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Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family history

Published: 22 November 2018

Rawd's Display Boards   2012

    It seems there are no limits to the ways family history can be documented.
    In the past two decades I have compiled and printed three score books and more coming. They are similar only in broad strokes: their origins and the material used to make them all differ. Many of them fall roughly into categories, for example those based on letters, those based on diaries or journals and those based on stories. One of the most challenging, largely because it was physically awkward, was made from the display boards of the Rempel and Thiessen families of Great Deer, Saskatchewan.

    One of the principles governing my family history efforts is making family history accessible to the family. Diaries in tiny cramped handwriting must be deciphered and transcribed to be accessible, and footnoted to be comprehensible. Photographs without captions are meaningless two generations later. Display boards are accessible only at reunions where they can be seen.

    My first cousin John Rawdon Bieber, called Rawd, was a family historian from his late teens.  He made a point of seeking out the elders on both sides of his family, to sit with them and invite them to talk about their lives.  He made copious notes and intended to make books of these family histories. This did not happen; he died in his fifties, having outlived medical prediction of a year to live by seven years.  One of the projects he did complete was in the form of display boards, ten panels three feet by four feet intended to show the descendants of his great-grandparents, one being Elizabeth Niebuhr of the Aron line - the mother of his grandmother (and mine) Katharina Thiessen Rempel.

    Not long before he undertook this project, the descendants of our grandparents Katharina and her husband Jacob Rempel had begun to have regular family reunions. To the third of these in 2002 in Sylvan Lake, Alberta, Rawd brought his display boards. Through the period of the reunion his cousins and their families pored over them. Because of his in-depth research of the families, he had on display many pictures and stories which were new to the cousins. He took orders for making duplicates of the photographs.

    There have been six Rempel Cousin reunions, the last in 2011 in Canmore, Alberta. There was the wish to continue them but the will was not present among us -- many of the cousins by 2011 were in or nearing our eighties. The passion for family history which was strong in Rawd and influenced others in our generation was not to be found, at least not to the extent of taking on the work of planning a reunion, in our younger generation. The value of the display boards, however, continued.

    Shortly after the Canmore reunion, Rawd arranged for the display boards to come to me, which they did through the efforts of several of the cousins in a long chain. While ideally suited for display at a reunion, the boards are large and difficult to transport. My sister and I decided to transfer their content, word for word and picture by picture, to the pages of a book, and this was done. Picture us, I at the keyboard, and Mary struggling with reading off the extended captions and the stories from those boards! The pictures were easily removed to be scanned and included; the texts were glued down. We felt the effort was worth it. We made forty or so copies and sent them to all of the cousins and to a few other people we thought should have them. The display boards and the books made from them are but two of the ways by which Rawd's memory lives on.

    When he approached his final illness, Rawd arranged that after he died, his family history material about the Rempels and the Thiessens would come to me, to do with it what I could. In August of this year, I heard from Rawd's spouse that the material would be on its way to me in a few weeks -- five or six boxes of it. I contemplated the arrival of the material with both excitement and a certain amount of dread. I am always excited with the arrival of new family history material, whether it be a listing of the changes in a cousin's family to be entered into the family tree database, or a "box of old stuff" which may contain wonders. The feeling of dread relates to my age, and the time and effort that will be required to make Rawd's material accessible to the extended family while I am still functioning well enough to complete the work.

    There were just two of us among the thirty-odd people, grandchildren of Katharina and Jacob Rempel, who felt passionate about family history. My sister Mary and our brother Barry are interested, but not passionate about it; while they have been helpful, they have not initiated family history books or other material. Cousins Phyllis Siemens and Margaret Mehler are also interested and Phyllis has indeed produced a book, Kirghizstan to Canada, 2009, and Margaret has produced family calendars. I have detected no more than mild interest among my children's generation, which is why there have been no more Rempel cousin family reunions. That leaves those boxes of Rawd's to me and whoever of my nearest family can be persuaded to aid me. Some days the burden of being committed to connect FAMILY past, present and future is heavy, but I intend to shoulder it with enthusiasm and carry on, confident that the excitement of learning ever more about my forebears will keep me at it.
    
     There will be another blog soon about Rawd's family archive. It arrived while I was in hospital for hip replacement surgery; David opened the boxes a couple of days after I was home. I have been working on it ever since. I have missed Rawd SO MUCH while working on his files that I need to call him consciously to my mind, which I have done by writing a running letter to him. I think this letter will become a part of a book entitled Dear Rawd. In it I tell him what I am doing with his archive, the challenges, the discoveries, the fascination of knowing him probably better from his archive than I did in person.

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Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family history

Published: 25 September 2018

The following are two versions of the same thing, written about ten years apart. The partial duplication is due to my incompetent system for filing my writing. The piece below was written in early 2018; the following draft was written much earlier. This may be due also to the nature of change as we age.

Grandma’s Notebook 2

      In my 2017 entry entitled Poetry II, I noted that I had been working on making a book of my grandmother’s notebook. Now I want to reflect on how that little notebook affected my thinking about family, about writing family histories, and indeed, about poetry.

      I knew my paternal grandmother well as a child. My parents and siblings and I lived in the Cottage across the garden from the Big House, where lived Grandma and Grandpa and their adult children, Aunt Elsie and Uncle Harry. Hired men came seasonally, sleeping in the bunkhouse and eating on alternate weeks at the Cottage or the Big House.

      When I was nine, we left Valley Springs Ranch to live in the village of Borden. Then our contact with our grandparents was much less but they continued to be an influence, although more distantly. They both died in the early 1950s, she at 83 and he a couple of years later at 93. After that it was just memories. 

      After high school and nursing training my path took me to the East Coast, following my air force husband. Thereafter we remained in Ontario in cities until we retired in 1993 to Victoria. My sister Mary had lived near our parents in Victoria for many years before that, and inevitably she fell heir to many family treasures as our parents began the process of divesting themselves of THINGS. One of the treasures was a battered little notebook, the cover detached and the individual pages capable of being shuffled like a deck of cards. Clearly, it was in need of preservation, and failing to know how to preserve it physically I undertook to preserve its contents. My daughter transcribed most of the entries, and we ended up with a nice little book of the material which was important to my grandmother (her great-grandmother) in the ten years from age 16 to age 25 – teenager to young married woman with two of her future eight children born. We don’t know if she continued with this notebook habit thereafter; only the one notebook was preserved to be handed down. But it seems to me that thinking about what my grandmother thought was worth noting in her nicely legible handwriting might reflect her views, values and indeed character.

