In Her Own Words - The New House

These are some of the memoirs written by Ethel Hymers Glewwe on her childhood in Saskatchewan, Canada from 1910-1918.

Building a New House - 1913-1915

     " Papa always planned on building a new house for us - so while Mama and me spent the winter of 1913 in St. Paul, he worked hard getting the grain hauled to town and using the money he made for selling the grain to buy lumber and building supplies.  the he hauled it to the farm and stored it in piles to ready when the time came that he could call on his cousins and neighbors for help.  He dug out the cellar under the kitchen of our house and erected support posts under the house.  The sod on the outside had to be removed, so he took it off about half way down.  Winter set in, but it was rather a mild winter and he was able to mark out and lay a foundation of stones for the addition.  Grandpa and our neighbor,  Joe Rands, helped.  Grandpa said he always did the cooking.
   
    Mama and I came home from St. Paul in March, 1914, and from then on it was a very busy year.  I remember Mama and me hauling away the sod off the house and putting it into a dry well hole that the well diggers had left when Papa was trying to reach some drinking water in our farmyard.  Usually the farmers began planting wheat early in April and when not planting, other ground was worked  over to plant in May - the corn and finally on Queen Victoria's birthday - potatoes and garden vegetables.  By June the crops were growing and there was a slackening of farm work and time for a house raising.

     Papa's cousins, Bert and Bud, Joe Rands and even the men and their wives from town came.  Some brought their children.  They moved most of the furniture outside and some into the granary that Papa and Joe had built.    Everyone had something to do - the ladies that came helped Mama cook the meals and many brought food and we all shared.  It took about three days to get the walls up and the roof closed in, before it rained and I can remember the night it rained.  Papa had moved our bed back in, but the roof leaked and we got wet and Papa put a canvas over us like a tent.  I thought it was fun, Mama was worried about all their work being ruined - Papa always made an adventure out of a catastrophe.  Finally the house was finished and Mama was very happy.  We had three bedrooms upstairs and two big clothes closets, a large living room and the old kitchen.  A cellar door and stairway was built under the stairway that went upstairs - it was such a nice house - a permanent wall was built to close in the pantry and a heater stove was installed in the living room.,  From this stove a pipe was extended to the bedroom upstairs and a pipe  from the cooking stove in the kitchen heated one of the bedrooms above the kitchen.   One bedroom had no heating pipe, but it wasn't much different that the one with the pipe.  I remember the upstairs was always cold in the wintertime.

     Grandpa wanted Grandma and their daughter Cora and son Allan to join him and hopefully stay.  But Cora was just graduating from high school and she had a group of piano students she was teaching and she didn't want to come.  Grandma and Allan came and Grandma brought some furniture, but she didn't like the house that Grandpa had on his section of land so they moved into our house and Grandma and Grandpa slept downstairs in the living room in their own bed and Allan slept upstairs in one room and I slept in the other room and Mama and Papa slept in the front bedroom upstairs that had the big closet.  Mama said it was wonderful to have so much room.

     Mama put in a big garden, Papa plowed about an acre - and I remember helping her with the measuring line and dropping beans and peas into the ditches she made with the hoe.  Grandma helped with the cooking, she could bake the best bread and cookies she called oatmeal rocks.  Mama did a lot of vegetable canning and usually when the harvest was over she had rows and rows of jars full of peas, beans, and carrots.  We had citron preserves and later on we had raspberries and strawberries that we grew.  We had pickles too and sauerkraut.  We considered ourselves very fortunate and one of the more prosperous farmers.  Grandma had a brother named Charles Kipp and he lived in Oregon.  His wife died and he wanted to visit his sister in Saskatchewan and his sister in St. Paul - so he came to visit.  I liked Uncle Charlie.  When Uncle Charlie was ready to leave for St. Paul, Allan went back with him.  Allan had to go to school and Grandma was persuaded to stay the winter of 1914-1915."

In Her Own Words - The Livestock and Such

Another chapter in the memoirs of Ethel Hymers Glewwe, and her childhood growing up in Saskatchewan, Canada - 1910-1918



     "I don't remember too much about building the barn except Papa wanted to have a name for his farm and when he had been working on the telephone lines he had found some antelope or deer antlers, so he chose Deer Horn Ranch.   He nailed the deer horns on the wall in the peak of the roof and they remained there for many years.  The barn wasn't very big and a few years later he had to build a bigger one but this one was much better than the sod barn.  We kept the cows in the sod barn for a while, and then they finally moved into a lean-to that Papa put on the barn.

