mother if she has any of her grandmothers’ recipes, and asked the same of my mother-in-law. I now have a few of those recipes.

From my wife’s mother, I got a recipe for brown bread handed down from her grandmother. Among other things, it calls for two cups of rolled oats, nine cups of flour, and a cup of molasses. Despite that volume, it apparently yields only three loaves of bread. While I am rather good at baking, I don’t really enjoy it, so I haven’t yet tried out this recipe, especially with the volumes of ingredients it requires.

Something I have tried making, however, is cranberry sauce using a recipe from my wife’s great aunt. My wife is actually a very good cook, but doesn’t enjoy it as much as I do so she rarely does. However, she’s usually the one who will make this cranberry sauce. Besides, I don’t actually like cranberry sauce.

So many cranberries!

My mother said that her maternal grandmother was not really a good cook, except for one thing: raisin cookies. While I take my mother’s word for it, I find it hard to get excited over raisin cookies.

My maternal grandmother was an amazing cook and baker. She made her soup noodles from scratch and pickles from cukes my grandfather would grow. While my grandmother was born in Saskatchewan, both her parents were  Germans from Russia, so a lot of her cooking reflected that cultural heritage. My mother, also a very good cook, learned from her mother, so a few of our favourite meals as kids also reflected that background.

My grandmother also made her own preserves, jams, and jellies. Of those, one of my favourites was her chokecherry jelly. A year after she died, I moved away from home to attend university. While unpacking, I discovered that I had a jar of her chokecherry jelly in one of my boxes. Realizing that I had the last jar of her jelly in the entire world, I savoured and stretched it out as long as I could.

Making stock during my latest attempt to replicate my grandmother’s soup.

My dad’s mother was not as good a cook. Rather, her usual fare was either very, very good or…not so very good, to put it kindly. In fairness, a couple of things she seemed bad at was because she was cooking for my grandfather’s tastes. For example, he enjoyed meat beyond well done. However, my grandmother made amazing soup. I have spent years trying to recreate her groentensoep met balletjes (vegetable soup with meatballs). While it’s a common traditional Dutch soup, everyone has their own little twists on how they make it. I exchanged many emails with one of my aunts over the years as we tried to work out my grandmother’s special way of making it.

My grandmother made a lot of customary Dutch dishes. Some I really liked, others I found…less likeable. While it was usually greasy, I really liked her hachee, a beef and onion stew. However, I really disliked her stamppot, which she made more often than not. Stamppot usually consists of potatoes boiled and mashed with other vegetables. My grandmother typically made boerenkool stamppot – kale and potatoes. The way my grandmother made it, she’d boil the vegetables beyond recognition, then my dad would make me cover it in gravy and mix it together. I was sure I was being punished for something.

One day during a trip to Alberta to visit my parents, I found myself in my grandparents’ neighbourhood. I thought the time of day was right, because it meant that I was probably too early for supper. While I loved her soup, I didn’t want to run the risk of ever having to eat boerenkool stamppot again. Unfortunately, my grandparents were eating early that day and my grandmother had already started cooking and invited me to stay for dinner.

Much to my surprise and delight, in addition to her soup, I discovered that my grandmother was making nasi goreng, an Indonesian fried rice dish. As Indonesia was a former colonial possession, Indonesian food is very common in the Netherlands. It’s fantastic food, It makes up for the fact that some staples of Dutch cuisine seem to be things made on a dare – or named on a dare, like snert (a nickname for ertwensoep, traditional Dutch split pea soup, which is delicious).

I asked my grandmother if she was trying something new. She replied that she made it all the time. I did a mental double take and said that I had never seen her make Indonesian food before in my entire life. “Oh, that’s because your father doesn’t like it, so I never made it when your family came for dinner.” So all those years I had been choking down boerenkool stamppot we could have been enjoying nasi goreng! Needless to say, that evening I let my father know how unimpressed I was to make this discovery.

Rijsttafel, a sampling of Indonesian dishes served wth rice, at the former Balilicious restaurant in Vancouver.

While it seems that Dutch cuisine leaves something to be desired, I may be exaggerating to some extent. Some of my favourite treats and dishes are Dutch and I’ve collected a few cookbooks with Dutch recipes. Unfortunately, I have yet to find many recipes that work for our entire family. While my version of my grandmother’s groentensoep is generally a big hit, other things seem to divide the house fifty-fifty.

Making rodelinzensoep (red lintel soup) using a recipe from my father’s cousin.
Snert! Fun to say, fun to eat!

Before I leave the topic of Dutch food, never accept an offer from a Dutch person of dubbel zoute drop: double salted black licorice. Lots of Dutch people love to see the reaction of their unsuspecting victims. I love black licorice, but without the addition of the Dead Sea.

Over the last few years, I’ve started to acquire recipes from more extended branches of the family. My brother-in-law is Jewish, and I’ve acquired a few recipes and cooking tips from his sister and mother. Sometimes I’ll try making a particular dish from recipes I’ve found online, and then sought guidance from my sister’s mother-in-law as to how to tweak and improve the dish. What I have discovered is that the best latkes are the ones made by someone else – I find them to be a lot of work!

Meanwhile, I just remembered that at the time of that episode of The Great Canadian Baking Show, my parents were in the middle of moving house, so my mom said she’d look for her mother’s notes and recipes after they settled in. However, visiting her over Christmas and well after the move, I completely forgot to follow up on it. Hopefully I can remember this seven months from now, when visiting her next Christmas!

52 Weeks – Week 18: Social

It’s been a bit of a struggle to keep up with the 52 Ancestors Challenge over the last few weeks. A combination of real life and lack of inspiration have been conspiring against me, but I’m proud that I’ve kept up my participation in the challenge. We’re over a third of a year into it and I’m still going strong.

This week’s theme is “Social”. One social aspect of our extended family is part of the inspiration for the title of this blog, A Deck of Ancestors. The 52 weeks theme fits in with the idea of a deck of cards and the fact my family is crazy for cards.

My brother shuffling the deck for yet another round. It was probably 1:30 a.m. and we were likely starting our nth game of something…

When I was little, it seemed that there was always a game of cards going on whenever we visited family. The game that captivated me the most was cribbage, with its rapid game play, unique board and scoring system, and arcane language and what seemed to be strange incantations: “fifteen two, fifteen four, fifteen six…“. Even now, when all my siblings and I are at my folks for Christmas or special occasions, it does not take long for a card game to break out, which usually lasts late into the night. Sooner or later, significant others and spouses are assimilated into the tradition.

My maternal grandfather taught me how to play when I was six or seven. Heaven forbid if you didn’t follow all his customs in the way you shuffled, cut cards, or played the game. The last time I visited him before he passed away, we spent most of the day playing cribbage. It is a wonderful memory that I still cherish.

In addition to cards, board games were a huge part of our family life when I was a kid. My siblings and I often would receive a board game for Christmas or our birthdays. Games are also a huge part of our home with our kids. I still have a few of the games I had as a kid, plus we have a great selection of more current games.

A very small sample of some of our games.

Not long ago, I also taught our eldest cribbage. Of course, the time I get one of the best hands of my life was our first actual game together. He was too inexperienced to appreciate what I had, and it’s not all that fun getting a hand like that against a kid playing for the first time.

Set up for 29. Unfortunately, the other five did not turn up with the cut.