Muench - Ottillie 'Tillie' (nee Muench) Leeson

 

MEMORIES OF OTTILLIE MUENCH LEESON

 
Ottillie 'Tillie' Muench Leeson recollections of childhood, 1986, transcribed and translated from tape recordings of Ottilie Muench Leeson, recorded by Mona Leeson Vanek, 1981 and 1986, plus memoirs written by Tillie.

My parents and grandparents: Emil Muench, Born September 10, 1877 in Scheddlezer Gubernie Kolonie Konstantinouka, Schidezer Russia, Poland. His parents were Julius Muench and Henrieatta [nee Zichlke] Muench. Henrieatta died in 1882, when Emil was 5-years-old. His sister, Julianne, was two years old. Two brother, William and August were older. Emil and Julianne were raised by foster parents.
 

Tillie said, my mother and father had immigrated from Russia-Poland in Eurote. Dad had had little, not even shoes, when he ws growing up. Everything that was not eaten for food just to keep the soul alive was sold. He was raised by foster parents, and life was harsh for him. Father, leaving Mother in Poland, immigrated in 1902. Then he sent for mother. Martha, my older sister, was born in Poland, October 10, 1903. She was 1 1/2 years old when Mom left Poland in 1904 to immigrate to 'the promised land' in Canada.

Mother said she was very ill for two weeks of travel on the high seas by ship. She couldn't eat anything and was throwing up all the time so she was very depleted in all areas when she got here. They came to Ellis Island, USA first, and then by train to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada where my Father was. He had emigrated from Russia, Poland shortly before her, and living with his sister and husband, Juliana and Henry Kuhn and their family, and working in a slaughterhouse and then a pickle factory. He learned some fine recipes to make sausage and delicious pickles. They made white vinegar, which they used for the pickles. Father met mother's train. He had a two-room shack.

*Note: Frederick Andrew Kuhn, a grandson of Emil's sister, Julianne, provided the following information about the Muench family. The Khun family were close neighbors and friends of the Muench family.

Rosalie, who joined her husband, Emil in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, state in a Canadian census that she came to Canada via Halifax N.S. in 1905. In order for this to be accurate they woul have had to go from Bremen Germany to Boston and then from Boston to Halifax, and then to Winnipeg. Most passengers from Boston to Halifax travelled on the S.S.Halifax.

In Ottillies's memories she says Rosalie was said to be very sick (seas sick?) on the trip from Europe. Most passengers from Europe to Canada landed in the port at Quebec City during the summer months. The St. Laurence River was frozen over in the winter so passengeres had to land in Halifax N.S. This kind of indicates that Rosalie and her daughter, Martha, made the trip during the winter or early spring. Mathematics tells me that the trip had to be betweem November 01, 1904 and Septemer 10, 1905 ~ when Ottillie ws conceived in Winnipeg."

*Go to Home, http://emilmuenchancestry.blogspot.com/ , and in left panel Archives select 2016/July to read The Muench-Kuhn Connection.

Tillie said, I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. I was three years younger than Martha, being the first of the children born in North America. We lived in a two-room shack Dad built. Richard, my brother, was born there, too, as was my sister, Vanda [Wanda].

Dad got very ill and a spot was found on his lung, which made him leave the pickle factory and move out to the country.

*Note: Frederick Andrew Kuhn's research elaborates on Tillie's memories.

"Friedrick William Kuhn helped Emil get his first job with, Gallagher, Holman, LaFrance Company, a meat packing plant and also an animal hide warehouse. Both men worked there. Frederick was a hideman, and Emil was a labourer.

 

Emil and his brother, William, lived at 773 Alexander Ave. William worked as a carpenter. Emil moved to 1211 Alexander Ave., living with his brother, August, when Emil worked as pickle maker at Dyson Pickle Company. Later the Muench family -­ ies moved to 280 Salter Ave.

 

Friedrick and Julianne's next daughter, Olga Kuhn, was born there March 05, 1905. In the mean time I believe Frederick William owned vacant property at 456 Sherbrooke St. and that this is where Emil (or somebody maybe William or August Muench - both carpenters ) built the two room shack mentioned in Emil Muench's daughter, Ottilie [nee Muench] Leeson's memories.

  Ottilie was probably conceived there, and born there May 24, 1906. William and August Muench were probably living with them also. Things were probably getting cramped because they all moved to 773 Alexander Ave. (big house but no longer there).

Some time after the Muenchs move out, Friedrick William Kuhn, Julianne, and daughter Olga move into the two room shack, their son Frederick William was born there Oct. 05, 1906, their son Henry Albert was born there Jun. 08, 1908. That two room shack is still there with people living in it [at the time of this posting].

It appears that in 1907 William, August, Emil and family move to 1211 Alexander Ave. and live there until 1910. The big house is still there [at the time of this posting]. There was a slaughter house where Emil had worked when they lived there just to the south and a stock yard to the north. Not the best place to be in summer!!!

In 1911 Emil and family moved to 280 Salter Ave and later that year the family move to Swift Current Saskatchewan."

*Go to the HOME page to read the Muench-Khun Connection: In the left panel select 2016/July.

Tillie said my earliest recollections of my childhood were in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. One time we were eating at my Aunt and Uncle Henry Kunn's house. [Emil's sister's son] I can't remember the building but I do know that they had a formal dining room and we had to stand behind our chairs while Uncle Henry returned thanks for all God's mercy and blessing. I remember being taken to church, and my oldest cousins. Cousin Olga wore a white dress and long white pantaloons. Another time we were at their house and mother and Aunt Julia were hulling strawberries. They gave us some of them, and then they put the rest up on a high cupboard. I remember climbing that cupboard to get some more.
 
I remember one December, and Martha and I going down town with my father before Christmas. Dad had us pick out a doll each, which we subsequently found under the tree Christmas morning. One time I got so angry I banged my doll down on a bench and broke her head. That made me so angry I hid it under clothes under my mother's sewing machine and then took my sister's doll. When she came home, she wanted her doll and we had a fight over that and I was forced to give up the doll, which just goes to show you should learn to control your temper while you are young.
 
Because of several incidents, my mother was in bed when my sister, Vanda, was born. The lady staying with us at the time laid me on the floor and put a wide band around my body with a big button in the center over my belly button as I'd ruptured it earlier. Richard, my brother, had an abscess on his thumb and she had to run him down and catch him to drain it.
 
I recall riding the escalator in a store in Winnipeg. I was very small, but Mom sat down at the top to nurse the baby, until a woman came and took her to the lounge. Mamma was an immigrant from a small village in Russia, Poland, and had much to learn of the city ways in a new, raw country.
 
One Halloween time in Winnipeg, some kids came around rat-a-tatting on the window with a wooden device they'd made. Instead of Dad staying in the house, he got angry and went to chase them away and jumped over the fence, caught his pant leg cuff on the picket fence, fell and broke his leg. Boy. I can imagine his feelings. A wife and children and no income! I don't know how they survived it or how they got through, but I would imagine that Uncle Kunn helped him.
 
