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Dedication
I dedicate these - my memories - to my deceased Little Sister Lydia Marie Buhr-Friesen And to
Her children: Jayne Bethan and James Bryan
And to
Our Mother: Tina Braun-Buhr
Life is a journey, sometimes long and sometimes perilous, though hopefully joyful and interesting. But it is a journey where we don’t know where we are going to end up or in many cases, where we are likely to pass. Our Spanish speaking friends say before a journey, “VIA CON DIOS” or “GO WITH GOD”. - Extract from “Senior Living”)
Introduction
To my surviving siblings, nieces and nephews, children and grandchildren, their spouses and potential spouses:
Many ideas of my writings have been taken from the book, HOW TO WRITE YOUR LIFE STORY by KAREN ULRICH. In fact, many statements in my introduction are direct quotes from her book: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO CREATING A PERSONAL MEMOIR.
“Writing memoirs is a journey with multi purposes. One purpose is to celebrate family.” Namely, siblings, as this writing will take me only from my birth to the doorstep of my marriage to Dr. Hewitt. Another purpose is looking to heal past wounds and to forgive one self for bad decisions.
“Also, I wish this to serve as my children’s memory of me,” since I rarely talked a lot about my childhood or our growing up years. These are my memories. They may not correlate with those of my siblings. They may not all be facts as they recall them, but they are my memories on looking back on my life. Some are facts my Mother and Sister Dorothy told me at one time or another, some facts were shared by my brothers, some were gleaned vicariously by hearing adults talk. but mostly I wrote from memories from as early as age two years. If some feelings are ruffled by stating, my memories just consider they are childhood memories of incidents which happened a long time ago.
The INNER CHILD THERAPY session which I attended brought things to mind which happened years ago as though they happened yesterday, like movies. That all twelve of us siblings survived to adulthood in spite of dire living conditions is of itself amazing. I want my children to realize under what severe circumstances we were raised and how much I strived to make their lives better when they were growing up.
Another purpose of this book is to confirm the mysterious calamity of the Great Depression and how my side of the family survived. The whole world was steeped into poverty after WWII but ours was more pronounced because there were so many children in our family, although large families were common among Mennonites. Most families fared better than ours mostly because of Dad’s poor work habits, such as starting to put in the crop when other farmers around were done.
Also, the purpose of this writing is to show how our parents caused the disintegration of the Mennonite culture in our family mostly because for years they did not attend services. This was due in part because distances to church services were too far to travel by horses, especially in winter times. Also in part because each parent came from a different Mennonite denominational upbringing which they seemingly never resolved.
To my knowledge there are 15 denominations within the Mennonite culture, which was started by Menno Simons, a Catholic priest who left Catholicism during the European Reformation. At that time, he had to flee for his life and wherever people harbored him he made converts, teaching SALVATION BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH, his new conviction. His followers were called Mennonites after the priest's first name.
Depending on which community my parents were domiciled we either attended a Mennonite Community Church with no denominational walls or we weekly walked one mile to an interfaith Sunday School where we were taught salvation by grace through faith.
Our Dad did read German Bible stories to us when we had to sit on the floor and listen to stories which we barely understood since we spoke a Dutch/German dialect or Pleut -Deutch at home. I believe he became discouraged and gave it up because of our inattentiveness. To me the stories he read about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still my favorite Bible stories.
Dad hailed from Old Colony Mennonites and attended German Parochial School in Gretna, Manitoba where he didn’t learn a word of English but he did learn to sign his name. This denomination was intent on preserving the German language although it was not really their mother tongue since they basically hailed from the Netherlands, Menno Simon’s starting point, and all spoke a colloquial Dutch/ German or Pleut Deutch language.
Our mother hailed from Bergthaler Mennonites. She and her siblings all attended public school and were well versed in the English language. My mother and her sisters (my aunts), never wore anything different in dress other than those seen in the Eaton’s catalogue or in pattern stores. My generation also did not wear weird clothes as was the custom in some Mennonite denominations. Mother taught us to pray, have faith, and to believe in salvation by grave through faith.
Mother liked to sing and whistle all day long while she did housework. She would pinch money from shipping cream checks in order to buy a gramophone (the kind we had to crank) and records for us to use. She taught us all to love music. I remember whenever a new record arrived at our house, we would all squat on the floor and write down words of each song. When we thought we had captured them all by comparing with each other, we would belt them out Wilf Carter style. One day mother said to me, “If I couldn't sing, I could never get through these hard times.” She sang a variety of German and English hymns but also some classics like “The Lorelei” which she sang in German. I also remember my siblings and I sitting in a circle of chairs and taking turns each calling out our favorite hymn numbers out of a hymn book we all had copies of. Later my brothers bought guitars and learned to play and sing along.
My parents were both born in Canada, as were three of four grandparents – which should make us third generation Canadians. My grandmother, Anna Braun was sixteen years old when she came to Canada and was too old to attend school in Manitoba but she studied alongside with her brother and became an avid self-taught reader.
Because we weren’t anchored in any particular church my siblings and I each joined the church that our spouses adhered to, which is the reason there are many faiths represented in our family: Baptist, Alliance, United, Catholic, Mennonites, Full Gospel, and Pentecostal We all had to learn to be tolerant of each other’s faith. Possibly all believe in salvation by grave through faith.
Because my parents moved so often, we became exposed to different cultures: French, German, Ukrainian, and Anglo-Saxon. The word MENNONITE became almost foreign to us because we seldom lived amongst them and forget much about their culture. I later read two history books on Mennonites: IN SEARCH OF UTOPIA and VO HIN VO HARE MENNONITEN (TO WHERE FROM WHERE MENNONITES). Otherwise I would have not understood what we were supposed to represent.
Basically, Mennonites are pacifists and immigrated from country to country whenever the drums of war came on the horizon. After leaving the Netherlands, Prussia, Germany, and Poland they arrived in the Ukraine where a kind czar allotted a large tract of land to the emigrant Mennonites and allowed them to live there without ever having to go to war. They lived in the Ukraine in peace for several decades until the czar died, and a different czar came to the throne. He feared the Mennonites might take up arms and become treasonable and ordered them off the lands. Hence began a great immigration of Mennonites to Canada and the United States. My great grandparents must have come across with the first group of immigrants during the 1800 s since three out of four of our grandparents were born in Canada. My great-grandparents’ country of birth is recorded as the Ukraine but not because they
