Part One: Leaving Germany--Never Going Back

My father was Irish; my Mother was German. They met in Wiesbaden when Dad was a soldier in the British Army of Occupation. Later, he stayed on in Germany to work for the British Graves Commission, locating the graves of British and allied soldiers in Germany. That job ended in 1927. Hence the interest in coming to Canada.

Mother tells the story: "There was this British Legion scheme of sending 3,000 families to Canada. They had sent them over in the years since the war, and there were 50 wanted to make up the 3,000. They were trying to get at least one family from the Rhineland, from the Army of Occupation, and they did have a different man, but his legs were bad. Another Irishman. He wanted to go, but...

"So Mr. Storey, the man from the Consulate, was after your Dad to go. I refused to go, you know. I didn't want to go to Canada. I never thought I'd live my life in another country. But he talked us into it. Your Dad was okay; he wanted to go. Your Dad says, 'Well, it's up to you now. I've got my medical. I've got everything. If you don't want to go, we won't go.'

"Well, they talked me into it. Told a lot of lies. We had to go right away; we were already late.

"We left right away. We got to Cologne at nine o'clock at night, and the train left at twelve."

That meant that they had three hours to say good-bye to the German side of the family before leaving forever. They never got to Ireland to say good-bye at all.

Part Two: Food

So there they were, from Berlin to Northern Saskatchewan. In the training camp in England, Mother had more or less (rather less than more) learned to milk a cow. She thought that Dad had had the opportunity to run behind the tractor and see how that worked.

Looking at the photo, Tom observed: "That's right up against the house. That's our abode, or part of it: the old homestead. That's the back porch. You can tell it isn't the barn because the door isn't big enough for the cows to get through!" Laughter all around.
Molly added: "Mother's favourite cow, Biddy..."

Mother showed her farming mettle; sentiment and favouritism did not get in the way of practicality.

"...We always butched a calf [in the fall], or that old white cow, finally; she was seventeen. I said 'You kill that cow and I won't eat any,' but Pat, that meat was delicious! It's the way it was raised, you know, with all that good stuff. It was always hollow, a big, white bony cow, but what meat!"

"You ate some, I gather?""Yes! That was fantastic meat."

Part Three: Housing

The house was minimalist, to say the least. Two rooms, walls unfinished inside, no insulation but tastefully whitewashed to the eight-foot level. In the winter, it was even more tasteful, because the hoar frost carried the white right up to the roof. Freezing, but the kids never caught a cold.

Part Four: Baby Davitt

Bill and I were born on the farm: He was fine, but I was sickly.

Kae asked, "When did you know that Patricia was sick?"

"Almost immediately, Mother knew there was something wrong." ...

Tom said, "You were one jump away from renal failure. It was a close call, and it was lucky it didn't happen earlier, or you would have been deader than a smelt!"

Molly added, "Kidney problems, born with it. Then a friend's daughter, living in Saskatoon, told Mother she should maybe bring Patricia to Saskatoon to this Dr. Brown, to try out this new treatment. He couldn't guarantee anything, but it was a chance."

"How old was the baby then?" asked Kae.

"Less than a year old; getting on for a year, I guess. So they took her in; left her there; came back [to the farm without her]. We had reports every day, remember? On the radio, from the general hospital in Saskatoon, reporting on all the babies that were in there, and the ones that were ready to pick up and take home. Baby Davitt: we were waiting to hear what they said about Baby Davitt!"

Added Tom, "They didn't have first names; just Baby! I remember that. On those farm programs, they had birthdays and everything from soup to nuts. There was quite a bit of coverage."

"It was a great service," Molly agreed.

In the time before rural electrification and telephones, the radio provided an vital communication link and a lifeline across the province and the country.

Part Five: Transport

In those days, Mother pointed out, "... getting around in the north meant horses. And first you had to catch your horse. Mother knew that. "I could hitch up the horses. But there again now: you made up your mind that you were going somewhere on Sunday, so you'd go look for the horses...Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! The damned things would disappear. If you actually did find them, it would be in the slough. It was half a mile long and there would be water in there, and the damned horses knew that. They would be standing in the middle and they wouldn't come out! You could shake your can with the oats; they wouldn't budge; they'd just look at you. They knew. They'd stand there in the water, and you couldn't get them out of there. And I wouldn't go in there, because I'd be up to here in water, and God knows what was creeping around the bottom! Yech! Oh, [when you had to depend] on the horses, the best was when they were in the barn."

Part Six: School

Molly and Tommy attended a one-room school with about 30 other children. The number fluctuated depending on how many of the boys were needed for farm tasks.

Bill only went for one day, before the family left the north, but his older siblings were quite willing to give him lessons.

Kae pointed out: "Bill tells of you writing in the dirt with sticks, doing your sums."

"No, I don't think so," Tom replied. "Maybe we showed him something in a patch of sand, on the way to school. Come to think of it, I don't even remember him going to school. Once, maybe."

"He saw the two of you writing your sums in the sand," said Kae firmly.