      Among the entries was a very odd little poem, a clipping tipped in rather than transcribed. I think I had read the poem several times, trying to make sense of it, before I read the title! The poem is made up of single lines from a great many poems (that every Victorian child should know!) This explains the odd familiarity of the occasional line, such as “In days of Auld Lang Syne,” “And I will pledge with mine,” “The Walrus and the carpenter,” “Came peeping in at morn” and “Kind hearts are more than coronets.” And these give evidence of how far I fell short with respect to knowing the “poems every child should know.” Determined to root out ALL of the poems represented by each line, I turned to the Internet, which was remarkably helpful. After some thought, I included all or part of the original poems as appendices in the volume Martha Hinde’s Notebook. I include the footnote I prepared for the Nonsense Verses, at the beginning of Martha Hinde’s Notebook.

Grandma’s Notebook I

      It is a great thing to have ancestors who in some way made a record of their lives. Collections of letters, journals and diaries, notebooks of favourite poetry, school projects lovingly saved by parents, memorabilia of all kinds. Photographs. These can supply entry points for exploring the lives of our forebears. Most to be treasured are the stories written by our ancestors, their autobiographies, because with such stories we know those ancestors intended their words to be read in the future.

      I am particularly blessed with ancestors who left records – all manner of records – of their lives. My present project involves the transcription of a notebook compiled by my paternal grandmother, from 1884, when she was fifteen, a girl living with her family in Derbyshire, England, until 1894, when she was a young married woman with two children and expecting a third, living in a suburb of Birmingham, England. That notebook was filled; there may have been others, but they have not come to my hands as this one did, from my grandmother to her son my father, to his oldest child my sister, and lent to me. I was aware of this book as a child; in my early teens I copied out one of the poems from it, having been told by my father that his mother had used it in smoky Birmingham on the rare clear night to teach him the constellations and the principle stars. This teaching verse begins:

Where yonder radiant host adorn the northern evening sky,

Seven stars - a splendid waving train - first fix the wandering eye.

To deck Great Ursa’s shaggy form these brilliant orbs combine;

And where the first and second point, there see the North Pole shine.

      There are 35 more verses; the language of the poem is Victorian but rhyme and scansion make it a verse possible to memorize – at least in the late Victorian era when memorization played a considerable role in education. The Internet offers one reference to this verse, in The Midnight Sky at London, first published in 1869; it too quotes the first two verses, however substituting Polaris for North Pole.

      Picturing my grandmother pointing out the stars and constellations to the boy who was to be my father has set me to contemplating the mind of my grandmother, as revealed by her choice of the poetry she carefully copied into her notebook. Further, while reading her choices and looking them up on the Internet for date and history of the author and context, I have been compelled to think about the nature of the education she received in the late Victorian period in England in comparison to the education I received on the Saskatchewan prairies in the mid-20^th Century.

      Children now are not called upon to memorize as a central component of their basic education. Memorization was central to my Grandmother’s education, and was still in the education system half a century later and an ocean away in mine. The poetry she liked, and the poetry implicit in the “nonsense verse” on a clipping tipped into her notebook do, I think, give me a sense of her mind and how she saw the world, complete with Victorian sentimentality and Quaker sensibilities. I knew my grandmother in the flesh only to the extent a child and teenager can know a family elder. I know her now, as a family elder myself, through what she thought was beautiful and memorable, worthy of a place in her notebook.

      My grandmother’s notebook was a lined “scribbler”, soft-covered, and by the time it came to my hands 115 years after the last entry, it had lost most of its staples and glue which had held it together. I took it apart (with my sister’s permission) and put each page into a sheet protector, enclosing the whole in a loose-leaf binder. When this project – transcribing my grandmother’s notebook to make it accessible to her descendants – arrived at the top of my project pile, I asked my daughter – who had offered to help with my projects – to transcribe the contents.

      She found the process unexpectedly difficult: not the technicalities of typing from the notebook into the computer but the words themselves, and the attitudes, the paradigms, the values which the words represented. She found herself conflicted, thinking about the content of that notebook and what it represented about the life and times of her ancestor.

      That set me to wondering why I didn’t share her experience. Perhaps it is because this not the first book I have assembled from the writings and memorabilia of my forebears. For her it was the first, and she was not prepared for the impact it had on her. Perhaps I am somewhat immunized. Certainly much of the poetry is unappealing to contemporary sensibilities, but I enjoyed the light it shone on the mental and emotional life of my grandmother as a young woman. But Allegra was not enjoying the task she had undertaken. I am always delighted to have assistance with my family history projects but helping me with them is supposed to be fun! She had almost finished the transcription; I took it back from her and completed it myself and then worked on the formatting and footnotes.

      One of the items in that notebook was a clipping from a newspaper. It was utterly baffling. It rhymed and the lines scanned but the content seemed to be utter nonsense. I pondered its meaning for some time, finally clueing in to a line in one of the ten four-line verses: “The Walrus and the Carpenter…” Re-reading the poem, I thought I recognized a couple of other lines, and turned to the Internet for help. Looking up one line at a time, I found that my suspicion was correct – each of the forty lines is one found in a poem which would be available to a child in the late Victorian era, those same poems probably constituting a significant part of that child’s education.

      Having made this discovery – which I take it any child in a literate household a century and a half ago would have made instantly – I decided to put into my book of my Grandmother’s notebook the text of the poems represented by the lines in the puzzle verse. Here is the poem. Including most of the suggested poems occupied about ninety pages of the finished book.

NONSENSE VERSES:

POEMS EVERY CHILD SHOULD KNOW

By Carolyn Wells[1]

Strike! For your altars and your fires!

In days of Auld Lang Syne,

Whose flag has braved a thousand years

And I will pledge with mine.

When the drum beat at dead of night,

The consul’s speech was low:

“Shoot if you must this old gray head!”

On the reef of Norman’s Woe.

“Come forth! Come forth, ye cowards all!”

Oh say, what may it be?

“Lie there!” he cried! “Fell pirate, lie!”

A scornful laugh laughed he.

Alas, alas, my Cumberland~ -

But hark! That awful sound!

When coldness wraps this suffering clay

Like noises in a swound.

The walrus and the carpenter

Came peeping in at morn;

The flame that lit the battle’s wreck

Was yellow, like ripe corn.

A wet sheet and a flowing sea;

The fevered dream is o’er.

I never loved a dear gazelle

Loved I not honor more.