I remember watching my mother. She had gone to church and on the way home she had lost her big belt with a big buckle on it and she went back to look for it. I remember her in a long skirt, white blouse and a black hat with a big plume on it. She had two hats, a white one and a black one.
 
My sister, Martha, went to school and of course when she came home I questioned her very thoroughly and picked up very well the English language she was taught at school. I forgot my German. One time I heard my father telling us that there were some big sewer pipes some distance from our house, and my father told us distinctly not to go there. Of course he knew the pitfalls of a kids actions, maybe the pipe would roll and catch us between them or maybe we would crawl into one of those things. We children, of course, never realized that.
 
I was always an adventurous person and inquisitive, so I persuaded my sister to go with me one afternoon after school and we were still playing there when Father came home. Naturally he came looking for us and you can imagine the result. We got a good thrashing when we got home and Dad was plenty worried.
 
Dad traveled to Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Canada, and built a house. My Mother followed later with us children. When we were on the train, moving from Winnipeg, Manitoba to Swift Current, I have a very vivid memory of it. Because movement always upset my stomach easily, I got very ill on the train and threw up into a big tin cup my mother held under my mouth. She spread a big handkerchief over my head so we wouldn't disturb other passengers. I've had a squeamish stomach all my life and motion will cause me nausea.
 
Mother took us into a hotel in Swift Current and we ate family-style at a big dining room table. I as so frightened that I wouldn't eat. Everybody, even the cook, the waitress and everyone around there tried to coax me to eat, but I would not. My mother, realizing this, took us up stairs to the bedroom and then she took some food along with her and she fed it to me and then I ate. There were gaslights, and we children were certainly fascinated because all we had before that was lamplight by coal oil.
 
Later, we were living in our house in Swift Current when I remember my brother, Robert, being born. That was the only time my mother had a doctor. The Doctor came there to deliver the baby. Two or three of us children slept on the tabletop, and then we ate across the street at a neighbor's house. I remember it well. She had potato soup, and the sun was coming through the window and the square, when it wiggled, made patterns on the wall. I remember her explaining that, and it fascinated us children.
 
We lived in Swift Current for a month only. I don't remember playing with any of the neighborhood children, or anything about our house there. Then my folks decided to leave and go to the homestead Dad had filed on. The day we moved, they bought a cow that they named "Schecka, meaning Spotted. And they had two oxen, which they hitched to a wagon because it was still early in the spring. I remember the bridge we crossed over the Saskatchewan River, which was about two miles out from Swift Current. (Swift Current has grown, so the river is almost in the middle of town now.)
 
When we came to the bridge, Mother took all of us children well back from the water and laid our new eleven-day-old baby down on the ground and commanded us children to watch it. She went and led the oxen and the cow across the bridge because they were afraid. Then she walked back and got us, and we drove until that night when we got to a Mennonite village. How far out, I don't remember. I fell asleep sitting in a chair after supper and when I woke up Mother was taking my shoes and stockings off. The room we stayed over in was such a beautiful bedroom, with beautiful wallpaper and curtains and beautiful figured comforter. I can remember it well.
 
My father, in the meantime, had gone out to the homestead. (Section 34, Township 13, Range 11). Whether he left that night or the next morning early, I don't know, but I remember the Mennonite man hitching the wagon because the snow was pretty much gone and lots of small streams were formed. Mother had Vanda and baby Robert with her. Us children, Martha, me, and Dick sat on the back of this wagon, on the tailgate, trailing our feet. I tried hard to get my feet in the water as we crossed those streams. The cow was tied to the oxen.
 
As we'd gotten ready to leave Swift Current, Mother and Dad took us to the doctor and he gave us some sort of immunity to chicken pox. He scratched my arm and how it hurt, and I remember him putting a big round covering over it, like it held an eggshell. I was just fascinated with it. When we got out to the farm, three days after leaving Swift Current, Mother took the covering off.
 
Bigford district was named after the first settler there. Father began building the shell of his homestead house, buying building materials and tools in Swift Current and taking them by wagon to the homestead, a week-long trip. On one occasion he took my sister, Martha, with him. Eventually he got a shell up for a house and they moved. When Mother and us drove up into the yard at our homestead, my father was on the roof of this little house, shingling it. It was 28 miles (45 kilometers) East Southeast of Swift Current.
 
My parents soon began plowing a garden spot, and of course we children were allowed to play around there. One day we went in and ate our dinner, and when we got outside again, my adventuresome spirit induced my sister to go with me, taking our big dolls, to the nearest neighbors. Father had taken Martha one Sunday and visited this neighbor, who lived a mile from our homestead. I told my sister we'd be back home by the time Mom and Dad came outside.
 
The neighbors lived in a small shack cut into a hill. Oh, how beautiful it looked to my young eyes. The woman, Mrs. Harden, had it all papered and calcimined and although it was small, it was very neat and clean. I remember her showing us lots of pictures and giving us seeds for my Mother to grow Marigolds. (They were the only flowers I ever remember having in the sixteen years we lived there.) Of course I never thought of the consequences. Lo and behold, when Mom and Dad came out to the garden spot, no children were in sight.
 
There were big coolies in that country and lots of coyotes, up to five or more in a bunch, so our folks were terrified, but my father, by means of deduction, got on his bicycle and decided to visit the nearest neighbor. Sure enough, there we were with Mrs. Harden. Boy, were we kids scared, but Mrs. Harden prevailed, keeping Dad from spanking us. We ran all the way home ahead of the bicycle, our little fat legs pumping like everything. I guess maybe because our parents were so happy to see us alive and well, we didn't get any punishment that I can remember.
 
When I first started school I was so anxious to go to school. We had to walk three and a half miles, but I didn't last a week until I asked my sister when school vacation was coming. I wanted to go home. I wore a pair of boy's shoes Dad had bought. Women's shoes were just too expensive.
 
Soon after arriving, Dad built a sod barn in the side of a knoll, west of where the house stood. I remember my parents used the oxen for some years. They had one that ran like a horse. Mother went in the buggy, with him hitched to it, although she never went out too much. At that time, the nearest store was Swift Current, which was thirty miles away and took an over night trip in order to go. My father went a few times on the bicycle. I guess he sold it, for I don't remember it being around in later years.
 
Father started breaking the land, at first with two oxen and working fifteen and sixteen hours a day, then finally, my father went to a ranch and bought two Clydesdale horses. Horses were expensive; as I understand it they were more than $1,000 each. Of course he didn't have any money, but in those days people trusted one another so he was able to get them on time payments, with our crop as insurance. One of the horses died some time later and that put a terrible hardship on my folks. He had to go and get another one. It took him day and night work in order to break the land up so he could sow crops.
 
We learned how to milk the cow, and my sister had to get out on the disc with the four horses when she was nine years old. The land was very rocky and sometimes when Martha hit a particularly good-sized rock, it threw her off the back of the disk. Then she'd have to run and climb back on, because the horses wouldn't stop. So it was a rugged life, but it was a healthy life.
 