"He said that?" said Molly, with considerable disbelief. "No, no way."

"We took him," recalled Tom; "We took him once, I think. Maybe we took him a couple of times....but why would he remember that particular thing?"

"Well," replied Kae; "it must have been a marvellous thing for him to see."

"Maybe we just showed him," thought Molly.

They all mulled that over, and then Kae started to laugh. "It does leave the impression that you people had nothing but sticks and sand!" Everyone was laughing.

"Higher education!" proclaimed Tom. "You stood on a stump and wrote in the sand" [which obviously required a longer stick]. "And homework! I don't remember anyone ever doing homework!"

"Well," joked Kae, "you ran out of sticks!"

Part Seven: Fun

Life wasn't just about doing sums and fishing reluctant horses out of the slough. Fun was definitely had by some, some of the time; fashion statements were made, and health concerns cropped up disastrously.

Designer Clothes by Hettie Davitt

Kae noted that she was very nicely dressed. "Where would she get a dress like that?"

"Oh, Mother made it, probably," replied Molly. "She was very good at things like that. We were always dressed well." Pat agreed, remembering all the dresses made for her. "And she made our coats," said Molly.

"So this is Mrs. Carter," said Pat, "who died, as Mother told me over and over, because she got sick and couldn't afford to go to the doctor, so she didn't go and didn't go.

These were the years before any kind of health system. In Germany, there had been a health system in place for decades. Mother couldn't believe how backwards it was here...in many ways.

Part Eight: Economics

Pat asked: "Now what was it that Art Hunter [Molly's husband] said: 'You can never out-poor the Davitts'?"

Molly replied: "Yes, that's right. He couldn't believe the stories I told. I would tell Bill and David [Hunter] the things that happened on the farm (they couldn't believe them either). One of the things I said was about money, and not having any. Literally, not having any money in the house, not so much as a penny. And Art was sitting there, and he said: 'Naw, there's always some money; don't tell me that!' " Molly and Tommy laughed.

"And was there money?" Pat asked.

"No!" said Tom. "No there wasn't; not a penny. Literally."

Molly explained, "It would be a sort of a barter system. You'd wait for the crop in the fall, hoping that you could sell some wheat and pay the grocer and anyone else that you owed."

So the kids looked for ways to make money, picking and selling wild strawberries, and shooting rabbits and trapping gophers (they got a nickel for every tail.) But life was about to change in response to global concerns sweeping across the world.

The hint of things to come: if you examine the photo closely, you will see that Molly is standing there with a camera. That indicates there were two cameras in a family who generally didn't have any money at all. Change was in the air.

Part Nine: The War

In September of 1939, war was declared and along with many others on the prairies, our world was turned upside-down, which was not necessarily a bad thing at the very local level.

Mother remembered it well. "They would write about the patriotism of Canadians, especially from the West. Saskatchewan men were the most patriotic of all Canadians. Well, the fellows just roared, you know. Everybody was trying to get in so their families would have something to eat."

Tom laughed, "They were the hungriest!"

Pat remarked, "I remember from doing reading on this period that there were people who went around, jokingly, saying "Heil Hitler!" to each other!"

"Oh yes," said Molly; "People did; Dad did!"

Tom added, "Remember Tommy Douglas and that famous speech? He led a delegation to Ottawa to try and get some money for the unemployed people in Saskatchewan. ...And who was it (was it R. B. Bennett?) said, 'Money doesn't grow on trees'. That was in July or August. In September, they declared war and they voted six million dollars to carry the war on, over the weekend! Douglas said, 'They must've found the trees!' ...it boggled the mind how quickly they could come up with the money."

"There was money to burn, all of a sudden," Molly remembered. "It was like they could buy anything for the war. Jobs everywhere. It was just unbelievable. The Depression was over. Within days."

Dad successfully lied about his age (he was technically too old to join up), hoping to get over to Europe to visit his family. He got as far as Regina to the south, and Prince Albert to the north. But there was money coming in monthly, and veteran's benefits, and a war-widow's pension later... As Tom observed, a substantial inheritance for his family.

The Urban Experience

We moved to Saskatoon, a city of maybe 50,000 people, or about 49,985 people more than we were used to. Billy went to a regular school.

"In elementary school, we had a little bit of hockey in the winter; we had a low-level league in the school, and we played occasionally at the arena against other teams. ...The better players played pee-wee hockey. Of course, when I was in the school, when I was in Grade 1 and 2, Gordie Howe was in Grade 7 and 8."

"In that school?" asked Pat incredulously.

"Yeah. In King George School."

"Really?" said Molly. "In that school?"

"Yeah. He came in from Floral [a small town just outside of Saskatoon], and he went to our school. Now I wasn't playing hockey, and I was a million light years below him anyway, but there was that semi-league of teams that played a few games, and then at the end of the season, they had an all-star game: the East Side versus the West Side."

"I remember that," said Pat.