Next morn the baron climbed the tower,

And smit with grief to view

The daughter of a hundred earls, -

The soldier’s last tattoo!

Earl March looked on his dying child,

Whence all but him had fled, -

Before Vespasian’s awful throne,

Behind the Tuscan’s head!

It is not along my inky cloak

All buttoned down before;

Kind hearts are more than coronets

That round my pathway roar.

The combat deepens. On, ye brave!

A-hunting of the snark;

The plume of Henry of Navarre

Was bit off by a shark!

      It took me the better part of three weeks to track down all of the sources of the forty lines in this verse. I think it was worth it, in a salutary sort of way. I enjoy poetry greatly, so my ignorance of so many of the standard poems from the Victorian age and earlier came as a bit of a shock!

[1] Wikipedia: Carolyn Wells (June 18, 1862–March 26, 1942) was an American author and poet.

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Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family projects

Published: 05 October 2017

      Poetry I, below, was drafted in 2012 and languished for five years forgotten.  Now in 2017 I am working on books for my siblings, my husband and myself -  biographical, composed of captioned pictures, writings including letters, timelines and memorabilia.  Very little of my production of family history books has been my own writing; to a very large extent they are collections of the writings of my family, past and present. My plan now is to provide commentary about the process of writing the books not covered in previous blog entries, as a sort of contribution to the "writing" section of my own "Life of..." book, as well as to the Niebuhrgathering web site.

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Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family history

Published: 05 October 2017

      One of the five books I worked on in 2011 was transcription and footnoting of my paternal grandmother's notebook, wherein she entered, between 1884 and 1894, the poetry she liked.

      This notebook of my grandmother's gave rise to much thought about poetry and also about education, and whether an ancestor's choice of poetry can give some entry into her mental landscape.

      I write now of the impact working on my grandmother's notebook has had on my own mental landscape.

      She was a girl of fifteen in a country village in England when she started the notebook; a young mother of two in the industrial city of Birmingham when she filled it.  I don't know if she continued with other notebooks thereafter; no others have come down in the family, just this one - to her son my father, then to his eldest child, my sister Mary, who lent it to me. 

      My daughter undertook to transcribe the poetry into the computer. She had a difficult time of it, not from the quality of the handwriting which was fully legible if not quite copperplate.  Her difficulty lay in the content, which was  of Victorian sentimentality  and of Quaker sensibility.  My grandmother was a birthright Quaker, brought up in a Quaker home where there was no music, no decoration of home or person, no card games.  Meeting (that is, church) attendance twice a day on Sundays and once on Wednesdays.  Entertainment was what could be made at home - word games and all manner of parlor games. Chess, checkers, drawing, serious conversation, carefully selected books, including books of poetry, especially that of Wordsworth and Longfellow, and Whittier, himself a Quaker. Poetry was read quietly or aloud; memorized poetry was recited. Memorization of poetry was expected not only at school but also at home. My grandparents lived across the garden in the Big House.  We - my parents and three siblings and I, lived the other side of the garden in the Cottage. Our grandparents were very much part of our lives, Grandpa a kindly presence, rarely speaking; Grandma always THERE, always busy, always ready to talk to us. She recited or read poetry to us, she coached my sister and me with stitchery…

      When I was first in public school - a one room, ten grade, one teacher school - I loved the poetry.  The curriculum as I remember it (to the limited extent I do remember it)  was Bliss Carman and Archibald Lampman and E. Pauline Johnson. I  enjoyed the rhythms and the rhymes and the ideas they expressed so beautifully.

      I didn't realize how different this part of my upbringing -- particularly at home, but also in school -- was until many decades later. Then, I did an informal survey of my email correspondents, asking the question, "To what extent was your childhood and youth  at home and at school  influenced by poetry?" The answers came back, ranging from not at all to very little, except for one, whose education had been in a private girls' school in England before the war. For her, poetry was in her childhood and remained in her old age important to her.

      The general lack of a habit of poetry from childhood tended to explain in part the comments I heard when I tossed poetry quotations into my conversation.  While from some it had the tone of accusation, I took it and indeed continue to take it as a compliment, being in part a tribute to my revered elders, when I quoted scraps of poetry relevant to a given conversation.

      Shakespeare is poetry.  Large parts of the King James Bible are poetry.  My father writes in his memoirs of one winter in the sod homestead shack on the prairies of Central Saskatchewan which he shared with his older cousin, when they read an entire set of Shakespeare.  My sister Mary remembers a day when Dad was at home and lying down - a GREAT rarity - men in those days - as is said of them now too - "played hurt."  But he had taken an almighty clunk on the head and HAD to lie down.  Was it a horse's hoof? I don't recall.  While lying down at home, he offered to my sister to read to her one of Shakespeare's plays.  She felt awed and honored - not only because of the reading of the play, which he did beautifully, but because for the length of some hours she had him all to herself.  She was one of four children; time alone with a parent was also a rarity.

      Every morning after breakfast, Dad read a chapter of the King James Bible.  I wonder if  any other translation could properly be regarded as poetry.  I have examined a dozen or so translations in the course of transcribing my great-grandfather's journals.  He was an antiquary, specializing in ancient books, particularly those which were written after the Reformation and after the foundation of the Quaker faith. Every time he mentioned a Bible translation, I looked it up on the Internet and often found passages quoted, which in comparing them to the King James version I found not only to lack poetry but to be clumsy uses of the English language.  This was not a scholarly analysis on my part  but rather the impression of one whose lifelong ambition has been to master the beautiful complexities of expressing oneself well in one's mother-tongue.

      I cannot say - in my ninth decade - that I have yet achieved anything approaching mastery.  I'm still working on that. The best I can say is I recognize mastery when I see it, and most often, that is in poetry.   My daughter, a writer herself, defines poetry as the best ideas expressed in the best words, in the best order.  I like that definition.

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Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family history

Published: 05 October 2017

      Some months ago I had word that a woman I knew was in the last stage of her life.  I didn't know Lyn well but had met her a few times; she was cousin of my beloved friend Sue who had died earlier.

      What can one do for a person who is dying, at a great distance, and not deeply well known?  I asked her by email if she liked poetry.  When she enthusiastically answered YES! I began writing to her every few days, including in my emails poetry that had meaning for me. Lyn was delighted, and this continued until she died, peacefully in her senior's residence suite, among friends.

