AUNT LUCY

       Aunt Lucy was my Mom's aunt and she was my Grandma's sister.

       Aunt Lucy was a very tiny English lady who was very able to look after herself. She wore her iron gray coat and hat...a straw hat in the summer and felt hat in the winter. She always wore a substantial pair of shoes.

      In the late 40's early 50's Aunt Lucy visited our place every year...usually late fall. A series of letters would be exchanged and arrangements made. Aunt Lucy would be picked up from the train. She had two large and heavy suitcases. We liked to see her come as she was a great visitor. She was a talker and had lots of stories.

    After a ten days or two weeks she would move a couple of hundred miles down the line to where her twin daughters and grandchildren lived.

     She would stay there about a month and then travel to the west coast. There she had two sisters and a son. She went from place to place and visited and in the late winter she would travel back to Winnipeg. 

    To us kids there were mysteries. We didn't know what happened to her husband. We didn't know how she made a living. We didn't know how she became this tiny independent English lady. 

    As kids we didn't know much about aunt Lucy .

    So why am I telling you this. I recently got Ancestry and found aunt Lucy and a bit about her life so I can piece together a story about her.

   She came to Canada in about 1900 and they decided to farm as there was lots of good cheap land. In 1914 she was left as a widow with five children with her youngest child only two years old. I'm not sure what she did after that but records show that she was in the same area as the farm. Somehow she raised 5 kids. I would guess that she received some support from relatives.

    Later on she moved to Winnipeg as some of her children lived there. Now When she visited us and went on to the coast she probably still lived with family as she was able to leave her place. 

   So with a little inference it was fun to put together more of aunt Lucy's life. 

   So far with ancestry I've found much more than I thought I would. I know I won't find any famous or high class people. The people on my Dad's side of the family were peasants who farmed. The people on my mother's side seem to have been farm workers in England. For example, my Grandpa did butchering. When a farmer was going to butcher an animal my grandfather was called and did the job. 

ANCESTRY

     I recently wrote a post telling of my early Father's Day gift. My son in law got excited about a project and no little issue like it's not Father's Day would stop him. 

    Well, the stopping issues started with me. My computer skills are not great. So here it comes. Ancestry sends an email. The email asks you for your information to sign into the program. My first problem was that it would not accept my postal code. It insisted on a zip code. We are used to those problems. So phone for help. It turned out that the helper and help requester were both at about the same level of expertise. She asked me to do all kinds of things that even I knew had nothing to do with the problem. 

    The problem was that I was looking at an email that she knew nothing about. She would ask if I could see something? Well, no I wasn't on that page. She apparently was not aware that ancestry sends out an email first.  

    Finally she was able to look at my account and tell me that I was in business as she could see everything in my account. But I say how do I get into the program? With that she left me as she had been with me for an hour. So I thought things over and said ah ha I know what to do. I did know what to do but my pass word had been mangled. There was no way I could reset my pass word from their system. One more call. I got the nicest guy in the whole telemarketing world. I did complement him highly.

    So off I went to look at ancestry. 

    My maternal grandfather was a rather dour little Englishman. I never heard him talk about relatives . So very quickly I found him with his three sisters and his parents. So the first thing I found in minutes was my great grandfather on my mother's side.

     My Grandpa is on the left. It's the only photo I can find of him.

    My biggest disappointment? I couldn't find myself! Isn't that vain?

   Maybe the next program I get, I will be able to register without a problem.

I GOT MY FATHER'S DAY GIFT YESTERDAY!

    Yesterday I received my Father's day gift from my son in law (sil). That's right!

    It works like this. My sil's mother died about a year ago. Apparently both his parents were not interested in family or relatives. I believe the family was quite small. Very few relatives attended her memorial. When the  sil's mother died about a year ago he started to look up the family.

    The sil has become very interested in researching family. As my daughter says he's gone down a rabbit hole. Every time I talk to him he's excited about what he has found.

    The sil knows that I'm interested in family history so he gave me a subscription to a family ancestry site that he uses.

    So now I'm off to find out all kinds of new things. Before 1990 my father's family did a family tree and they located over 900 of the family.