"The West Side was our side; we were the low rent district; the East Side was Nutana and all the high class places. I remember the Saskatoon Arena seated about 5,000 people, and they would get about ten to fifteen thousand kids packed into the place, at 10 cents a ticket to see this all-star game between the East Side and the West Side. And I remember when Gordie Howe was playing for the West Side. The score was 15 to 1, and he scored 14 goals! I remember one goal, in the middle of the third period. He took a slap shot from center ice and the goalie simply got out of the way!"

Pat was laughing. "He saw it coming and he thought: 'I don't want to have anything to do with this!'"

Bill added, "Well, Gordie looked like he was about 20 years old, and all the others looked like they were twelve. [They were twelve; they were all twelve including Gordie.] He was a really big kid."

Molly wanted to know if Bill had dined out on this famous connection over the years. He admitted that from time to time he interjected the fact that he had gone to school with ol' Gordie. After all, it was definitely a

Part Ten: Summing Up

Saskatoon was no Berlin, but it had movie houses and streetcars and blocks that other kids lived on who could be your friends. It had schools and department stores, jobs and running water (well, some houses had running water!). It had electricity! Excitement! And hope

It was an urban space. It might have been (probably was) quite a few years behind New York and London, but it was half a century on from Livelong and Turtle Lake. The family was moving on in space and time, but that decade on the farm would leave its mark on all the participants, in their stoicism, persistence, and their resistance to adversity, in their survival skills, in their willingness to go along with life and enjoy it, no matter what it brought them. It was a life of hardship needing to be endured, but enlivened with laughter and learning and huge dollops of common sense and practicality.

How To Write Your Family History

How to get started:

· documentary sources: birth/death records; family geneology if known, letters and photographs, diaries

· oral information: getting people to talk to you/the importance of food and relaxation/the art of interviewing - start with easy, short-answer, factual questions and then elaborate on the answers (this is where I used the photos as a jumping off point); comfort level of participants to taping/taking notes: asking about favourite family stories and how each person remembers it. Have an interview outline/schedule: what info do you want to get?

Sorting it out: What you do with the material once you've collected it

· decide the main themes and grouping ideas: often based on family life - food, babies, transportation, fun, school days, special events, work; this is where Kae and I ran into problems, and this is what I learned from Karen:

· review all materials and indicating major themes
work through each theme, collecting and collating the information you have and ordering it within the theme; work chapter by chapter; deciphering what is closest to truth (cf. story about Dad's photo)

· identify what's missing and figure out how to fill the holes, if possible

· what conclusions can you come to: weighing up the past, by you (the editor) and by your participants

Presentation: decide how to present the information: format, style, medium.

· Remember that "simple" works: Typed manuscripts with good, clean layout in a decorative three-ring binder would be easy and inexpensive. Or decorate the pages as you might do in a scrapbook, with photos and fancy borders. Consider whether you want to make multiple copies: therefore, whether to do it in black and white (elegant and less expensive), or colour copying.

· More complex? A book that you want printed and bound. Look for friends who can help you get there (and be sure to acknowledge their help in the final production) - deliberately leave room for other family members to take part/friends also - look to younger generation for computer help if appropriate, etc.

· Find a local printer/bindery that can do much of the layout for you, or can work from your manuscript on flash drive or CD.

· For ideas on design, reference similar projects in the same medium: eg, for books, go to the local library and look at various types of books for ideas about format and style; check out books in the family history, and then books in other subject areas, such as art how-to books, gardening and crafts for ideas on less formal formats. For web-site and internet presentation, look at some of the current crop and cherry-pick the ideas you particularly like

· Consider new technology and how you can use it, possibly to extend or expand the life of the manuscript: CD or DVD; post on internet? Blog or web-site. Again, a good way to draw in the younger generation.... We have a DVD in every book that has the full 900 minutes of conversation that people can listen to, and all of the photos as well...plus an invitation to the younger set to play with the raw material in interesting ways: altering photos, making short videos using photos with the appropriate recorded story that they illustrate. There are lots of creative possibilities.

· One factor that should be considered: how long the various media last. CDs appear now to be on the way out (2008); how long for DVDs? Who knows? Cassette tapes now need to be converted to CD or DVD. What format has a proven track record for lasting hundreds of years: the book!

Wrap-up:

· "And in the end...": what did it all mean (both the process of collecting the information, and the resultant story), and where does it all go: what to do with all the bits and pieces: the table-cloth, the original old photos, the heavily edited manuscript. Your final tasks will be to find your collected relics a home for the next generation to have access to them, to play with them. A younger, enthusiastic family member is your best bet to inherit this material.

· Also consider the wider social value of the research and writing you have just completed. You might want to send a copy of your book to the provincial archives and/or to the National Library and Archives. Go on line to find their contact information, and be sure to write to them beforehand, to make sure that they will accept the book in the format you have chosen.

· Finally, you can decide to put the whole story, or an edited version, into cyberspace via a blog, a website or some newer form of internet interaction as yet to be developed. The world is out there, waiting for your story.