I remember Mother one time had to get out on the seeder to seed some oats when my dad was gone, and she didn't do too good a job because when she turned she broke some of the disc off ,so my father didn't ask her to do this anymore than he had too.
 
Another time I well remember, she went out to help Dad stack hay. She left us children at home. When she got home she found out that we had gotten into everything. She didn't know, but we tasted about every medicine there was, except where it showed a cross of bones. I'd gotten a box of matches and lit them and threw them into the ashes, one right after the other. When mother saw that, she went white, and she told my father she was never going out again because it was not safe to leave us children alone. You know how it is, "When the cat's away and mice play." We'd sampled the dried fruits, got into the cream, and generally had us a ball!
 
When the folks first came onto the farm, Mother never knew anything about pies and cakes because in the old country they only made raised dough. They'd put some sugar in some of it and maybe some raisins, a few raisins, and stuff like that. We did get, however, dried fruits. Mother would cook with them. Dried apples, plums, peaches and all that.
 
She'd make a roast. She'd take a big pork roast and boil it and in it she'd put a hand full of each kind of these dried fruits. Then she'd make ham dumplings, however I don't know how to make those anymore, and put them in, or she'd make long gravy and put that in. It was really healthful food for us children.
 
They went a lot for boiling stuff, not frying. My father wouldn't eat anything fried. They made a lot of soups and different stuff like that which most other people never got. Of course, I don't know. I know lots of other people they fried most everything. In those days they didn't can anything out there because jars and jar lids were something unknown at that time. So they put their vegetables into a cellar under the house that Dad dug out. It was a kind of clay soil so it stood without concrete walls.
 
Picking Saskatoon berries and wild goose berries, which made very good pies, was always a good time. Picnics were always very special times.
 
Starting in October we dug turnips and carrots and everything and put them into the cellar. I remember my hands nearly freezing off, topping the vegetables and then hauling them and shoving them into that cellar. If it got bad cold, they'd take a lantern down there and light it, and throw blankets over stuff if they could. Many times the potatoes froze, even at that.
 
I can remember one time my father was out picking rocks and he had a team of horses that was generally very mild tempered. I think either one of the horses chewed a bit, or it pinched her, or a bee stung her, but they suddenly took off and Dad couldn't catch them. They ran for home, ran around a telephone pole, one on either side, and tore the harnesses all to pieces and broke away from the stone boat and then tore through the yard, through the cattle fence and the only thing that stopped them was the pigpen. It was a terrible time.
 
Another time, one of those precious early times, a big horse was very nervous and tight; she was a ranch-type, loose wild horse. When he brought her home Dad had to put a rope around her and put two horses on her and dragged her into the barn. So she fell backwards onto (they used to eat by the straw stacks and they made a hole along there) and she laid down and fell backwards into one of those holes. When Dad found her she was dead.
 
In 1911-1914, crops froze, hailed out, or were dry. There was little left to harvest. Hailstorms in the area were frequent. For five years we had no crops.
 
When there was a great drought, the winds were so terrible they'd tear the little plants out of the ground and carry them off in the wind. There was no butter. My father had to send cattle out to be pastured elsewhere. Even though he paid for them, and one of the cattle didn't come home and my father figured that guy, the man that pastured them, kept it. But he said it had died. But no cattle had died before around our place, so father figured he got took, so he never ever sent them out again. But it was a terrible time.
 
My mother baked dark rye bread and my father induced us to eat it. He said, "Children, we would give you butter but we haven't got it. We haven't got the means to provide it either." Sometimes they bought some lard and we'd put some lard on our bread but you know how that tastes -- flat.
 
Another of my first recollections as a small child is of when Edward Fredrick was born, February 24, 1913, on the farm. My mother's heart stopped during [childbirth] labor.
 
1915 was a bumper crop year, Bob said, with the largest yield ever for us while farming in Canada. However it was not to be their year. A fierce windstorm came with a prairie fire and burned most of the grain already harvested. The prairie fire caused much damage and burned cattle and horses and grain. 1916 through 1921, it was either too wet or too dry, or dust storms, or rust, to 10 bushels to the acre, or no crop at all.
 
Although Mother gave birth to nine children who lived, she only had midwives with all the others. Reinhold (1917) and Olga (1920) were also born at our Bigford homestead. Two more babies were stillborn. Olga was born prematurely, and Mother nearly lost her life. She was the only bottle fed baby, and was my special care. Emma also was born there.
 
In the main, we were pretty happy children for years, though we had to work hard. We had to work from the time we could do anything. Sometime around the same year that Edward was born, I was possibly seven or eight years old, Dad and I were coming home in a sleigh from neighbors. We had a team of oxen and the bull had strayed. Dad handed me the reins, showing me how to hold them, and then started me off for home while he went looking for the bull. We could see the house about a half-mile away on the prairie homestead.
 
I should have been perfectly safe, but child-like, I must have thought it fun to pull on the reins and say "Gee-Haw." Anyway I never got home and when Dad learned I wasn't there, he went looking for me. He found me in the coulee. I'd driven the oxen into the neighbor's fence. I seemed to have a knack for getting into bad situations. Dad was worried that I turned the vehicle over and been killed. He was happy to find me alive.
 
One day as Mother came in the house from milking she had bucket and had to set it down. She saw the baby, Olga, fall out of the high chair where Emma had put her. Emma herself was only small and didn't realize she should have fastened Olga in. Anyway, Olga's leg broke in the thigh. The blanket around her helped twist it. She was home two weeks when the neighbor came over. Her leg had swelled and mother cried about it. The neighbor persuaded my folks to take her into Swift Current. Remember, it was thirty miles to a town with a doctor. The leg had started healing and had to be re-broken to set it straight. Olga was six weeks in the hospital. The folks went in to visit her once. It was an all-day drive with horses and sleigh. Olga came out of it okay and could walk all right.
 
Of course we had all the normal childhood diseases and my parents coped with them at home. The only thing we all had to be vaccinated for was smallpox, to eradicate the disease. People today don't know anything about it, but it really was a killer.
 
About the only contact we children had with other children was at school or Sunday school or church picnics, or things like that. They also had Interdenominational church at our schoolhouse in the summertime, when they could get an itinerant teacher or student preacher. In the wintertime, they'd sometimes gather at the school to have Sunday school. My father read the bible at home often with us children and tried to explain the best he could, but of course we couldn't understand and the older we got the more we drifted away from it. But I did learn a love and respect for God almighty, (though I did not know his name till I got in my fifties, and then learned his name was Jehovah. Psalm 83:18.)
 
We came out of it pretty good. We were terribly, terribly shy, but that is nothing to be disturbed about. At least we were taught some manners and to be considerate of others. That's more than a lot of children are taught today.
 
