Tag: Alberta

52W Mark II – Week 16: Should Be A Movie

My grandfather was in a movie – sort of.

Every week, participants in Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks are invited to post on the hebdomadal theme at her Facebook group, Generations Cafe. In my post there for last week, I noted that it’s been quite the struggle participating in the challenge this year. For every week’s theme this year, it felt like I had already written about the current topic – sometimes more than once. It’s getting hard – challenging even! – to think of something new that fit, which I also found interesting enough to me to write about.

This week, I’m not going to fight it, I’m just going to go along with it. So you’re not experiencing deja vu when reading about my grandfather, Leo Burgess, and his brush with Hollywood. 

My grandfather worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway for over 30 years, first as a brakeman and later as a conductor. During his time with the CPR, he worked on the train crews for movies like Silver Streak and Superman: The Movie.

My grandfather, Leo Burgess, is the man wearing a cap standing on the right side of the photo.

Working on Superman was one of the highlights of my grandfather’s life. He was always proud to talk about meeting one of his favourite actors during filming, Glenn Ford.

I assume photo referred to in the letter is the same photo that appeared in the CP Rail News, above.

During the eulogy at my grandfather’s memorial service, one of his friends told an anecdote that suggests my grandfather felt that he had gotten familiar with the cast and crew. The scene took six days to shoot. Apparently during a break in filming, Ford was talking to a group of railway workers when my grandfather sauntering up, put his arm around the actor, and said, “How’s it going, Glenn?”

My grandfather was working in the engine during the filming of this scene.

Today my parents live about a 30 minute drive from where this was filmed. The tracks are gone, but the memories live on.

52W Mark II – Week 12: Membership

In this blog I’ve written about many different memberships that my ancestors have been part of: members of the military, the church, and the bar, for example. Something I haven’t really written about is membership in volunteer work, service organizations, and social organizations. So for this week’s 52 Ancestors Challenge, I’d like to share something about my paternal grandmother, Christina (“Tiny”, pronounced “tee-nee”) Komen.

My grandmother, Christina Komen, dressed for one of her choral performances. The date written on the back of the photo is March 5, 1957. Unfortunately, the rest of the notation is about the photo on the wall behind my grandmother. It says that it’s a Canadian soldier and his war bride from Scotland and that they were my grandparents’ neighbour. I believe this means the photo was taken at the neighbours’ house.

My grandmother was a wonderful singer with a beautiful voice. Before emigrating to Canada, she was a member of local and church choirs in her home town. After settling in Canada, my grandparents and the family (including my father) lived in a number of small towns south of Lethbridge, Alberta. However, for most of the late 1950s and early 1960s they lived in Warner, where my grandmother was a member of the Warner Choral Society.

The St. Basil’s Catholic Church Choir, year unknown. My grandmother is in the second row, second from the right.

My grandparents later moved into Lethbridge, where my grandmother was a member of the St. Basil’s Catholic Church Choir. The choir would appear on a local television on “The Sunday Hour”, a program that aired on CJLH-TV. At that time, it was a CBC affiliate. It’s now CISA, a Global Television station.

The St. Basil’s Catholic Church Choir were featured on The Sunday Hour on CJLH-TV in Lethbridge on April 11, 1965. While the advertisement is for a program of Easter music, this air date occurred a week before Easter, on Palm Sunday. My grandmother is in the front row, fourth from the left.

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 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!