       The process of selecting poems for Lyn had its challenges.  At first, realizing that many of my favorites referred to death directly or allegorically, I thought this might cut too close to the bone, but Lyn was pleased with my selections, commenting on them in detail. One of them, a childhood poem from my English grandmother, had Lyn analyzing the underlying theme, inclusiveness, which had been quite invisible to me before Lyn pointed it out. To me it just brought memories of my  grandmother reciting it, without consideration of any deeper meaning.

      Years earlier, in the fall of 2009, when my brother David was dying, cheerfully philosophical to the end, I wrote letters to him every few days, illustrating them with pictures of our shared childhood, and my favorite pictures of him as an adult. And years again before that, it was letters to my dear friend who had retired to England, and found that her cancer had returned after more than a decade silent and was now killing her. 

      Knowing what to say to a dying person, or  what to do for him or her, is a problem for most of us, and we may resort to greeting cards which we hope may at least tell the dying that they are remembered.  I recall going from card shop to card shop looking for one for a particular kinsman, and failing to find anything I could think of as appropriate.  This triggered the thought that perhaps my own words are POSSIBLE, if I can only figure out what to say.

      It helps when the dying are well aware of their situation, and expressions of hope from friends and relatives are simply wrong.  It helps when you feel it possible to talk to them (email or letter or in person) about their situation.  I have before me an email from Lyn in which she says in effect, "Yes, send me poetry.  I know exactly where I am on my journey, and poetry will ease my separation from this world and give me something to think about other than whether it's time for my next pain pill."

      So I sent her poetry.  And earlier I sent my brother and my friend letters.  I know that to the last, these emails and letters were read to the recipients by friends and family, the recipients being too weak to do so themselves.

      I think that in this, there is an element of offering the dying a sense of what their legacy is in this world. Not just THAT they will be remembered, but HOW they will be remembered.  I don't think many of us will be  like Alexander Pope in our latter ends, in his poem Ode to Solitude, the last verse of which is:

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,

Thus unlamented, let me die.

Steal from this earth and not a stone

Tell where I lie.

       I think most of us would like to think there will be a memorial of some kind  where those who knew us can go and commune with their memories of us.  Less often now this is a gravestone, with people increasingly choosing cremations and natural burials, and burials at sea.  My niece got a cherry tree in Beacon Hill Park, overlooking a rose garden where as a Guide she had planted roses. For us, we built a Memory Gazebo, with plaques in memory of those of our relatives and dearest friends, including pets, who have died.  There we sit in fine weather, which here in Victoria, BC is early spring to late fall and indeed at times in winter.  In high summer, surrounded by the memorials, we float on tides of memory with the scents and colors of  flowers,  the butterflies wafting on the breeze, and the gentle conversation and calls of the birds in our ears.

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Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Blog

Published: 28 October 2012

A few weeks ago in a fit of overweening vanity I assembled all of the blogs I had written for www.niebuhrgathering.com  into a book.  As a rational restraint on my vanity, the print run was one copy. 

The process of assembling, formatting, etc., was, however, salutary.  I didn’t keep a precise count, but in those blogs I mentioned MANY times that I felt a sense of urgency about getting through the list of family history projects which I had set myself to complete.

It is true.  I do feel urgency.  But seeing the repeated reference to this feeling in material written for public consumption left me uncomfortable.  Age is having its toll, to be sure, on both body and mind, but surely I did not need to inflict my concern in that regard on any chance reader?

Rather than apologizing for my feeling I want to delve into what is going on.  Yes, I’m getting old.  Yes, with age has come a lengthening list of acute and chronic health issues.

Tennyson’s Ulysses has given me the words to express my emotional conundrum.

I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

It seems, not for the first time, that a poet has expressed more powerfully than I could, what I feel:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end.
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

Working on family histories gives me the feeling of shining in use, rather than rusting unburnished.  I recall my beloved mother-in-law talking about not feeling useful, and my quoting to her a passage from Carolyn Heilbrun’s book The Last Gift of Time, to the effect that the use of the elderly is to demonstrate to younger people that there comes a time when the tempestuous times of youth and middle years are ended and a state of calm and serenity is achieved, all storms passed.

           But that doesn’t feel to me like enough. There has to be something more than just serenity, and for now at least it feels that the something should be productivity, in some form.

The books I produce, in which I make the lives of the family past and present accessible to the young of the family, may not even be read by the young.  That doesn’t seem to be relevant.  But  there might be someone, a great-grandchild perhaps, in the next century, who will feel as I do about the value of making the past accessible.  That is a feeling I have had myself about material which came to my hands from almost two centuries ago, written by my great-grandfather.  Making it and similar material from all sources accessible is worthwhile, and I do not in consequence rust unburnished.

And then there was my paternal grandmother who said to me when I was a child,

Count that day lost whose low descending sun

Views from thy hand no worthy action done.

I have no attribution for that couplet.  Wikipedia says the author is anonymous.  Too bad.  This too captures my feeling, that every day there must be something accomplished which does not have to be repeated tomorrow.  That is, something which moves my life forward day by day, not just living through the same day over and over.

            The feeling of urgency arises from the sense that I waste more and more days as time goes on, living the same day over and over rather than moving forward.  Clearly I am not ready to seek that achievement of serenity praised by Heilbrun.  So I will go on writing.

                                                                                          Roberta Rivett

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Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family history

Published: 13 October 2012

Earlier in this space I have referred to my ongoing work transcribing my English great-grandfather’s diaries. I have months of work left, possibly something like a year and a half, and that may be optimistic, but expressing concern about that is not my present purpose. No, now it is my purpose to complain about something that should be obvious to any WOMAN who undertakes to make the diaries of a MAN accessible to his descendants. So here is my complaint: My great-grandfather writes his diary entries from his own point of view. Obviously!! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? Doesn’t EVERYBODY??

What this means is that he RARELY makes mention of the activities and events of the home front. Here’s an example. There are many others, of course.

The year is, perhaps, 1860. He might mention paying the weekly charge of the woman who does the family laundry. In some entries when his children were babies he even mentioned the number of pieces of laundry, from which one might infer that the laundress is paid on a piece-work basis. But I don’t know if the laundress comes in and does her work in the home, or does it in her own home. Where does she get the water? What kind of soap does she use? Does she do ALL the family laundry or just some of it? Does she do the ironing? What kind of equipment does she use for the laundry and ironing?

These are matters that were unimportant to him, and so did not get mentioned. For myself I would find these details, and a multitude like them - such as everything to do with food preparation – fascinating. And because they impinge insufficiently on his awareness, or at least his writing, I am doomed to frustration.