In the early days Dad hauled water from the neighbors, the Sheiks. That was a mile west and kitty-corner from our place. Their water was soft. Dad dug our well five feet in diameter and thirty-eight feet deep. Dad dug with pick and shovel while mother cranked the buckets of dirt up with a windlass and then disposed of it. The cribbing was two-inch planking. When he finally struck water it was hard water. (Reinhold says the water is soft and good.)
 
We had a good supply for many years. We drew it up with a winch and bucket on a rope. One frosty winter day Mother let us out to play. It was a good 30 degrees below zero. My sister Martha and I ended up at the well. In summer, sometimes Dad let the empty bucket drop directly down the well while holding the rope in his hand. When the bucket was full he would winch it up and empty it. Having seen this we remembered it and got both of us in trouble.
 
We winched up the bucket full of water and chunks of ice. Because it was too heavy, I suggested we drop it down instead of first emptying it. Martha said we'd better not, but being impulsive I said, "Lets try it."
 
It was fun to see the rope fly off the roll. I'd seen my parents do it many times with an empty bucket. It went down, zing, and so did the rope, roll, winch handle and all. Thirty feet down!
 
Can you imagine our two heads peeking, with eyes the size of saucers, over the rim of an open well? It was a miracle we didn't tangle in the flying rope and go down too. Were we two scared girls!
 
Dad had gone to Swift Current and didn't get home until late that night. When he came home there was no water for the horses or house. Martha and I hid under the bed, for Dad was harsh. What Mother told him we never knew. But the next morning he put a ladder down and brought up the winch and bucket. I don't remember, but Mother must have helped pull that heavy winch up.
 
I remember the well was only a few steps from the house, about twelve steps or more, but when I was a child it seemed like a mile. As we got older we had to pump our water and carry it by the bucketful into the house. There was no such thing as electricity out there. My mother washed on the scrub board.
 
We never knew what it was to take a whole bath in a tub. We had a little tin pan to wash our face and hands in, and every Saturday we were made to wash and take off our upper clothes and wash under our arms and our chest, and every so often, our hair.
 
Both Mother and Father loved the land because in Europe in their station of life they couldn't have never, ever owned any land. What you were born in, that's what you stayed in.
 
My parents had been weavers by trade, but Father always dreamed of being a farmer. They talked about how they'd had hand-weaving looms that people made for themselves, but those went out when the big iron looms came in, during the early weaving trade in Europe. Mother brought her cloth with her. I remember having a petticoat made out of some of it. My father always promised he was going to make a big loom, but he never got around to doing so. So we never learned how to weave cloth.
 
We ate healthful farm food and Mother baked all her own bread and they grew their own foodstuff. The only time Dad went to Swift Current was maybe once a year before Christmas. I can remember many years we had nothing whatsoever for Christmas, not even nuts and candies or nothing. He'd take in a load of grain and bring back about nine or ten 100-pound sacks of milled flour.
 
*******

We were farming in the district with over 100 acres by 1922-1927 and things improved for us. Our homestead was built on a little knoll, and my father was building a great big barn that was known far and wide as the "Muench place."

It could be seen a long way away from home. People would get their directions from it. Dad mixed all the cement and gravel with a shovel on a wooden platform for the walls, which were ten inches thick and eight-feet high. The building was one of the biggest barns in the country, 36 feet wide and 50 feet long. It became a landmark for fifty years in the Bigford District.

We children had to sort out stones from the big stone pile we had in the yard and when father was building the cement walls, he used those stones for filler. We had a long iron bar to tamp the stones into the cement so the air bubbles would all come out and it made a smooth surface.

When he made the hip roof us children loved to climb on it. The boards were spaced apart so we could put our feet on them. One day I was climbing around and Dad said, "Since you like to climb so well, go on up to the peak at the top and hold this board for me while I nail it on."

When I looked over the edge I nearly fainted. I didn't want to do it because it was thirty feet high, but Dad insisted, and I just hung on for dear life. That cured my climbing. I must have been eight or ten years old.

When he had most of the rafters up (apparently in winter) a windstorm blew them all down, so he had to start all over again. This barn had a galvanized roof, a big high hip roof. They put all of the hay they cut into it, along with any sheaves or bolts to feed the cattle with. It was one of the biggest barns in the country and a show place for many years that people took their directions from. We lived in the Bigford District, with the Hardin and the Sheik families about a mile west of us.

Wagons with gates in the bottom were used to haul dirt to build the railroad track, about three miles from home. The farmers went to work with their horses and my father used a horse drawn scraper. My oldest sister, Martha, drove the horses while dad maneuvered the scraper. It was manual and hard backbreaking work. Poor Martha, she was only 12 years old. She'd fall asleep on the road home. Mother didn't like it.

We children rode bare back, chasing cattle that broke out of the fences. Some times we had an ornery critter that no fence would hold. Then Dad put a wooden yoke on them, with the cattle's head between the squares of four boards. Even then they'd break out.

Dad had oxen, cows, pigs, chickens and geese. One year the folks loaned our gander to a neighbor to fertilize their eggs. He must have fallen in love for next spring he tried to lead our flock over there. The coyotes chased them into the fence and we lost them all.

The folks loaned our big sauerkraut cutter all over the neighborhood, and then we had to go hunting for it when we needed it. Kraut making was a regular fall evening event. We put the large heads of cabbage in the hay barn to keep. Then when time permitted, the folks set a day. On the allotted day a wooden barrel, about fifty gallons, was brought in. Mother would sterilize it with water and red-hot stones heated in the kitchen stove, dropped into the water and then covered tightly that afternoon.

Mother had us children bring the heads in, core them, and in the evening after supper, we children and Dad cut or shredded the cabbage with the kraut cutter. It must have been four feet long and had a box on it where the heads were put in and pushed back and forth by two people, one at each end. Mother kept on coring or cutting the hard centers out. Some times the heads were so big they were cut in half or even quartered first.

When the barrel was half full with salted, cut cabbage, Dad would have a bath and clean underwear, washed his feet real good. Then [he] climbed in the barrel and tramped it all down until the juice came.

In the meantime, Mother and us children would be cutting and dumping cabbage into tubs, for Dad was in the barrel tramping it down until it was full. Remember we had no other way to tamp. There was no wood of any kind on the prairies. And this is the way it was always done in Europe where they'd emigrated from. We were a healthy family. No doctor bills; doctoring was done at home, usually colds, chicken pox, measles, etc.

During those early years, 1911-14, the small acreage crops suffered frost, drought, and hail. 1915 was a good crop. It may have been all harvested, I don't recall for sure, but a fierce windstorm caused a prairie fire to run out of control and burn most of the grain in the bin. Some of the following years it was too dry, sometimes too wet, also rust in the grain so yields were very low, perhaps 10 bushels per acre.

When my father went to get us shoes, he'd take a little stick and put under our foot that we would have to step on. Then he'd take the length. The width was never even thought of in those days. Generally it was boy's shoes that we girls wore. Why boy's shoes instead of girls, I don't know, unless they were more sturdy, because we had to work like the men.