   My father's side of the family were German Lutherans who came to Canada from Volhynia in the Ukraine. Great Grandpa brought all his married children to Canada over a period of 15 years. Great  Grandpa had four sons and four daughters.

      Grandma and Grandpa about 1946

    First a couple of family members were sent out to scout the area. They sent back good reports and their wives and children were sent out. As money was gathered for fares others  made the trip. The  Mennonites in southern Manitoba were a great help to the family.

    After a number of years all of them relocated to the Esk area in Saskatchewan. Two of the families moved on from Esk but two sons and three daughters spent the remainder of their lives at Esk.

    Now my three brothers and some of their children are the only family members left in that area.

   Anyhow I expect to find a few things I didn't know. Maybe some of my followers come from German Lutheran families from the Ukraine!

  Anyway, thanks to my sil for an early Father's day gift.

What Should We Ask Our Elders?

     On my last post I confidently stated that we should make a list of questions to ask our parents and grand parents. After I published the post I thought, " What would I write down?" I had to stop and think about it. Maybe it's not so easy to make up a list of questions. We have the nagging thought in the back of our head that we would like to know more of our parents and grandparents. But what do we really want to know?

   So the first thing I considered was the age of the son or daughter and parents and grandparents. Questions kids would ask would be different than what adults would ask.  Answers would be different depending on the ages. These days some grandchildren are not that familiar with grandparents.

   I would make up a list of general areas I would interest me. Then I would  say tell me something about the games you played as a kid. This can be a conversation where one answer leads to another question.  ...games at home, school or with friends.

    School would be a big one. My Dad lived less than half a mile from the country school he went to. For some time he lit the fire so the school would be somewhat warm when the other kids got there. I heard this story many times. I didn't hear about his teachers or what they learned. He spent one year in high school where he boarded in town. He wasted his time in the pool room. He did not return to high school. He had regrets about wasting this opportunity.

    He talked about the food they ate and how good it was. What was the food?

   My Dad road freight trains. What was it like?

   I knew small pieces of Mom and Dad's life but not much detail. Our best hope is to fill in some of the detail.

   I have children in their 40's and grandchildren in their teens. What would I want them to know? Remember, I'm going to have to prompt them to ask questions. Funny situations have come up. My Mom kept all my report cards . My daughter was looking at the report cards and said,"Dad, you had poor marks!" I think we have to be ready to tell some things we are not proud of. 

   Other areas I would pencil in for ideas would be: happy times, sad times, work as a child, travel, disappointments, favorite people in their lives, challenges, friends, siblings, grand parents. I like to hear about daily life. My kids should hear about how I milked cows or road horses. They should hear about harvest and cutting hay. They should know about my shenanigans. I was a rascal. 

   This is by no means a complete list. It should grow.

   What questions would you put in your list?

How Far Do We Go Before We're not Related Anymore?

      A few days ago I sold a car. When Bill came to pick the car up he came in and we had tea. Bill had been looking at my car for four or five years. He would drop buy every few months and want to know if I was selling yet. I got to know him a bit. It happens that he came from a little village near my home village and that we knew many of the same people. Bill is a generation younger than I am so it was fun piecing together who we actually knew. 

      When he came in the other night I got out my local history book to check out a few things. Bill played hockey for my village so we found some hockey teams he had played on. I knew some of his neighbors on the farm. I told him that my Dad's cousin's daughter married Walt Ward. Bill said , "They lived right across from our farm." This really interested Bill. Then he told me that Walt's mother was his(Bill's) grandmother's sister! So Bill said., "That makes us relatives!" Have I lost you yet?

     I thought the relative definition was quite a stretch , but it got me thinking about the definition of relatives. Do we go as far as DNA traces? DNA shows family traces accurately. Do we spend much time researching family history and make huge family trees? Our family tree was completed about 25 years ago by the same "cousin's daughter" the Walt married. 975 people were discovered. I was surprised to find out who I was related to. Are relatives only the people we know and people other family members know? Are relatives only the people our grandparents know and tell us about?

    So I'm really wondering about the definition of relative and how far out in family does it go. I think Bill and I made a big stretch to come up with labeling ourselves relatives.

    What do you think? I know some blogs I follow have an intense interest in family history. Is the sky the limit?