We had four teams of horses in the barn and I can remember their names.  King and Dock, the team from the fire department, and Jack and Bell, Jim and Dolly and Dan and Clair.  We had single horses for the buggy and riding.

Mama with Dock, King, Bell and Dan

    My horse's name was Prince.  He had a white face and was a trained cow pony.  Then we had Kit, a beautiful dapple grey and high-stepping Fly.  Nugget was a bronco and if you weren't careful, would buck you off.  We also had Maud, Jenny and Lady.  Maud and Jenny we bred and let run with their colts.  Lady was a pacer and Papa had bought her from a racing horse stable.  Allen always rode her to school.  She always wanted to race, and when I rode to school on my pony, Prince, we often raced the half mile to the crossroads on our way home from school.




    We had names for the cows also.  There was white-faced Daisy and black-faced Daisy, then Sutton who belonged to a farmer named Sutton who died and his widow gave us the cow when she left the farm.  There was Bessie, Nancy, Patsy, and my cow's name was Bertha.  I have my picture taken with it when it was a calf.  It was our first calf and Grandpa said it was a girl so he would name it after his first daughter. (I wonder if my Aunt Bertha ever knew we had a cow named after her?)

     We had some pigs but we only named the mama pig.  She was Sally and she had a lot of little pigs every year.  Sally was very tame and if we was alone in the pen Papa would put me on her back and I'd hold onto her ears. She would give me a ride all around the pen.  I used to scratch her behind the ears.  She would come over to the fence and wait for me.



     We had some white turkeys.  Turkeys are a very difficult type of fowl to raise.  They keep close together in a flock and sometimes become attached to a leader gobbler, who might decide to leave the protection of the farm yard for a hollow in a field or a dry creek bed.  This was dangerous to their safety.  At night they would huddle together with no protection from the prowling wolves or coyotes.  You can't drive turkeys - they just won't go where you want them to.  Once Papa had to search them out and it was a good thing they were white because Mama, Papa and I sneaked up on them and caught them and put them in sacks.  Some got away but we got the gobbler and the next morning the stragglers had come back home.  Papa cut their wings so they couldn't fly away and we had to put up a fence to keep them home.  Mama didn't raise many turkeys after that.  We had ducks and geese but Mama didn't like them.  They were such dirty fowl.  They always tried to bathe in their drinking water.  We couldn't waste so much water.  Mama had to make a special drinking pan just for the ducks.  They didn't wander away, they stayed in the farm yard.  I didn't like the geese and the old gander always wanted to chase me and he'd scare me.  Mama always canned chicken and turkey, but we sold the geese and ducks in town at Williams' Store.  Sometimes Papa would shoot rabbits and Mama canned them too.  We always had some kind of meat over the winter, later we even smoked meat when we butchered a pig."

In Her Own Words - Kincaid

     "It was in the spring of this year that the railroads began to move into the Providences. Tracks were laid about 12 miles north of our farm. Grain elevators owned by the railways were built and the post office was moved to this new location, Kincaid. It wasn't long before the tradesmen and businesses came in.



     There was Alfred Williams General Store, Menzies Drug and Ice Cream Parlour, Haddad Hotel, Mortuary and Furniture Store, Joe Frosted's Lumber and Implements and Percy Ross's Garage and Wagon shop. There was Wong's Restaurant and Promery and Lee's Law and Insurance Office.

     Then the telephone came and Mrs. Cassel was the telephone operator. Marion Cassel was a very good friend of Papa's sister, Cora. The post office was in the general store with Alfred Williams as postmaster. Pierre Jacques was the station master. Alfred Williams had two brothers, Tom and Joe. Joe ran the grain elevator and a livery stable. Tom had a farm east of town.

     These town people were all very good friends of my parents and we often visited back and forth during the years of my childhood. Papa was president of the telephone company and he organized a crew of farmers to build and extend the telephone lines as far out as our farm and some distance south of us. He and the crew would dig pole holes and put up wires for days at a time and even stayed overnight at different farmers' houses when he was too far away to come home.