My father often said he was sorry, but Martha and I were the two oldest and they couldn't afford a hired man so we were all pressed into doing hard work, and it was a case of work if you were going to eat.

Martha started working oxen and the disc when she was only nine years old. She had to work incredibly hard. We had no time clock, just guessed by the sun. When we got home in the evening we had to unhitch the horses, take off the bridles, water the horses and then lead them to their stalls, tie them up and put hay in the manger. Then take off the heavy harnesses. The horses were a good deal taller than we young girls were. We hung the harness on a peg. Only then could we go in to have our supper.

All of us children had to work like that, but since Martha and I were oldest we helped first. Quite often after a noon meal we would sing a praise God song. When weather was such that we could not go to Sunday school we all gathered around the table Sunday mornings and had a singsong, Bible reading and prayer.

Dad played the violin and used to sit quite often, especially in the winter, and play it to entertain the family and for his own pleasure. Emil had a very fine voice and sang at church all of his life.

At harvest time my father used the binder and we learned to shock the grain. We set seven sheaves up one at a time, around two in the middle, so the grain would ripen. Dad helped when there was time.

I remember Mother getting up at three o'clock to get breakfast for the men who had to fire up the old engines in the early days, and then later on she'd have the crew out.

They'd start out before dawn and be out in the field pitching bundles into hayracks and there would be two hayracks pulled up, one on either side of the separator, and each would throw in a bundle, alternating one from each side. They had to go in a certain way in order for the thresher to take it through.

I loved to watch the grain come out and I loved to watch the straw come out of the big snout too. I loved the time the threshing time came around. You could hear the putt-putt-putt of the engines way out in the fields. There were great big belts that went between the engine and the threshers.

I remember the crews. Mother and a neighbor usually got together cooking for them. And my, oh, my, at that time we got pies and cakes and everything, which we normally never even saw.

While we were growing up we skated on a pond east of the house at Bigford. I remember running and sliding on ice ponds after the January thaw. There was no chance of going through the ice. It was mostly below zero all winter. Times on Sunday afternoon, we'd take our sleds, home made from 2 x 4's, and some old boards nailed over them, and head for coulees a mile from the house. These coulees were torn out by the water heading for rivers from the flood at Noah's day, the Bible tells about from Genesis the 6th chapter.

The bitter cold and blizzards are something one never quite forgets. In the spring breakup, the coulees, which were drifted full of snow and as hard as rock in winter, softened. They had to be crossed with plunging horses as they broke through the softened snow, the sleigh or buggy, depending on which you were in, jerking along behind. Every moment was fraught with the danger of shafts or harnesses breaking and the vehicle upsetting.

In the spring they ran deep with water. We used washtubs and some times a wooden horse trough to float around on the pond in the early spring. Boating!

Some times ducks stopped there. Dad tried to shoot them but missed as he had little practice, as times were tough with little money. The slough always dried up in summer, although in the spring we had to carry water from it to wash clothes because it was soft water.

In the fall I'd sit on the step of our prairie home in Bigford, Saskatchewan, listening to the hoot of the train as it hauled long carloads of grain across the prairie. It was a thrill to hear in those days. We were the only German family, and no one would help my Dad. Other farmers would help one another.

In 1918 the flu epidemic struck the country when I was twelve years old. Our teacher, Miss Sloan, got it first. She complained of a headache. That evening I came down with it and for ten days was delirious. All the folks had was camphorated oil. All our family got it except for Mother and Bob. He was very young and was sent out to get the cows in the morning. Mom sure worried while he was gone. She couldn't leave. We were all down. Dick got so delirious he thought the house was tipping over because Vanda swept all the dirt by the stove.

I didn't see Swift Current again until I was twelve years old and then, since I had no decent shoes of my own, I took Martha's shoes without asking her. [Also] when I was twelve, my mother's wedding dress fit me. She had made it herself when she married. It was green wool, with many hooks on the inside of the bodice and many hooks on the outside.

Shortly after Word War 1, somebody brought in Russian thistles. That plant took off like wild fire. Dad tried me first on a rake and two horses. He set fire to the thistles first, and I was to keep going and every so often trip the load and let it go. But some stayed in the teeth of the rake and it was too dangerous. I nearly got burned.

So next he made the reigns real long, and with four horses and four harrows. We set fire to the thistles and it worked pretty good. I could keep out of the reach of the fire. Again, it was up and down that "28" field, and by the end of the day I was so black, with only red lips and holes for my eyes showing.

One time that year, Dad took Martha and me to Queen Center, thirty miles due east, where there was a German Baptist Church. We spent a few days. I tasted my first radish at one of his friends. And I was all gaga over window boxes of flowers on the farmhouses. We never ever had flowers after the marigold seeds Mrs. Harden had given us quit growing. (Dad felt that only food was of value until my sister Vanda set him straight. She told him God made flowers to give for our enjoyment as well as food. It made him think. After Mother died he had lots of houseplants and exchanged slips with neighbors. But that was years later.)

When the closer town of Wymark began, I don't remember. It was only sixteen miles away. Every week one summer I drove a buggy and horse to Wymark, taking a five-gallon can of cream and bringing back our empty can. My parents received around $2 or $3. That was the only cash money for the summertime. When the price went up to $4, there was real joy in milking the cows and separating the cream. We raised a big garden and our own wheat and oats.

One of the cows we had was prone to kick. On time, she kicked once too often. Dad was short but very strong and he got so angry he grabbed that cow by the hind leg, flipped her on her back and said, "If I can't milk you standing on your feet, I'll milk you on your back!" I don't know if he got much milk!

In the fall, threshing machines went by. After threshing was over, big caravans of wheat wagons went by, going to the nearest town with a grain elevator. I remember my Dad and I hauling one full load. My father never thought about us being girls and needing to go to the toilet. Where in the dickens could you go to the toilet for sixteen miles?

Just after I turned fourteen, I learned to haul wheat by the load by myself to Wymark. Martha did it before that. It meant getting up in the morning before dawn, get the horses curried, harnessed and fed, then eat our breakfast on the road.

We'd load our wagons at night or in the late afternoon, using a 60-pound shovel. We called it a scoop and I remember swinging them with ease. Loads averaged some 75 bushes and over, depending on the size of the wagon box. The biggest load that I hauled was 108 bushels on one wagon with two horses, and that they was really remarkable.

We had a hill to climb first and Dad put all four horses on one wagon and take it over, and then I'd put the horses on my wagon and take off. I can remember as you went along, the farmers would come from either side and we'd have miles of those wagons going into elevators at Wyemark, and returning home in the late afternoon.

One day the bolt came out of the reach, and I just got into the elevator when the wagon came apart. Another time, I had the traces too long, and starting up a hill, the neck yoke came off the tongue. Only by the grace of God and a very gentle team of horses, I escaped having a bad accident.

Martha and I were the oldest and we worked hard together. We helped Dad to ride cattle to Swift Current to the stockyards thirty miles away. I was about fifteen years old when I borrowed a saddle; made my own riding skirt, and I and Martha drove the cattle to the slaughterhouse in Swift Current.

