Tag: 52 Ancestors

52W Mark III – Week 20: Taking Care of Business

When I was a kid, we moved around a lot. People often asked my if my dad was in the military. No, he was a Woolworths manager.

My father entered the Woolworth manager training program right out of high school. Back in the day, the program involved a lot of moving around. Later, promotions almost always meant a transfer. He was with the company for 28 years, leaving the company about six months after Wal-Mart bought it out in Canada. That’s a story for another time.

My sister and me at the Woolworths in Regina

My dad began his career with Woolworth’s in Lethbridge, Alberta as a management trainee. He once told me that his very first assignment on his first day was to unload a shipment of bras, and the female staff stood there giving him a hard time. Next, my dad trained in the Regina, Saskatchewan and Medicine Hat, Alberta stores, where he was an assistant manager.

Dad’s first store as manager was in Flin Flon, Manitoba. After Flin Flon, dad was transferred to Terrace, B.C., and shortly afterward to Duncan, B.C., where he opened a new store there as the Associate Manager.

Grand Opening of the Woolworths in Duncan. My dad is second from the right.

At one point, the Canadian head office in Toronto transferred dad to Kirkland Lake, Ontario. However, when the international head office learned about the transfer, they cancelled it. They thought it was too much to move a man with young kids halfway across Canada.

My dad (left) at the Canadian head office in Toronto.

Dad transferred to North Battleford in 1974 and was General Manager when Woolworths opened a large new store there as the anchor tenant of the Frontier Mall in 1975.

Big news in a small town.

Dad quit in the early 80s and went into business as a sales agent for a furniture company. The new career was not what dad anticipated, and he did not enjoy being separated from his family as the job entailed a great deal of travel. He returned to Woolworth’s a few months later. As he had been replaced at the North Battleford store, he was assigned to the Woolworths in Swift Current, Saskatchewan. He commuted from North Battleford to Swift Current, a distance of about 320 kilometres. Dad was there until he was transferred to Terrace, British Columbia six months later.

Four years later, the company transferred dad to William’s Lake, B.C. In 1989 Woolworth’s converted all of its larger Woolworth stores into Woolco stores, which included the Williams Lake location.

Until last Christmas, I had no idea my mom still had these.

In August 1991, dad was transferred to the Woolco in Chilliwack. In March 1994, Woolworth’s sold its Woolco stores to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart transferred Hans to Hinton, Alberta that same month. Dad left the company in August 1994. My parents and younger siblings then moved to Lethbridge, where we still had a fair amount of family. My dad briefly went into sales before he and my mother bought a small motel in southern Alberta. My dad has now been a motelier longer than he was a Woolworths manager. My youngest sibling and I have had much different fathers!

One of my brothers had this on his bedroom door for years.

52W Mark III – Week 19: Preserve

I am absolutely certain my grandmother, Helen Lerner, could have made anything from scratch, sweet or savory. She was a fantastic baker. She made her own pickles from what my grandfather grew in the garden. She made homemade noodles for her homemade soups. I’m pretty sure there was a time back in the day she made her own soap. Of course, she made her own jams, jellies, and preserves. One of my favourites was her chokecherry jam.

Chokecherries

My grandmother passed away when I was finishing my last month of grade eleven. In the last year or two of my grandmother’s life, my mother often went to Lethbridge to help her out and, later, visit her in hospital. After one of her last visits, my mother returned home with a bunch of things my grandmother had made, including several jars of chokecherry jam. I was pretty sure that they did not last long in our family of seven.

Fast forward to just over a year later. I moved to Vancouver to attend my first year of undergrad at the University of B.C. A few weeks after having moved into residence, my mother sent me a box of my things. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the box included the last jar of my grandmother’s chokecherry jam. Needless to say, I did not rush through that jar. I used it judiciously and sparingly, without being stingy, and savored every bit of it. It was a wonderful way to remember my grandmother.

52W Mark III – Week 17: War

In Week 45 of the 2022 52 Ancestors Challenge, I wrote about my maternal grandmother’s cousin Lee Anton. I also wrote about Lee as one of the Featured Articles for the 2023 Book of Remembrance published by the British Columbia Genealogical Society. With this week’s writing prompt, I’d like to share what I’ve learned since writing these two pieces.

              The cover of the book.                                        Feature about Lee on page 98.

First, to recap, Lee was a Trooper of the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment (14th Canadian Hussars, also known as the 8th Recce) R.C.A.C. Lee was killed in action on April 12, 1945, age 22, less than a month before V-E Day, in the northern part of the Dutch province of Drenthe, the day before the start of the Battle of Groningen. Along with many of Canada’s other fallen soldiers, Lee is memorialized in two very special ways.