Thinking about this, I remembered some years ago working on my mother’s book. She wrote at length about laundry day, when homesteading on the Saskatchewan prairie in the early years of the last century. My mother was a granddaughter of Elizabeth Niebuhr Thiessen so I am comfortable in including HER words in niebuhrgathering.com, confident that this is a rightful place for them, while at the same time alleviating to some extent my frustration with my English great-grandfather.

WASHDAYS AS I REMEMBER THEM (Published in Rempel Stories II, privately printed in 2002, editor Roberta Rivett.)

1926 Great Deer, Saskatchewan

Doing the laundry in 1926 was much easier than it used to be. Time was when my older sisters had to melt snow in the wash boiler on the kitchen stove. They carried the snow in, in chunks if it was hard enough, otherwise in buckets. Now in 1926 we were living in the big new house, with a cistern built against the basement wall. We could not get to the lovely soft water from the basement; it was reached through a trapdoor in the back entry on the main floor. The rain fell on the roof of the house and then by drainpipes was led into the cistern from the outside. The cistern thus filled would give us all the laundry water we'd need until spring or later. This water was soft, nothing like our well water, which was hard and would curdle the lye soap, or any other soap.

The large cast-iron cooker stood in the basement on the cement floor. There was a firebox under it made of metal, vented into the chimney stack. You made a fire under the cooker to heat the laundry water.

The cooker was also used to make lye soap. When a steer was butchered, all of the tallow was saved to be used in the making of soap. The lye came in round tins, and was caustic; you simply never let your hands come into contact with it; it could burn your skin dreadfully. Four pails of soft water were poured into the cooker. The cans of lye were put in, and then the tallow. The fire under the cooker heated it all. The lye dissolved the tallow and it all simmered slowly for some hours, until it was of a smooth and even consistency. Then it was poured into pans, where it cooled and became quite firm. It was cut into suitable pieces and stored. It would likely last until the next steer was butchered in the fall. If we ran out of lye soap we would have to buy laundry soap from the store.

To do the laundry after the soap was made was a good idea, as there was much soap adhering to the cooker. At other times, a piece of soap was sliced thinly and put into the cooker when it was full of water for the laundry.

Now we come to Day One of the laundry. The water was drawn from the cistern with a bucket which had a rope tied to the handle. The rear hall was not only a place to enter by the back door; it was a place to hang outdoor garments on the good hooks that were provided, attached to a board on the wall opposite the door.

Below the hooks and in the corner was the trap door into the cistern. You lifted the trap door and leaned it against the wall.

It was interesting, looking down into the cistern full of water, seeing your reflection. We were always cautioned to be careful and not fall in, as that would almost surely mean death. Now and then there was talk about getting a pump for the cistern, but as there were so many other demands on the money, it never came about.

My oldest sister Tena and I became quite efficient at hauling the water up, pouring it into another pail, and then carrying that pail down the basement steps to be poured into the cooker. When one of us came up with the empty pail, the other would have a pailful ready from the cistern, waiting to be poured into the empty pail, and so on until the cooker was filled.

Tena sorted the laundry into suitable piles for the washer to handle. There was a huge pile of wood in the basement, which was used for the kitchen stove as well as for heating laundry water, so that was no problem.

On the Second Day, the first thing in the morning the fire was lit under the cooker, and the washer was placed where it would be convenient to transfer hot water into it from the cooker. Five buckets or so were poured into the washer. The white clothes were done first: white men's shirts, pillowslips which were made from 100-pound flour bags. Aprons, tea towels and sheets also were made of flour bags.

Considering hundred-pound bag of flour we used in a week, there was a lot of this strong white material available. It was quite a task to get all of the printing out of the bags, but soaking them in separate warm water and lots of lye soap followed by a good hand rubbing did wonders. After this they were boiled in the wash boiler on top of the kitchen stove, not forgetting to put in extra lye soap. Now you had new material; even underwear was made from it. The sheets were made of four opened bags together, seams sewn flat, and one more halved, sewn across the bottom.

The washer lid had a dolly. I don't know why it was called that but it would have made as good a job by any other name. The dolly was a round, heavy piece of wood about twelve inches across with four pegs about four inches long fastened into it. When the washer lid was closed, the dolly plunged into the laundry, and when the handle was pushed back and forth, the laundry was swished about in the hot soapy water. This was continued for about fifteen minutes, then laundry was put through the wringer and into the laundry tub. Hot water from the cooker was poured on the laundry in the tub.

The wash board came next. The water must not be too hot, because we had to use our hands to lift pieces of laundry out of the water and onto the scrubbing board, where we scrubbed it, up and down, up and down. We had to be careful to scrub the washing only and not our hands. We made sure the ball of our hands would not get in the way and also get a rubbing. Blisters arose and were very painful, taking days to heal. We learned to scrub only the laundry, and not our hands.

Our hands held the laundry, and piece by piece it got a second washing. This procedure took place with all the washing: washer first, then through the wringer, into the tub, scrub it over the washboard, then another fifteen minutes in the washer and through the wringer. The wringer was made to turn by a handle and a handhold. Around and around, one piece after another. Just watch out and don't let your fingers get caught along with the wash. Right hand turns the handle, left hand feeds the wringer. And then the wash was ready for rinsing the next day.

While I would get another load into the washer and apply womanpower to make it go, Tena would sort out the white things that really were not white enough and must be boiled in the wash boiler on the kitchen stove. And don't forget to put in some lye soap. When ALL the laundry had been through the washer and the wringer and the scrubbing board, it was ready for rinsing in cold well water the next morning. Before that could happen, the washer was emptied again, the water carried up the back stairs and thrown out well away from the house. The wooden washer was thoroughly cleaned and made ready for the rinsing water.

The Third Day, the rinsing water was carried from the well and poured into the clean washer, the lid closed, the handle pulled back and forth until we were sure all the soap was rinsed out of that lot of laundry. Then each load of wash was put through the wringer a final time and piled on the table, covered against dust. In the summer the wash was hung out on lines, but in the winter it was carried upstairs through the kitchen, and up the second stairs in the dining room and finally up into the attic by way of a ladder. The wash hung there on many lines until it was dry. This would take a number of days as there was no heat in the attic.

There were some things that needed starching after rinsing. Some of the men's shirts, dresses, blouses and aprons were starched. The starch was made by putting a mixture of flour and water into a pot of boiling water on the kitchen stove. The mixture was then strained through a twenty-pound sugar bag, just in case there were any lumps in it. When it was cool, the articles that needed starching were dipped into the starch water and wrung out by hand.

