Tag: Saskatchewan

52W Mark II – Week 47: This Ancestor Stayed Home

Stayed home??? This is not the  52 Ancestors theme for me! My ancestors never stayed anywhere for very long! Even before moving to North America, my ancestors moved around a lot.

I follow in that tradition, having lived all over western Canada. By the time I moved away from home for university, I had lived in Lethbridge AB (two places), Regina SK, Medicine Hat AB, Creighton SK (on the Manitoba border), Duncan BC, Chemainus BC, Terrace BC, North Battleford SK (two houses), Terrace BC (again – and two houses!). The longest we ever lived in one house was the second place we lived in North Battleford. I was always the new kid in the class.

We lived in one of these houses in the first year of my life. I need to ask my mother if this was the first or second place we lived in Lethbridge. The other place we lived was in an apartment on the north side of the city. Decades later, one of my sisters lived in the same apartment complex when she began university.
(For the life of me, I cannot figure out why images no longer centre!)

Even after I moved away from home I didn’t stop moving. While I lived in two different residences during undergrad, I spent the summers in Terrace, Coquitlam, and Vancouver, respectively. After graduation, I lived in North Vancouver for a short time until I relocated to Victoria BC for a six-month legislative internship (where I stayed at two different addresses). I then relocated to Vancouver for a few months until embarking on a seven-week trip to Europe. On my return, I stayed at my folks, who by then had moved to Williams Lake BC (with several moves still yet to come for them). I moved back to North Vancouver, followed by longer residencies in Vancouver, Burnaby, and Richmond BC.

By my count, to date I have lived at 25 different addresses since I was born. The longest was 13 years, a record I set in the 90s. I would be very happy to beat that record. Our children, on the other hand, have only moved once in their lives, and have attended the same elementary school for every grade. I can’t even imagine what that’s like!

I feel like I lived a Johnny Cash song.

52W Mark II – Week 27: The Great Outdoors

Whenever I pointed out to my father how my younger siblings always got things that I was never allowed to have, he’d say, “at least I took you fishing!”

That answer sufficed for the seconds it took me to remember… “Dad, they hated fishing!”

Some of my earliest memories are going fishing with my father. We also did a fair amount of camping, but far less frequently. Fishing was our favourite outdoor activity. Growing up, we lived all over western Canada, so we’ve fished in all sorts of lakes and rivers, as well as the ocean. During trips to Alberta to see our grandparents, we’d often go fishing with my maternal grandfather as well.

I was four and a half. We were living in Creighton, Saskatchewan at the time. We must have been on a road trip to my parents’ friends, who lived in southern Manitoba.

While we have angled for all types of fish, my favourite catch was always pickerel, which is what walleyes are called in western Canada. We also caught a lot of jackfish, which is another name for northern pike.

A month later, closer to my fifth birthday. In our driveway in Creighton.

One of the greatest controversies in my family involved pickerel. When we lived in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, one of our favourite fishing destinations was where the Battle River meets the North Saskatchewan River. In late summer, water levels were so low that a large sandbar developed, forming a sort of island. Water levels often were low enough that you could wade to the “island”, which took you to a particularly good spot where the pickerel seemed to gather.

During one of those late-summer fishing expeditions, my brother caught two particularly large pickerel. However, he was about four years old at the time, and not strong enough to reel them in – one of the great things about pickerel is the fight they put up despite their size – so my father had to help them.

My brother and father with the controversial pickerel – along with one my brother was able to reel in himself.

Pickerel are not a large fish by nature, so the eight-pounders my brother caught were pretty impressive. So much so that my father decided to have them mounted. However, in the decades that followed, they both claim that they caught the fish and have tried to take sole credit. In recent years, they’ve reached a compromise, and both recognize each other’s role in the achievement.

One of the two infamous controversial pickerel.

I also much prefer freshwater fishing to saltwater. However, one of my most memorable fishing trips was when I was in high school. At the time, we were living in Terrace, British Columbia. My father had a friend in Prince Rupert who had a fishing boat, who invited my father, me, and one of my brothers (he of pickerel fame) out one weekend. (My youngest brother was an infant at the time, so he wasn’t invited.) I’m sure my sisters were welcome to join us, but they had no interest.

Quickly after we started, not far offshore, we dropped some crap traps, and then set out for open water. Our goal was halibut, and we were quite successful. One of the best parts of the trip was that, at various times, we were able to see the coast of Haida Gwaii and Alaska. The most amazing part was seeing porpoises swimming along side us during part of the voyage. I’m sure my brother’s most significant memory of the trip was being nauseous.

A rough approximation of our fishing trip. The red box on the coast is Prince Rupert, the one inland is Terrace, where we were living at the time.

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!