     There was a big celebration when the line was complete. Farmers came from miles away to Kincaid to show their support. This was a wonderful thing to be able to telephone town and to contact each other. We probably were one of the first to have a telephone. Our ring was two long, one short. There were fourteen on the line. If too many families listened in one couldn't hear very well. The story goes that Grandpa was talking on the phone and a neighbor was listening and Grandpa said over the phone if 'that nosy Corcoran would get off the phone and mind his own business may he (Grandpa) could hear better'. Mr. Corcoran was supposed to have said, 'I'm not listening!'"

More words from the memoirs of Ethel Hymers Glewwe.

In Her Own Words - 1913

     "Grandpa returned from St. Paul early that spring.  He was anxious to build a small house on his property so he could bring Grandma from St. Paul and his young children.  Grandpa's first house was like a double barn or granary.  It faced east and the door was in the middle.  On the south end was the kitchen and living room - it was one room.  On the north end of the building were the bedrooms divided by a curtain on a wire strung across the room.  There was a window on the north and west for the bedrooms and one on the south for the kitchen.

  I remember when Grandma came she didn't like it very much and didn't want to unpack her suitcase.  Mama convinced her that it wasn't too bad when the garden grew with all the fresh vegetables and the chickens began laying eggs.  We would have fresh eggs and milk with thick cream and butter and home-baked bread.  The days would go by fast enough before she would have to return to St. Paul.  Grandma didn't come though until after my Papa's sister, Cora and brother, Allan, were out of school.


     I don't know where everyone slept, but I remember I did sleep sometimes with my Aunt Cora.  That spring must have been awfully busy.  I can remember Mama and me going in the horse and buggy over to Grandpa's house with lunch for him while he worked on his house and I remember cleaning windows.  Because I wasn't tall enough to reach them from the outside, Mama got me something to stand on.  That spring Mr. and Mrs. Britton came from Ontario and joined their bachelor sons, Bill and Bob.  They lived across the road from Grandpa's where Grandpa's first house or sod hut was.  Mrs. Britton was older than Mama and she showed Mama how to cure meat and preserve eggs and dry vegetables for winter.  I liked Mrs. Britton and I often visited her.  She could sing and taught me a song about a dog named Rover.  Later on their three daughters joined them, Lottie, Mae and Jean.  They were grown-ups.  Lottie went to Moose Jaw to work in a hospital.  I think she was a practical nurse.  Mae helped her mother on the farm and Jean was a school teacher.  They had been educated in Ontario.  Mama was glad to have other women as her neighbors so close by.

 Grandma, Cora and Allan came in late June, 1913, and in August, Ethel came.  She was engaged to be married and wanted to see Papa, her brother, before she got married.  She was a lot of fun and while she was visiting us she learned how to ride a horse.  She went back to St. Paul with Grandma, Cora and Allan in September.  Grandpa stayed on the farm to help Papa.

     Papa wanted to build a barn for the stock and get rid of the old one with the straw roof and sod walls, so he brought lumber home with him when he hauled in the threshed wheat.  We didn't thresh our wheat on our farm the first few years.  We hauled the cut wheat straw to Papa's cousin Bert's farm to be threshed.  Later on we hired a threshing crew and Papa even worked for the man who owned the machinery."

Frank Hymers

Another chapter in the memoirs of Ethel Hymers Glewwe, and her childhood growing up in Saskatchewan, Canada - 1910-1918

Wordless Wednesday - Kinkaid, Sasatchewan

About 1915

For the past month, I shared the memoirs written by Ethel Hymers Glewwe of her childhood homesteading in Kinkaid, Canada.  Today, Wordless Wednesday I share pictures of this land.

1995

Not much has changed!

SNGF - Ahnentafel Roulette!

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings has posted a new mission.
For those who have accepted the challenge there is .......

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

1) How old is your great-grandfather now, or how old would he be if he had lived? Divide this number by 4 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your "roulette number."

2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ahnentafel (ancestor name list). Who is that person?

3) Tell us three facts about that person with the "roulette number."

4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook or Google Plus note or comment, or as a comment on this blog post.

5) If you do not have a person's name for your "roulette number" then spin the wheel again - pick a grandparent, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!

So here goes...
1) My great grandfather is Heinrich (Henry) Glewwe born in 1868, making him 143.  Diveded out by four and rounded up to number 36.  

2)Using the pedigree chart, by relative in the #36 spot would be the father of Heinrich Patet (my ggg grandfather).  I have no information on him.  So I go back to # 1.