The articles that needed ironing were dry before the heavier things, and we might get to ironing them by Friday, but mostly the ironing was left for the following week. The ironing was quite a job by itself. You laid a folded flannelette sheet across the end of the dining room table, and used sad irons. Why sad irons, I don't know. They were made of solid iron with a nice shiny bottom. They were put on the stove to heat. There was one handle made of wood, which would clip onto the iron. You ironed away with one iron until it seemed to need reheating. Then you unclipped the wooden handle and traded the cooling iron for the hot one from the stove.

I remember Mother sitting in the kitchen mending or knitting and being a part of the day. It was a good feeling seeing her there.

The sheets and towels had to be made smooth in the old-fashioned way. You got the five-foot-long bench from behind the table - Father had made it years before and the boys sat on it when they ate. On ironing days there was another use for the bench. A two-foot-long roller made of wood was used to make the sheets and towels lovely and smooth. Towels or folded sheets were wrapped tightly around the roller. Then came an item called a rubble. The roller with the sheet wrapped around it was placed on the bench, and you took hold of the rubble and placed it on the roller, which was on one end of the bench. Now you put pressure with the rubble on the roller and rolled it until you came to the other end of the bench, and then started over again. This was hard work and hard on the bended back, but when you unrolled it, it was a joy to behold. When all the towels and sheets were finished they were taken upstairs and put in the linen cupboard.

The next week there was NO laundry. The next week we had much other work to do, and if we got all the ironing done this week, we were free of the laundry until the week following - it was a big washing every second week. There were eight of us at home at the time I am writing about. Helen and Olga were working as live-in housekeepers. My oldest brother Jack was going to boarding school at Rosthern, Saskatchewan. I was sixteen years old at that time. Now I am past eighty years. When I read this, I can hardly believe it. We are in a push-button age now.

Susanna Rempel Hinde 1990 (Born in 1909 near Borden, Saskatchewan. Died in 2004, in Victoria, British Columbia.)

Details

Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family projects

Published: 13 October 2012

My retirement was only a few years old when I arrived at what Carolyn Heilbrun, in “The Last Gift of Time,” refers to as the passion that is necessary for every person to find with age. She describes it as a necessity, in age, to become utterly absorbed in SOMETHING – doesn’t really matter what – in order to experience continuation of the sense of achievement which was available to us in our working lives.

I had thought when I retired that I would take up the interest I had identified many years earlier – working in some manner with adults who had difficulty with literacy. I applied as tutor in a literacy program, and for ten years tutored adults to help them improve their literacy. It was demanding work,  challenging and rewarding. Through that ten year period a broad interest in family history had begun to make itself felt, and when it came time to move on, I knew where I was going – toward producing books of family history.

Several realities underlay this new direction. Retirement had given me the whole 24 hours a day to use as I chose; I had acquired grandchildren; I had extended my interest in and use of computers. The time needed to apply myself to the growing interest was there; the motivation generated by the acquisition, through grandchildren, of ancestor status, was there, and the computer was there, without which the making of family trees is difficult to impossible. Further, I learned – poking about in relatives’ mental and physical attics - that many of my forebears and my husband’s had left scattered bits of their history behind them – letters, diaries, memorabilia. My husband’s uncle had put together a family tree on his mother’s side. A first cousin once removed on my mother's side, ditto. My father had written stories about his life.

Putting all these together and I could see the possibility of moving forward with making family history accessible to the younger generations.

This didn’t happen as a concrete, everything-laid-out-in-an-orderly-manner kind of way, it happened in bits and pieces, moving forward in a lurching fashion, but one day a dozen years ago I found myself with a Project List. On the list were the family history projects I would like to work on to produce volumes which could be shared, and family-related continuing activities, each with a rough plan as to the steps needed to move it forward, and the projected completion year for each. The first project was assembling my father’s book of stories into a coherent, edited, footnoted volume. My project list records that the first project was completed in 1999, thirteen years ago. Since then I have averaged two books a year, now with 27 completed, and about 35 still on the project list.

About 35? Yes, about that. From some of the raw material now in hand, I don’t know how many books will emerge.

I didn’t start out with this many projects on the list. I had no idea that this was going to take up so much of my life. It seems that’s what happens when you find your passion. It becomes all-absorbing.

Recently I connected with a professional genealogist I had commissioned to trace some forebears which my limited search skills could not find. Reviewing her work, I realized that my strategy for collecting family history material bears little relationship to the work done by a professional genealogist, for whom if it isn’t documented, it isn’t a fact, and that’s the case even at times when it IS documented.

No, my strategy is more like that of an orb spider who builds her net, then waits for the insects to fly into it.

Four years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and experienced the usual shock and enhanced awareness of my mortality. This did not, however, result in a higher productivity of family histories, in fact, the rate of production slowed, perhaps understandably, but with the possibility of limited time to work on my projects, the sense of urgency became anxiety, further impeding productivity.

No excuses! The work was there to be done, I had the tools to do it, and surely once the malaise, the “cancer brain,” subsided, work could resume.

In due course it did subside, although my mental acuity has not fully recovered. The fact that four years have passed and I am four years older probably has more to do with that than the cancer.

And so the sense of urgency resumes.

2011 was a good year. Early in the year I caught up with the work on hand of my great-grandfather’s journal. Much remains, but I have gone as far as I can with the material for now. Other much smaller projects came to the fore – five of them, and through the year all came to the boil at the same time, “the boil” being near-readiness to print and bind. As always, they were much bigger than anticipated, but all of them should be DONE early in 2012. Now others are calling out for attention. I think 2012 will be a good year too. I will pass my five year point with the cancer, with no recurrence; I am learning strategies to deal with my failing memory and I have sharpened skills with the computer, meaning I can work more quickly and accurately.

The five 2011 books are numbers 28 to 32. And strangely, about 35 remain due to some strange arithmetic  I don’t understand.

I’ll keep going.

Details

Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family projects

Published: 04 June 2011

Autograph Books

 My work with family history goes through a cycle, the pattern of which, now, after years of being in its thrall, is becoming discernible to me.  I listen for a particular project to form itself in my head, and hear it begin to call out to be done.  I put it on the project list, and make estimates about what is required to complete it,  in time and ink and the assistance of others.  It sits on the project list until a gap forms between other projects, and then it calls louder, demandingly, becoming raucous.