*************

The rocks on Dad's farm were so bad. Dad hadn't seen them, because he homesteaded in the wintertime when there was snow on the ground so he didn't see the rocky land he was homesteading. Eventually Dad dug out enough rock to build a rock fence eight feet wide, four feet high and 80 rods long, all rocks from some 60 acres of land. The frost still brings more rocks up every year, and people living there now are still making rock fences with them.

Some of them were huge rocks. One time my father and a man named Ed Instrum worked together getting rocks out. They dug a big hole right next to the rock and Dad had made a great big pry out of a 12' or 14' by 4" x 6" plank with a bolted on old plowshare on one end of it. That was the only thing that saved his life one time.

As he was coming out of the hole, the rock suddenly let go and rolled into it and pinned him against the hole. If Ed Strum had not been there, Dad would surely have died. But Ed Strum put that big pry under there and lifted the rock enough so Dad could get his leg out. He promptly passed out for several minutes. It cost him many trips to the doctor because they had to drill a hole in through there and drain the pus from the bone all the time until it healed.

We children had terrible colds in the winter, coughing until we thought we'd lose our breath, as we came into the house. We didn't have fresh fruit like oranges and stuff like that. Apples and that kind of fruit had to be shipped in. The only time we ever saw apples was in the fall when the threshing crew was there. Dad would buy a box of fruit, maybe a box of peaches, and a box of apples, for the crew. For us children, they didn't seem to think we needed things like that to grow on. Dad would take one apple and cut it into wedges and we each got a little piece.

A whole chicken would be enough for the whole eleven of us at dinnertime. Children didn't particularly like meat, either. It's no wonder I had rickets because I was growing so terribly fast. Between twelve and thirteen years of age I got to be five foot one inch -- taller than my father. I shot up so fast; sometimes I fell down and couldn't get up to walk.

Of course my folks never paid any attention to that, that was just normal for a normal childhood because they had no doctors in the old country or very few and they were far away so whatever you could do for your family at home was about all the treatment you got.

There were lots of gophers and once, while Dad was hauling stones, he tried to catch a gopher. It got under the team of three horses and one ox, which he used to pull the stone boat. The team got excited and ran away on him, but he hollered 'Whoa!' The ox was slower and it stopped so the horses went in circles until he was able to get the reigns.

I can remember us going to picnics in later years. They always had one on my birthday, the 24th of May, which was also Queen Victoria of England's birthday. They have changed the date of Queen Victoria day now. Originally it resulted from the Civil war when the north seceded from the south. Canada seceded from the United States and the boundary line between them then.

As in the local picnics, where just the local people came, there was fun for everyone, with all kinds of races; fat men's races, skinny men's, fat women and children's, and three legged. A variety of interesting things were going on all the time. There were pillow fights, greasy pig races, wheelbarrow races and baby contests. Best of all, there was lots of ice cream and a big picnic lunch.

At the once-a-year picnic, called "Plowing Matches," people came from as far as 50 miles away by horse and buggy, as well as by wagons. You can imagine what time they had to get up. Maybe they would leave shortly after midnight because they were mostly all farm people and of course they had stock and they had to be taken care of.

At those picnics we sometimes got a cone of ice cream. Our neighbor once in a while bought us some. My father didn't have the money for it because there were too many of us. You've got to remember, all of those people were dirt poor. Mr. Sheik was very kind and he gave his boys more than anyone else around there had, but he mortgaged his farm to the tune of $10,000. In those days that would be as much as $100,000 today, so he lost his farm to the ban, which was a sad thing.

I saw watermelons at the picnics, too, but I don't ever remember getting a slice of them. Oh, how good they looked. We drooled for a lot of things in those days, but never got any. Of course not all of the farmers were as hard up as my Dad. Some of them had pretty good land, but anyway we had a big family where most of the others had three or four children. Of course, there were other big families, too.

At one of the picnics, I saw my first car -- a Ford that an old couple had bought. And the "oh"s and "ah"s and everybody was around examining it and thought it was wonderful, though I had heard about 'leaping Lena' sometime before that. One of the local boys was talking to one of the other boys in school, but the minute we girls came around they'd shut up because they didn't want to tell us girls what they new.

For a time, before the older children began to leave home, there were 11 people at the table. The three eldest girls and one boy had finished the eight grades of school before Reinhold and the younger girls started. When Olga began school, there were five Muench children attending school together. Whenever Mother gave them a part of an apple for lunch, she cut it in four or five pieces, however many were going to school that particular day. Sometimes it would be one plum or sometimes a nice piece of sausage that went into their lunch.

Mother was an excellent cook and could make the best chow-chow pickles, and some of the best apple pie. We kids used to squabble over the apple peelings, which of course she peeled kind of thick for us, as they were a specialty. She also made the best sauerkraut and potato dumplings with some of Dad's homemade sausage. It was especially good when she made Eier Brie gravy with a raw egg broken into it and stirred while the gravy was still hot, just before it was taken off the stove.

Mother was also a good seamstress and sewed all the family clothes and knit all the winter socks and mitts. All were very neatly done and she taught each daughter to also knit mitts and socks for the family. When we were small she always washed the boys overalls Saturday while they slept so they had clean trousers for Sunday school.

Braddock, a little town, was eventually built about three miles from our place. They put the Post Office there, stores, three elevators, and various houses. Oh yes, the country was changing. This was about the early 1920's. The old engines were far different from these of 1985.

We also sold vegetables and potatoes. Also butter and whatever we could spare to the cook shack. I got to deliver some of it and the cook would chase me around the shack, trying to catch me, before he would pay me. I was sixteen at the time.

A real neat sod house stood between our place and the school. We kids had an invitation to see what a sod house looked like inside. Percy Smith owned it.

The Bigford School was a one-room building, heated with a coal stove. It was built by the area residents who also built a wooden fence around the school grounds. There also was a well, but the water wasn't fit to drink. The school's drinking water was carried by the students from the Vanwarmer farm, a quarter mile away.

One teacher taught all grades. The one Bob remembered the most was Miss Sloan. She was very strict, but at least he learned more from her than any of the others. Some years there were upwards of forty children in school. Each morning before school started, they all said the Lord's Prayer and did exercises. The school was used for Sunday school and Presbyterian Church services, Christmas programs and get-togethers. Bob recalled a Sunday school teacher named Georgiana Beiswanger.

Each fall, the school board called for open bids on hauling the winter supply of coal. One fall, as the bidding took place, the bids got lower each call. Finally one of the Earl family boys said, "I'll haul it for nothing." He got the job. The Earl family had the Bigford Post Office at their place. The Muench's mailing address was changed to "Braddock, Saskatchewan" for several years before they left the farm.

Scrubbing the schoolhouse floor and oiling it every Saturday paid $15 a month. My sister, Martha, and I had that job one summer. Another fall we persuaded our Father to let us rake the fields after harvest and Dad thrashed it. We made $30 each. Oh what joy. But it took the feed away from the cattle, so that didn't last.