     

A Discovery Far Back in My Genealogy

       Two areas of interest to me are local history and my family tree. I read a tremendous amount of local and western Canadian history. I have done little genealogy research but others have and I find their discoveries fascinating.


     The relatives on my father's side were German  Lutherans who went to the Ukraine and Russia at the end of the 1700's. They were invited by Catherine the Great to come and farm so that more food could be produced in the area to feed the people. They were also used to teach the Russian and Ukrainian people agricultural methods that would be more productive. The Germans were promised  three  things: keep  the German language, practice their Lutheran faith and not serve in the army. These people were very devout and so their religious faith was most important to them. Language is what helps a  culture to survive. These Lutherans were pacifists and did not want to participate in any war. 


     Over the years gradual changes took place. Finally, it was required that the Germans would have to join  the Russian army. My Grandfather was in the Russian army. In the late 1800's many of the German people began looking for some other place to live. Land was available in the United States and free land was available in the Canadian west. My family, the Kleins, sent some of the men over to investigate the opportunities. They liked what they saw and sent back information for the this large family to come to Canada. From about 1898  to 1910 my family came to Canada. My Great Grandfather brought all seven of his adult children and their families. 


     I was never able to find anybody beyond my Great Grandfather. I wanted to know if he had brothers or sisters. I wanted to know who his parents were. All records were kept by the Lutheran church. 


     The other day I stumbled upon a website that had what I was looking for and more. One section of my family had done the research and got back as far as my Great, great, great,great Grandfather! How about that? Was I excited to find this information. George who as the greatest was born and died in the 1700s and no dates were found for his birth or death. Gotlieb  was my Great, Great, Great Grandfather and was born in 1791 and died in 1856. To me this was amazing information.


     Now a friend read this and wanted to know what they did. Were they rich, horse thieves, swindlers or drunks? I had to tell him that I really didn't know but my suspicion was that they were hard working peasants.  So I didn't find any surprising things in the closet but it was super just to find their names. 

The Devastation of Exclusion

          Today I met an acquaintance who I haven't seen very often in the last while. We exchanged greetings and the next topic which came up was "his hobby which has gotten out of control."

          His hobby is genealogy and he has become involved with the provincial group and spends much time on it. As many of you know  you can become totally absorbed in the research of your family history. I admit that I have more than an average interest in family history.

        We had a very pleasant chat and both had difficulty in leaving to go on with other obligations.

        He gave me a website to research to see if I could find more information on my family. I had looked at this website three years ago and had forgotten why I hadn't pursued it . I looked at the website today and put in some of my family names and all of them came back "No records found."  How devastating! It's like we don't even exist! Now I know I'm being overly dramatic. We are a large German family who came from Russia to Manitoba and then Saskatchewan. My great grandfather came with all of his adult children. We did a family tree in the mid 1980's and were able to discover 970 descendants. I was really surprised to see that we were not on this website.

       So being excluded lead me to some other examples of exclusion. I was a junior high school teacher for 37 years. My heart always went out to the little kid who was chosen last or totally left out of a group. Many times a kid came to me close to tears because their birthday was missed in the announcements on the intercom. That was always an easy fix. I would say we'll tell the office right now and a smile would return to the tormented little face.

       My Dad was born in Saskatchewan in 1912. In the early 1960's he wanted to travel to Europe so applied for a pass port. The reply he received was devastating. "Mr. Kline , we have absolutely no record of you!" My Dad thought that his Dad had forgotten to register his birth. My Dad at this time had filed income tax for almost thirty years. My Dad then had to scramble and find records from old school registers to prove his age. In due time he received his pass port. My Dad found the whole issue humorous but nevertheless he had been left out. In later research I found that his Dad was not at fault for forgetting to register him. The birth registrations in Saskatchewan from 1910 to 1912 had many omissions. Deaths and marriages were complete but some how the birth registrations were a complete mess.

      In relation to Dad's story he said , "That's why I never got a letter from the government to join the forces for World War II." If he hadn't applied for a passport he would have found the problem when his old age pension was due.

      So a pleasant chat on genealogy got me off on a tangent about the devastation of being excluded. Some people have enough ego to roll with being excluded and others are completely destroyed.