Family history

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Written by: Roberta Rivett

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

Details

Written by: Roberta Rivett

Published: 18 March 2011

  For more than a year now I have been working on transcribing the journals of my great-grandfather.  Before I got my hands on his journals - the record he kept of his life, his work and his family for more than half a century - I knew a little about him, mostly from my father’s memories of his grandfather, and my grandmother’s memories of her father, although those, heard in childhood, had become unclear, leaving me with a rather fantastic image of a mythical being.

Now, deciphering the words written by his own hand and  walking with him and his family, living his life in Victorian England, I feel I know him as I have known none of the other kindred who have been subject of my family books.

I believed from these family stories that his wife Lydia died – of ruptured appendix – when her youngest child, my grandmother, was six, and that her father had employed a neighbor lady with a young son to look after his home and the children still at home.  I believed that he had adopted his housekeeper’s son when he married her, and that they had had two sons together both of whom died in their teens.

I knew, I knew.  This was the myth.  I had thought, as in my transcribing I approached the year I had understood to be Lydia’s death, that I would learn the reality.

It didn’t happen.  The diary ceases months before the time I had understood to be Lydia’s death, and resumes, only sporadically, years AFTER her death, until much later when it is resumed more regularly.  There is a brief passage regarding his dear Lydia’s funeral, with a drawing of her coffin and the placement and names of the pall bearers.  There is, written undated, a brief passage quoting Lydia’s words as she lay dying.

From the scant information my great-grandfather leaves during the years after Lydia’s death, I can only infer the heartbreak.  From the date of Lydia’s funeral I know that the myth of the year she died - when her youngest child was 6 -  is out by two years.  She – my grandmother – was said in the family stories, which I will now call myths, to be six when her mother died, and eight when her father remarried.  The scraps of journal indicate that little girl was almost 8 when her mother died, and eleven when her father remarried.

What can we trust of the family myths?  My brother has words for this, which are often quoted in the family to help understand this recurring puzzle.  I believe I have quoted him before in this blog.

I started to write this three months ago, and then, delving further into the thousands of pages of my great-grandfather’s diary yet to transcribe, I discovered that although he had put a few isolated entries into the earlier diary, he had continued unbroken from the regular entries of that one into a new one, which now, in the middle of March 2011, I have just finished transcribing.  This diary covered the period from August 1877 to June 1881, during which time the details of his wife’s death, and three years later his remarriage and his first child with his new wife, are all recorded.  This later journal combines entries about his family and his daily life with his business dealings.  In consultation with my sister Mary, my constant companion in this process of uncovering family history, I decided to transcribe only those entries which related to his personal life, his family, friends and fellow Quakers, and omit transcription of his daily multitude of business dealings, and also omit such items as the weekly purchase of milk and the seasonal purchase of coal.

There is a gain in taking this approach – the transcription reads much more like a story and less like an account book.  There is also a loss in that the account book entries describe the items passing though his hands in the course of his business dealings.  He was an antiquarian – would he today be called an antique dealer?  Perhaps.  The items include ancient books; footnoting those has been a study of history in itself.  I had not known, for example, that there were MANY translations of the Bible, between the invention of moveable type and the King James Version.  I had known little about Roman Britain.  I had known little about the coinage of all ages of Britain, although I had inherited from my great-grandfather four of his Roman coins. My great-grandfather had a particular interest in the books of the early Quakers, so in footnoting them (Google prolifically providing me with information and remarkably often, complete texts of these books) I became much more conversant with the time of the Reformation.

In the early diaries  I transcribed everything, and everything was footnoted.  Now in 1881 his life story is the focus, his work being referred to only glancingly in what I choose to transcribe.  But I have not  discarded the printouts of the full diaries; they can be re-examined at any time, and I have also, naturally, kept the disks on which they came to me from the firm in London, England, which photographed and digitized the diaries for me.

Today I am contemplating making  a worksheet of the tasks remaining to be done to make my great-grandfather’s life accessible to his descendants.  I am feeling qualms.   Is it best just to putter along, and NOT be clear about the mountain of hours still required?  Or should I face the reality squarely?

Perhaps a hot chocolate and a half-hour of watching birds at the feeders will produce an answer.

Details

Written by: Roberta Rivett

Published: 26 July 2010

As I type, the last copies of my book about my husband's grandfather is printing.  Later today I will bind one of the copies, so as to have it ready to give his daughter, my mother-in-law, at lunch tomorrow.  She is almost 98, and increasingly frail.  

This project, like most of mine, has been in the works for several years.

And once again I experience  NOT the feeling of elation for having completed a long project, but a momentary feeling of "That's nice," followed by "What's next?"