1) My maternal great grandfather is Alexander Brossoit born in 1856, making him 155.  Divided by four give me #39.  

2) Referring back to the pedigree chart #39 is the mother of Augusta Hinz (who is married to Heinrich Patet. See #2 above)   Here, too, I have no information.

3) Striking out on both counts, I'll pick the next closest for whom I do have information.

4)  Augusta HINZ was born on 2 Jun 1840 in Blandau, West Germany.

Fact 1 -  In 1864, she was married to Heinrich PATET, a widower with two grown sons: Gustov and August. They had three children: Marie born in 1865, Reinhold born in 1869 and Martha born in 1872.

Fact 2 - Heinrich PATET died in 1878. Augusta remarried in 1883 to Gottlieb HOPKE, who had a son, Richard. Gottlieb died in 1893.

 Fact 3 - In 1894, Augusta immigrated to America, settling in St. Paul, Minnesota where her three children lived. The following year, 1895, she married for the third time to John GRIEVE who died a few years later in 1899.  Augusta died on May 8, 1923, and is buried in Forest Lawn Cemetary

In Her Own Words - Our Neighbors

This excerpt is a continuation of the memoirs written by Ethel Hymers Glewwe on her childhood in Saskatchewan, Canada from 1910-1918.

     "My papa was a big man, 6 feet 1 inch tall and weighed about 210 pounds.  He could lift me up to his shoulder with one hand and I'd put my arms around his neck.  Sometimes he pretended he was a horse and get down on his hands and knees and I'd climb on his back.  Sometimes he would hide behind the stove and pretend he was a wolf and I'd run to Mama.  I remember after he took care of the stock at night, he would come in, take off his big shoes and pull up a chair facing the stove.  He would open the oven door and put his feet on it and I'd crawl up on his lap and he would tell me stories until I'd fall asleep.  Then he's lay me in my trundle bed.  I remember once I got sick and I couldn't go play in the snow.  Mama sat me by the window and Papa and Mama made a snowman for me and Papa put a corn cob pipe in the snowman's mouth and he had a straw hat.  My snowman stayed a long time.

     Our bachelor neighbors loved within snowshoe distance.  Mr. Beckmann lived about 2 miles east of our farm.  He was, Grandpa said, a man of letters.  I didn't know what Grandpa meant until a few years later when Mr. Beckmann asked Papa to store his trunk for him.  He was going back to England for a visit and would be back in a year.  But he never returned and we opened the trunk and found many text books on many subjects, so we surmised he was a teacher or professor in England.  There was no address or identification to where we might send the trunk and so we just kept it and the books.  Mr. Beckmann had a dog - his name was Shot - and he gave Shot to me.  He was a big, brown, curly-haired water spaniel.  I could climb on his back, but he made such a nuisance of himself in the water troughs for the horses and cattle.  Papa said he had to go so he took him to town.  This was when the town was closer to our farm.  Papa gave him to the station master.

     Then we had Mr. Lilly.  He lived just south of our farm and sometimes you could see smoke coming from his chimney on his house.  He would come over once a week and Mama baked bread for him and cut hos hair.  He liked Mama and me and would bring his banjo and play and sing for us and sometimes Papa would get out his violin and then we would enjoy singing the old songs.  Mr. Lilly could play anything and Papa said that he thought Mr. Lilly must have been a music man. 

     Joe Rands only lived a mile away and he was a relative of Papa's through marriage.  He was married to a daughter who was adopted by the brother of my Papa's Uncle Jim.  She had died and left Joe with a four-year-old son whom he left with his mother in Ontario when he came west to homestead.  My Papa and Joe were very good friends and he helped Papa and Mama very much.

     Just north of our farm were Papa's cousins - Bert and Bud Crozier.  They lived about a mile as the crow flies - just over the hill.  You couldn't wee their house like we could see Joe's.  Grandpa's farm was straight west and only one half mile and if he was outside you could see what he was up doing. 

When Mr. Beckmann and Mr. Lilly and Joe would come over to our house in the afternoon, Papa would have them stay for supper an then they would get around the table and play Five Hundred.  I would first climb on some one's knee and then another until I'd get tired and Mama would put me to bed.  Sometimes the men would just visit or if Mr. Beckmann brought his mouth organ he would play it for us.  I can't remember ever being lonely."