One is through the Second World War Book of Remembrance for the Second World War. Lee is commemorated on page 491.

Lee was also memorialized through Saskatchewan’s “Geo-Memorial” program. You can see Anton Lake, which was named after Lee, on Google Maps. This project is documented in the book, Their Names Live on: Remembering Saskatchewan’s Fallen in World War II.

Lee is interred at the Holten Canadian War Cemetery, located just outside of Holten, Overijssel, Netherlands. It is not far from where Lee was killed.

It was only a few weeks ago that the significance of the date on which Lee had been killed dawned on me. April 12, 1945 is the day that Canadian troops liberated Camp Westerbork. It was the transit point where the Nazis gathered Dutch Jews before sending them to the death camps. It was the first place they interred Anne Frank after she and her family were betrayed.

Going through the regimental diaries for Lee’s regiment, I discovered that it was the 8th Recce that liberated the camp, which the Germans had abandoned hours beforehand.

Entry from the War Diary of the 8th Reconnaissance Regiment for April 12, 1945 documenting the liberation of Camp Westerbork.

Based upon the chronology set out in the diaries and other war records, advancing on the camp was the first thing Lee’s regiment did that day. It means that the fighting in which Lee was killed occurred after the camp was liberated. While the entire regiment was not involved, there were at least 100 members of the regiment present at the camp, so there is a good chance that Lee was present for the liberation of Westerbork.

Lee’s grave as seen on Find a Grave

52 W Mark III – Week 16: Step

A “steppe” is a geographic and ecological region consisting of grassy plains. Some steppes are referred to as savanna and prairie. The largest steppe in the world, the Great Steppe or Eurasian Steppe, stretches from Ukraine to China. The Canadian prairies and the American great plains are other examples of of steppes.

My maternal ancestors originated in the western German states that formed part of the Holy Roman Empire, which came to an end with Napoleon’s conquest of the region. In the nineteenth century, my German ancestors sought a paradise on the steppe, first in Imperial Russia and later in North America. I wrote about these Germans from Russia only a few weeks ago, in Week 7.

A seminal work documenting the history and culture of these Germans is Paradise on the Steppe by Dr. Joseph S. Height. Dr. Height’s book is well-known amongst family historians who trace their roots to Germans from Russia.

Dr. Height was born in Tramping Lake, Saskatchewan in 1909. In university he specialized in foreign languages. He spent three years in Germany studying philosophy and German. He attended the University of British Columbia and earned degrees in those two disciplines. Dr. Height spent the last fifteen years of his career as a professor at Franklin College in Indiana. Dr. Height passed away in Indianapolis in 1979.

In addition to his academic works, Dr. Height published several books about the history of the Germans from Russia. In addition to Paradise on the Steppe, his works on this topic include Homesteaders on the Steppe, Memories of the Black Sea Germans, and Folksongs of our Forefathers. Dr. Height also translated a portion of The Emigration from Germany to Russia in the Years 1763 to 1862, by Karl Stumpp, another book of great importance to genealogists researching this area of family history.

Based upon twenty years’ research, Paradise on the Steppe sets out the historical, economic, social, and political forces that pushed these Germans from their homelands and pulled them to the Russian and Ukrainian steppe starting in the late 18th century. Dr. Height tells of the hardships the colonists faced from the moment they left their homes through to the hardships they faced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with growing oppression by the last Czars, the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinist suppression, and Nazi invasion.

Dr. Height also details the colonists’ successes, joys, and achievements. He includes chapters about language, folksongs, festivals, holidays, courtship and marriage, food, school life, and church life. Dr. Height also goes into great detail about how the colonists governed themselves. Of course, the book would have been incomplete without its extensive look at the colonists agricultural activities.

While Paradise on the Steppe provides a look at the collective whole, it also provides important information about the founding colonists of the first colonies and their “daughter” colonies. For example, several of my direct ancestors and related families are included in the lists for the Beresan colonies of Rastadt and Karlsruhe.

The German colonies in the Beresan district in 1890, as seen in relation to Odessa. All four of my maternal grandmother’s grandparents came from Rastadt and Karlsruhe, located in the upper right-hand corner.

By the 1950s, little was left of the German colonies, through decades of emigration or exile to the Soviet Union’s holdings in central Asia and Siberia. Many of the emigrants relocated in places with similar geography and environment – the American great plains, the Canadian prairie, and the pampas of Argentina, to name a few. My grandmother’s paternal line left the Russian Empire in 1893, first settling in Texas and later in Saskatchewan. My grandmother’s mother left Russia with her parents and siblings in 1912.

Paradise on the Steppe is available at many libraries, especially family history libraries. It is also available for loan through the Internet Archive.