            At hiatus stages of other projects, caused by delays in receiving the input of others, or delays in necessary material coming to hand, these calls become irresistible, and I answer the demand.

            Recently I finished transcribing and footnoting the eleventh of my great-grandfather’s journals, and while waiting for the remaining seven to arrive, digitized, from an English archive, I resumed work on my brother’s story of his experiences on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean, getting the pictures sequenced and captioned.  Now he has gone off to write the  narrative to link his “Letters from Reunion” and I am left with tidying up odds and ends of data entry, catching up on postal correspondence, attempting with a notable lack of success to organize both my computer files and my paper ones, and yearning for the time when in my working life I had a secretary. The odds and ends done, the demands of THE AUTOGRAPH BOOK became thunderous and now I must yield to them.

 When I was in public school 65 years ago, there was a great fad of collecting classmates’ and relatives’ messages and signatures in little notebooks with pastel pages.  I don’t know what became of mine, but my sister kept hers and it provides a fine example of the autograph books of that time, with a few entries from older connections being holdovers from a past era.  The verses typically are silly or sentimental or punning.  The older generation also was very big on moral aphorisms.  Most entries are dated.  The dates provide clues about the lives of both the writer and the recipient.

             It seems that my notion of autograph books being a fad of my childhood days is in error.  Once I started looking, I found family autograph books dating to a century ago, and one of a friend dating to the later years of the nineteenth century.  There is an extensive Wikipedia article on the history of the autograph book, which will appear in my book of autograph images.

            The book that now demands to be made will present for the most part the images of the pages, rather than a transcription of the words.  The images too offer clues about not only the writer but the era, as well as the life of the recipient of these messages. 

             Everything is connected.  In one of my great-grandfather’s diaries he quoted an aphorism, unattributed, which gave me a frisson up my spine.           

“Count that day lost whose low descending sun

“Views from thy hand no worthy action done.”

             The Internet tells me the couplet was found in Bartlett’s Quotations, and was anonymous.  But it wasn’t anonymous to me.  It connected me, with a shock, to my grandmother.  She was about eleven when her father, my great-grandfather,  wrote that passage in his diary, and its familiarity convinces me  he had quoted it to his children at the time he wrote it in his diary.  And  many decades later my grandmother quoted it to me.

            And the intent of the couplet has been – I now realize – a guiding principle in my life.

            There are many books on the merits and values of tracing one’s ancestors.  I don’t recall this one being mentioned, although its importance means to me that it outweighs all the other benefits.  This sudden sense of kinship – of inhabiting the same mental landscape as my grandmother and her father, was profoundly moving.

            And so I will spend my time with the autograph book images my husband scanned for me, captioning them to show the family relationships reflected therein, and imagining the lives that were being lived when the verses and drawings were made.

Details

Written by: Roberta Rivett

Category: Family history

Published: 04 May 2011

 Earlier in this space I have referred to my ongoing work transcribing my English great-grandfather’s diaries.  I have months of work left, possibly something like a year and a half, and that may be optimistic, but expressing concern about that is not my present purpose.  No, now it is my purpose to complain about something that should be obvious to any WOMAN who undertakes to make the diaries of a MAN accessible to his descendants.  So here is my complaint:  My great-grandfather writes his diary entries from his own point of view.  Obviously!!  Of course!  Why didn’t I think of that?  Doesn’t EVERYBODY??

What this means is that he RARELY makes mention of the activities and events of the home front.  Here’s an example. There are many others, of course.

The year is, perhaps, 1860.  He might mention paying the weekly charge of the woman who does the family laundry.  In some entries when his children were babies he even mentioned the number of pieces of laundry, from which one might infer that the laundress is paid on a piece-work basis.  But I don’t know if the laundress comes in and does her work in the home, or does it in her own home.  Where does she get the water?  What kind of soap does she use?  Does she do ALL the family laundry or just some of it?  Does she do the ironing? What kind of equipment does she use for the laundry and ironing?

These are matters that were unimportant to him, and so did not get mentioned.  For myself I would find these details, and a multitude like them - such as everything to do with food preparation – fascinating.   And because they impinge insufficiently  on his awareness, or at least his writing, I am doomed to frustration.

Thinking about this, I remembered some years ago working on my mother’s book.  She wrote at length about laundry day, when homesteading on the Saskatchewan prairie in the early years of the last century.  My mother was a granddaughter of Elizabeth Niebuhr Thiessen so I am comfortable in including HER words in niebuhrgathering.com, confident that this is a rightful place for them, while at the same time alleviating to some extent my frustration with my English great-grandfather.

 WASHDAYS AS I REMEMBER THEM  (Found in Rempel Stories II, privately printed in 2002, editor Roberta Rivett.)

 1926  Great Deer, Saskatchewan

Doing the laundry in 1926 was much easier than it used to be.  Time was when my older sisters had to melt snow in the wash boiler on the kitchen stove.  They carried the snow in, in chunks if it was hard enough, otherwise in buckets.  Now in 1926 we were living in the big new house, with a cistern built against the basement wall.  We could not get to the lovely soft water from the basement; it was reached through a trapdoor in the back entry on the main floor. The rain fell on the roof of the house and then by drainpipes was led into the cistern from the outside.  The cistern thus filled would give us all the laundry water we'd need until spring or later.  This water was soft, nothing like our well water, which was hard and would curdle the lye soap, or any other soap.

The large cast-iron cooker stood in the basement on the cement floor.  There was a firebox under it made of metal, vented into the chimney stack.  You made a fire under the cooker to heat the laundry water. 

The cooker was also used to make lye soap.  When a steer was butchered, all of the tallow was saved to be used in the making of soap.  The lye came in round tins, and was caustic; you simply never let your hands come into contact with it; it could burn your skin dreadfully.  Four pails of soft water were poured into the cooker.  The cans of lye were put in, and then the tallow.  The fire under the cooker heated it all.  The lye dissolved the tallow and it all simmered slowly for some hours, until it was of a smooth and even consistency.  Then it was poured into pans, where it cooled and became quite firm. It was cut into suitable pieces and stored.  It would likely last until the next steer was butchered in the fall.  If we ran out of lye soap we would have to buy laundry soap from the store. 

To do the laundry after the soap was made was a good idea, as there was much soap adhering to the cooker.  At other times, a piece of soap was sliced thinly and put into the cooker when it was full of water for the laundry.