And what's next is the book about my great-aunt Mary.   Having decided  few days ago that I was NOT going to wait for certain information to come in, but rather to finalize the book now, print and bind and mail...with each copy a plea being made to send me anything that should have been included, for a future edition.

Details

Written by: Roberta Rivett

Published: 26 July 2010

The title is an expression used in my family to indicate something really - and unexpectedly - big.  It comes from Zane Grey's The Last of the Plainsmen, in which a story is told of one of the last big buffalo hunts.  The teller of the tale writes of camping on a hillock to increase his distant view of an event on the southern horizon.  Dust was billowing in clouds, and the rumble of many hooves shook the ground.  The  herd approached, and for three days buffalo streamed past his hillock in their millions on their spring migration, finally tapering off to a few stragglers.  He watched their departing rumps heading north, then, turning  south and looking back, he saw the main herd.

I am anticipating several "main herds" in my life in the near future.  The first wave of one of them arrived last week, with much more to come when I have processed what came and returned it.  It is family history in the raw and unprocessed; it is the notes of the author of a book about the Quakers at Borden (my kin, all of them.)  The book is a slender volume with perhaps two hours of steady reading in it.  The archive box of her notes from which I have been sent a few files, is perhaps two cubic feet of PAPER, sometimes printed or hand-written on both sides.  I see between three and five family history projects in this material alone.  If I have mentioned feeling daunted before, picture me now!

The connection Leona who is lending me the material is extremely disciplined, and works on only one family history project at a time.  I am extremely undisciplined and cannot resist the siren song of a new project.  The family stories the projects represent are all linked, with myself as the linchpin.  The protagonists are all related or connected to me.  All the new information which has flooded in on me in the last week reinforces, casts a new light on, expands, explains, corrects what has gone before. And it is all CRYING out to be attended to,  made accessible, communicated to the younger generations.  It is my lot, indeed my compulsion, to respond to that siren song.

Later.  Yesterday there were five excited posts from Leona.  She had designated school break week, a holiday for her as well, to go completely through that box of author's notes, and having done so confirmed my suspicion that if I looked back, I would see the main herd.  She said that I ain't seen nuthin' yet, and that if I thought there were goodies in the first installment she had sent, the best was yet to come and I would learn things about my relatives that I surely didn't know.  

This is at the same time overwhelming, daunting - and energizing.  I will spend the parts of today and the weekend  not committed to other people catching up on the bits and pieces that have fallen between the cracks, and then start a blitz of photocopying.  In one of Leona's posts she strongly urges me NOT to think about what I will do with any of the material until I have it all.  In the spirit of that urging I will try to avoid what I have in fact started doing - lining up projects in my mind...

Betty Ward, author of The Quakers At Borden, used that archive box of notes to produce her small book.  Most of my books have been the transcription and organization of the writing and memorabilia of individuals, a process which did not generate a vast quantity of unused notes but rather incorporated everything I could find by or about the central person.  I see that I shall have to learn a new skill - selectivity - if I am ultimately to master "the main herd."  

Later again.  I spent a good part of today sweating over a hot photocopier, reproducing the materials I must soon return to Leona.  In the process I am learning a little about the mental activity of  professional writer, preparing a book for publication.

There is an excellent book, "Events and People" by Helmut Hiebert.  He has taken an interesting approach to the history of the Mennonites in Russia, one I like a lot.  The book had a limited print run and had sold out by the time I became aware of it so I got it through interlibrary loan - my copy came from the National Library in Ottawa.  I had written to the author before doing this and learned that no reprint is planned.  After I had read it I wrote again, expressing my appreciation for his work and admiration for his standing as a professional writer.  He emailed back saying it was his passion, but that he had a day job - as orthopedic surgeon - consequently my praise of him as a professional writer was inappropriately applied.  

I don't think so.  To be a surgeon with a side in history-writing means he has a lot of energy, and that's admirable all by itself.  But his words got me thinking about how I define a professional writer: a person who writes books for professional publication and for sale, and actually sells them.  I write books - I think the count is 17 at the moment, but while I asked some of my kin for paper and printing costs, I don't regard that as sale, and the "publication" part is purely home-grown.   Consequently I think Helmut IS a professional writer, in spite of what he calls his day job.  

His next book is to come out this summer;  the title will be, I think, Stalin's Terrible Year.  The Mennonites in Russia in the year 1937.  I had an 18-year-old cousin who was taken from his home in that year in his Mennonite village in Russia, and shot.  Helmut wants to put his story into the book.  Now all I have to do is FIND it.  It's here - somewhere...