We children walked 3 1/2 miles to Bigford School in summer because of the severe winters when the temperature dropped to 40 degrees below zero. In winter, we often drove, having the use of a buggy or sleigh, which our older brother drove. When we landed at school the driver had frost bitten cheeks and was so cold he hardly could hold the reins.

We didn't have warm clothes. No money. Times were hard. We were a big family. In winter any lunch, mostly carried in a 5 lb. Roger Golden Syrup pail that was left in the school entry usually froze solid. We'd bring it in and stand around the pot-belied stove, which usually was quite hot. We'd stick our frozen sandwiches against the stove. It went 'sssst' and was almost black, then we'd turn it over and do the other side, so we had a dark brown or semi-black toasted sandwich that usually was still frozen inside. It had a distinct flavour.

In summer the oldest child got up at 5 o'clock in the morning and rode out to the pasture, maybe 3 or 4 miles, and brought in the work horses, stabled them, curried and brushed them, fed and grained them. Then lifted those heavy horse collars and harnesses and got them harnessed. I was only 14 or 15 and a skinny kid when I did it.

Then it was pump the trough full of water, help Mom with breakfast and dress the younger children. After breakfast get Dad's horses hitched up to whatever implement he was using that day, plow, disc, harrow, drill, binder or whatever. Then help Mom milk the cows, then run for school. When daylight saving time came in I was late for school one hour every day. The rest of the school children went on ahead.

During school vacation it was help on the farm with the disking, harrowing or plowing. Those were the days of the sulky one share plow, or double plow with five horses. While harrowing you walked behind about four harrows, each about four feet wide. When I was 14 I had to harrow the field on our place, called the "28." I didn't ask what "28" was, but I had four horses, a set of four harrows. They were wide, and the days were hot. Barefooted, I had to harrow that field up and down, and it was long and big. No excuses were acceptable. Just do what Dad told you to do.

While disking you could sit on it, but often hit a rock and it came apart. What a struggle to get it back together. It was heavy, the horses pulled and you struggled. But generally the team were gentle animals. They were big Clydesdales, Belgians, etc. Dad bought one horse from the Turkey Track Ranch. You never could tame him. He tore up more equipment. We had runaways, always riding on bare back since we couldn't afford a saddle.

In the fall some of the older boys from the families missed some school to help harvest. The School Trustee Board was very strict. If someone missed three consecutive days at school it was soon investigated by the Board. We heard that some parents were assessed a fine if a child missed more than three days without being ill.

Since Bigford District didn't have natural bush or trees, all firewood and coal had to be shipped or hauled in from Swift Current, at first, and then from McMan, then Wymark and lastly, Braddock. During the summer time, we kids had to go out in the pasture and pick up dry cow chips for cooking fuel. This was usually done barefooted and once in a while we stepped into a fresh green cow plaster and it oozed up between the toes.

We had many terrible blizzards and it was best to stay home. Cattle had their hoof, teats and tails frozen off, and some even froze to death. If a human was out in it he didn't last twenty minutes. I remember one terrible blizzard that lasted three days. We couldn't even go to the barn. Mother sent my sister out in between lulls in the storm to watch till Mother came back from milking the cow and putting snow in the mangers for water, and fed the cattle.

My father happened to go away to go to an auction sale and he never made it. He had to go into a village because it blew the sleigh off the road, and ten and twenty foot drifts in nothing flat formed clear across the road. Hunting cattle and horses after a winter blizzard on horse back was freezing work.

Shelterbelts and high poplar trees back from the road that safeguards much of the road in that area now, were something we never had when we were there. My father was the first to plant any sort of tree at all; a shelterbelt that the government gave the farmers the new shoots free, and told them how to plant them. I can remember my father plowing and us children having to put those shoots of the trees into the ground.

At first they carried water to start them and then the trees took off and grew really fast. For the first time, magpies came to nest in the trees. The land around our home was flat, slightly rolling land for about ten miles around, and lays in a big bowl and you can see the different farms to orient yourself. Dad's barn was the focal point.

(The shelter belt was still there in the 1980's when Tillie & Bob returned on a visit, but many were broken down. A few remained years later when Art and Mona Vanek travelled from Noxon, Montana to see the land where Mona's mother grew up.)

I worked also shocking grain, and helping mother when the threshing crew came during harvest. The big harvest moon hangs in my memory while we milked cows, played hide and seek in the moonlight with my brothers and sisters, until Dad called, 9 o'clock bedtime.

I remember Dad slicing one apple so we all got one piece. They were happy times when rare company came and games were played around the table after supper on rare occasions in the long winter evenings. We had sleigh rides in the coulees with coyotes howling in the distance making us shiver.

Some summers an itinerant young student preacher came. We met in the schoolhouse at Bigford, and often people from Marx came. Most people had respect for God and His word, the Bible. No crime. Once in a while someone went astray. It was a shame for the girl who got pregnant without marriage. Marriage was honored then.

Hardships a plenty, but people pulled together in time of disaster. One year we didn't get the flax threshed until February. Dad stacked it and Hunt brought his engine and threshing machine. Some years later Dad got one of his own.

Sometime after 1922 our parents decided to add some to the house and while digging the hole for the cellar, they encountered a rock the size of a cook stove. Four horses couldn't pull it out so Dad got the tractor, fastened the chain onto it, and started to pull. The tractor settled in and reared up on the front so it almost upset backwards. Dad never gave up. He unfastened the chain, turned the tractor to face the rock, and pulled it by backing the tractor.

Sometime during the 1920's, possibly 1926, a very severe hailstorm hit the area. It not only left the cropped land looking like freshly ploughed fields after the hail melted, the rain drowned the gophers out and the hail killed them. That night it also knocked part of the chimney off of the house. At the time, four of the boys, Richard, Robert, Edward and Reinhold were sleeping in a flat-roofed granary. So much water came through the roof that, before it ran out through the walls and floor, it floated their shoes. The boys had binder canvases to cover their beds so they didn't get too wet.

We lived on that farm for some sixteen years. In the meantime, when I was seventeen years old, I asked to be allowed to go to work. Martha, was smart enough that had Dad sent her to normal school in Swift Current. I'd have a companion of sorts. I wouldn't be totally alone.

I went to work for a family in Swift Current. He was a lawyer named Cathrie, and they had a girl and two boys. I worked for five years for various families and they were all good to me, and had lots of patience, for I was a dumb, green kid. We only got about $15 a month plus room and board. But it was a chance for young girls to get away from home and get on their own. Lots of young people were doing that. It was good training. I learned a lot. Young girls, before they get married, I think should go work for other people in their homes and learn. Everybody does things differently. Get experience that will help your own marriage.

I never learned about baths until I went into Swift Current to work, when I was seventeen years old. Then I saw my first bathtub and my first electricity and a bed to myself. After I worked a while I was able to buy the first real coat, all my other coats were hand-me-downs and made over.