Now we come to Day One of the laundry. The water was drawn from the cistern with a bucket which had a rope tied to the handle.  The rear hall was not only a place to enter by the back door; it was a place to hang outdoor garments on the good hooks that were provided, attached to a board on the wall opposite the door.                                                             

Below the hooks and in the corner was the trap door into the cistern.  You lifted the trap door and leaned it against the wall.                                                   

It was interesting, looking down into the cistern full of water, seeing your reflection.  We were always cautioned to be careful and not fall in, as that would almost surely mean death.  Now and then there was talk about getting a pump for the cistern, but as there were so many other demands on the money, it never came about.

My oldest sister Tena and I became quite efficient at hauling the water up, pouring it into another pail, and then carrying that pail down the basement steps to be poured into the cooker. When one of us came up with the empty pail, the other would have a pailful ready from the cistern, waiting to be poured into the empty pail, and so on until the cooker was filled. 

Tena sorted the laundry into suitable piles for the washer to handle.  There was a huge pile of wood in the basement, which was used for the kitchen stove as well as for heating laundry water, so that was no problem.

On the Second Day, the first thing in the morning the fire was lit under the cooker, and the washer was placed where it would be convenient to transfer hot water into it from the cooker.  Five buckets or so were poured into the washer.  The white clothes were done first:  white men's shirts, pillowslips which were made from 100-pound flour bags.  Aprons, tea towels and sheets also were made of flour bags.

Considering hundred-pound bag of flour we used in a week, there was a lot of this strong white material available.  It was quite a task to get all of the printing out of the bags, but soaking them in separate warm water and lots of lye soap followed by a good hand rubbing did wonders.  After this they were boiled in the wash boiler on top of the kitchen stove, not forgetting to put in extra lye soap.  Now you had new material; even underwear was made from it.    The sheets were made  of four opened bags together, seams sewn flat, and one more halved, sewn across the bottom. 

The washer lid had a dolly. I don't know why it was called that but it would have made as good a job by any other name.  The dolly was a round, heavy piece of wood about twelve inches across with four pegs about four inches long fastened into it.  When the washer lid was closed, the dolly plunged into the laundry, and when the handle was pushed back and forth, the laundry was swished about in the hot soapy water.  This was continued for about fifteen minutes, then laundry was put through the wringer and into the laundry tub.  Hot water from the cooker was poured on the laundry in the tub.

The wash board came next.  The water must not be too hot, because we had to use our hands to lift pieces of laundry out of the water and onto the scrubbing board, where we scrubbed it, up and down, up and down.  We had to be careful to scrub the washing only and not our hands.  We made sure the ball of our hands would not get in the way and also get a rubbing.  Blisters arose and were very painful, taking days to heal.  We learned to scrub only the laundry, and not our hands. 

Our hands held the laundry, and piece by piece it got a second washing. This procedure took place with all the washing: washer first, then through the wringer, into the tub, scrub it over the washboard, then another fifteen minutes in the washer and through the wringer.  The wringer was made to turn by a handle and a handhold.  Around and around, one piece after another.  Just watch out and don't let your fingers get caught along with the wash. Right hand turns the handle, left hand feeds the wringer. And then the wash was ready for rinsing the next day.

While I would get another load into the washer and apply womanpower to make it go, Tena would sort out the white things that really were not white enough and must be boiled in the wash boiler on the kitchen stove.  And don't forget to put in some lye soap.  When ALL the laundry had been through the washer and the wringer and the scrubbing board, it was ready for rinsing in cold well water the next morning.  Before that could happen, the washer was emptied again, the water carried up the back stairs and thrown out well away from the house.  The wooden washer was thoroughly cleaned and made ready for the rinsing water.

The Third Day, the rinsing water was carried from the well and poured into the clean washer, the lid closed, the handle pulled back and forth until we were sure all the soap was rinsed out of that lot of laundry.  Then each load of wash was put through the wringer a final time and piled on the table, covered against dust.  In the summer the wash was hung out on lines, but in the winter it was carried upstairs through the kitchen, and up the second stairs in the dining room and finally up into the attic by way of a ladder. The wash hung there on many lines until it was dry.  This would take a number of days as there was no heat in the attic.

There were some things that needed starching after rinsing.  Some of the men's shirts, dresses, blouses and aprons were starched.  The starch was made by putting a mixture of flour and water into a pot of boiling water on the kitchen stove.  The mixture was then strained through a twenty-pound sugar bag, just in case there were any lumps in it.  When it was cool, the articles that needed starching were dipped into the starch water and wrung out by hand.

The articles that needed ironing were dry before the heavier things, and we might get to ironing them by Friday, but mostly the ironing was left for the following week.  The ironing was quite a job by itself.  You laid a folded flannelette sheet across the end of the dining room table, and used sad irons.  Why sad irons, I don't know.  They were made of solid iron with a nice shiny bottom.  They were put on the stove to heat.  There was one handle made of wood, which would clip onto the iron.  You ironed away with one iron until it seemed to need reheating.  Then you unclipped the wooden handle and traded the cooling iron for the hot one from the stove. 

I remember Mother sitting in the kitchen mending or knitting and being a part of the day.  It was a good feeling seeing her there. 

The sheets and towels had to be made smooth in the old-fashioned way.  You got the five-foot-long bench from behind the table - Father had made it years before and the boys sat on it when they ate.  On ironing days there was another use for the bench.  A two-foot-long roller made of wood was used to make the sheets and towels lovely and smooth.  Towels or folded sheets were wrapped tightly around the roller.  Then came an item called a rubble.  The roller with the sheet wrapped around it was placed on the bench, and you took hold of the rubble and placed it on the roller, which was on one end of the bench.  Now you put pressure with the rubble on the roller and rolled it until you came to the other end of the bench, and then started over again.  This was hard work and hard on the bended back, but when you unrolled it, it was a joy to behold.  When all the towels and sheets were finished they were taken upstairs and put in the linen cupboard.

The next week there was NO laundry. The next week we had much other work to do, and if we got all the ironing done this week, we were free of the laundry until the week following - it was a big washing every second week.  There were eight of us at home at the time I am writing about.  Helen and Olga were working as live-in housekeepers.  My oldest brother Jack was going to boarding school at Rosthern, Saskatchewan.  I was sixteen years old at that time.  Now I am past eighty years.  When I read this, I can hardly believe it.  We are in a push-button age now.

Susanna Rempel Hinde   1990       (Born  in 1909 near Borden, Saskatchewan.  Died  in 2004, in Victoria, British Columbia.)