Once upon a time I had a secretary, and SHE had two secretaries, to deal with my work.  I never learned proper filing and I miss her terribly at times like this.  

I see that this entry has become seriously stream-or-consciousness.  Time to stop.

Details

Written by: Roberta Rivett

Published: 26 July 2010

One of the readers of this blog was reminded by my last entry to send family information she had received from a branch of the Niebuhr clan which had become disconnected, and was happy to reconnect and offer names and dates.  I don't know whether this branch of the family will wish at some point also to offer the flesh - the family stories - to clothe the bones of the names and dates.  So very many of the families who lived and suffered through the chaos of two wars, a revolution, famines, epidemics - are reluctant to speak or write of those times.  I regret that because their stories have lessons for those of us whose forebears left Russia in the early years of the last century, being on another continent when the terrible times began.  I have learned something of these times through putting together the story of my great-aunt, my grandmother's youngest sister, who did not come to Canada until 1926.  The lessons?  They are lessons of surviving, of holding together the values of the family, of enduring great sorrow and misery - and coming out the other end - most of them - with their sanity and their balance and their belief in the goodness of life intact.  We have it too easy, here and now, to grasp fully what they experienced, but we cannot grasp it at all if they don't tell us about it.

When my grandson was eighteen, I was  transcribing family data into my genealogy program about a cousin of his, who at eighteen in 1938 was taken from his home and shot.  I had to stop my data-entry task for a few days to think about what it would mean to have that happen in a family.  And - I couldn't grasp it.

I had said I would write of the fun of family trees, so I must not get myself caught up in sadness...

When one has entered  information into a computerized data base, it is then possible to display that information in a great many ways.  For example, if you were asked what month of the year holds more marriages than any other, you might guess June, but for the Mennonite branch of my family, that is not the case at all.  Think about it! A great many of our Mennonite forebears were farmers.  June typically would be much too busy a month for a wedding.  Looking at my entire data base, which includes many urban English on my father's side, June is indeed the peak month, but for the descendants of our earliest ancestor, Christof Niebuhr, the peak months are July and August.  Looking at the number of children in families, there was another surprise - the highest peak on the graph was for families with two children.  Certainly the graph reflects ALL the descendants of Christof Niebuhr, and the biggest number of them are the present generation, when family size has reduced compared to earlier generaions.   That's another interesting figure - how many descendants in each generation?  For Christof Niebur the 9th and 10th generations - that is, my generation and that of my children - have a half of the total descendants of 12 generations.  This is in part explained by our having more complete family histories the closer we get to the present.  Nevetheless it is interesting to note that this one man in the 16th century has more than 8000 direct descendants and in addition their roughly 3000 spouses in his family tree.

In an earlier blog I mentioned the way ancestors double every generation.  By the year 1000 AD, the one family line I have going back that far has just under a billion people in it - or would IF they were all recorded, and if there were no overlaps.  By the year 80 AD, given those same conditions, my ancestors would MORE THAN equal the weight of the entire earth.  This fact of geometric progression makes nonsense of the notion being a direct descendant of - well, some recognizable historical personage, say - which seems to be what many people would like to see in their family tree.  If's simply not meaningful in a genetic sense.

And yet - there is mitochondrial DNA to be considered, and if I understood enough about it, I would write about it.  There's a sort of fad going on just now about sending one's DNA for testing, contributing to the building up a data bank of mitochondrial DNA.  Intrigued by what I read, I jumped on that bandwagon - part of the FUN of amateur genealogy! - and since then have been sent by email many posts explaining it all in deeply incomprehensible terms.  If I can ever wrap my limp old brain around the concepts I will write about it, but that's not going to be soon!  I had an email from one of the Niebuhr connection who actually understood what it is all about, and had acquired information through havng his DNA tested where his earliest European ancestors had lived.  I'm talking about thousands of years ago, and I find that pretty interesting.  

But as for tracing family lines WAY back, well, the principle meaning I derive from the tracing my great-grandfather did in 1853 was to observe in the changes of names in the family line, how history worked itself out in surnames.  From "English" names (a mongrel nation if ever there was one!) to French names (with the Norman conquest in  1066) to Scandinavian names in the Middle Ages to Roman names in the early centuries of the first milennium AD.  I regard this ancestor exploration as an interesting way of learning history.  And of course, the farther back you go, the less likely it is that the history bears any resemblance to what actually happened.  My great-grandfather was VERY fond of the idea that he was descended from an English minor baron who resisted the Normans for years after the conquest, and recently I read a biography of that individual which held that his actual EXISTENCE was seriously in doubt.  

However, I derive a great deal of enjoyment about putting together all the information which comes to me, and treasuring it as a family history.  I find it, simply, fun.