I bought myself a new Chantung blouse and a Crepe skirt and I remember it was pleated where it went tight around my legs and tight around my waist, which was about twenty-one inches. The rest of it stuck out like a barrel, but I sure thought that was the most wonderful thing I ever had.

* * * * *

Dad eventually bought his own Red River Special threshing outfit, which also included a Kerosene-burning Waterloo Boy tractor that turned the big belt on the big separator threshing the grain. It cost around $2,200 and he drove it out from Wymark. Two men, on either side, pitched the bundles from their hayracks into it, and grained poured into the wagons.

The grain wagons were unloaded, using a sixty-pound scoop shovel, shoveling it into the granary. It was suffocating work for the one working inside of the granary, shoveling it back from the one little window through which it was shoved in. The dust and heat was suffocating and no quarter was given. I did my share of that.

Farmers took their threshing equipment from one farm to the other to thresh. In the early days another man, our neighbor, Mr. Sheik, had it. But Dad didn't like the service he was getting so he eventually bought one of his own. They all told Dad that he gave much better measure and was far fairer in his charges. A neighbor who had one and did most of the threshing for years, out of jealousy, had his boys or himself bury a box of matches in a bundle of grain. But one of the threshing crew found it. Had it gone into the threshing machine it would have set a fire, which could have resulted in a prairie fire. As a result, the whole crew quit and Dad had to reassure them they weren't to blame. Many of the men came from the [United] states to make a stake, under $8.00 a day wages.

Not long after buying the threshing outfit, Dad bought our first automobile, a Grey Dort Touring car. A short time later, when Dad hadn't learned to drive well yet, something broke on the threshing outfit that needed welding. So he took the car to Wymark where the blacksmith shop was and because he was driving too fast, when he turned a corner, luckily right in town, the spokes all came out of the front wheel of the car. Someone else brought him and the welded part back to the threshing machine.

Another time, it rained while we were at Sunday school and on the way home the car slipped off of the trail and struck a telephone pole, breaking it off. As the pole came down it struck the top half of the windshield and broke it. Dad wasn't too happy, and of course Mother said, "You shouldn't have been driving so fast."

After we milked the cows, my brothers and sister and I played hide and seek in the moonlight under those big harvest moons until Dad called nine-o'clock, bedtime.

My sister, Martha, married Charlie Duvall, about half past four on Wednesday, March 22, 1924.

Dad also sent Dick to normal school in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. I moved to Moose Jaw in 1924 and got work as housekeeper for a Doctor who had his practice in his house. I enjoyed going to Regina Beach, Saskatchewan on June 30, 1926, and went to the Regina Exhibition, too. A year later I left there, going to Coderr, Saskatchewan. Olga was very young and remembers little of these years, other than when I was working in Swift Current, Olga had imaginary telephone conversations with me. She missed me, I'm sure.

I can remember going back home one time and my Dad had a Ford car. I was really surprised.

When my parents sold their farm in March 1928, selling everything except two and a quarter sections of land, to move to Spokane, Washington, I quit my job and on April 3rd, I came through Eastport, Idaho via the Canadian Pacific Railroad to move with my parents to the United States of America.

They purchased a ranch just south of Chester, Washington, about five miles south of Spokane. Dick remained in Canada until after the harvest that year and then also came to Spokane.

I married ALBERT EDWARD LEESON in an evening ceremony on November 23, 1929 in my parent's farmhouse near Chester, Washington. I descended the staircase, dressed in an oyster-white satin wedding gown. It was calf-length and beaded with tiny pearls and rhinestone scrolls around the skirt. I wore a floor length veil cascading from a headband of wax orange blossoms.

Al and I moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon in July 1930, leaving there in March 1931, coming back to Spokane, Washington after traveling to Helena, Montana in search of work. We rented a two-story house on Sixth Street.

In 1931, Dad, Mother, Emma, Reinhold and Olga moved to the Trochu District of Alberta, Canada where they purchased a farm. My parents sold the remaining land near Bigford in 1931.

Dad and mother retired to Abbottsford, B.C. in 1943 and later moved to Chilliwack, British Columbia where Mother died in 1948. Later Dad moved to Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada where he died in 1962.

EMIL and ROSALIA MUENCH's children:

Martha, October 11, 1904

Ottillie, May 24, 1906 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Richard, April 18, 1908 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Wanda, October 10, 1909 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Robert Charlie, April 19, 1911 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Edward Fredrick, February 24, 1913. (Edward died in May 1933 in a motorcycle accident in Spokane, WA on Market Street just north of Francis in a head on collision with a car.)

Emma, March 19, 1915

Reinhold, August 5, 1917

Olga, June 27, 1920

Martha (Duval) (VanOhne) moved from Swift Current to northeastern Saskatchewan, then to Coronation, Alberta and last to Chilliwack, B.C. where she died of cancer in 1956. She was predeceased by Duvall and VanOhne. Martha had nine daughters and one son.

Ottilie (Leeson) lived in Spokane, WA until 1945, moved to a ranch in the Bull River valley in Sanders County near Noxon, MT and then returned to Spokane, WA in 1962. Her husband, Al, died in 1964 and she died in 1987. Tillie had two daughters and one son, Chester Floyd (October 19, 1931), Mona Inez (November 26, 1932) and Carol Elizabeth ( February 11, 1936.)

Richard died in 1954 in Spokane, WA leaving his wife, Marion, and three sons, Larry, Alan and Kenneth. Marion died a few years later, in Spokane, WA. Larry died near Seattle, WA in a motorcycle accident on his way home from work. ca. 1970s (?) Alan and Kenneth remained at the family home on 24th Ave., Spokane, WA.

Wanda (Fox) lived in Spokane, WA, then Republic, WA with her husband, Joe Fox, and finally Tonasket, WA where she died and is buried. Wanda (Vanda) had four sons. Jim Slagle, Walter, George and Paul Fox.

Robert lived in Spokane, WA. Married Leola Coltis and had a son Stephen and a daughter Laurelie

Edward died in Spokane, WA at age of 20 years old, in 1933.

Emma (Sterling) lived in Lousana, Alberta and Three Hill, Alberta and then in Olver, BC with her husband Paul Emma had a son, Carl and a daughter, Terrill.

Reinhold lived in Trochu, Alberta with his wife, Bernice. They had one daughter, Caroline and a son, Garth.

Olga (Reichel) deceased, at Trochu, Alberta where she lived with her husband, Max. Olga had three daughters and two sons. Gail, Maxine, Angela, Byron, and Shelby Reichel.
 

In 1962, Emil and Rosalia Muench had seventeen granddaughters, fourteen grandsons, several great-grandchildren living in various places in the United States and Canada.

When Arthur Frank Vanek and Mona Inez Leeson wed on August 31, 1949 they linked the following family trees, [Maternal ~ Muench and Leeson] [Paternal ~ Vanek and Gremaux].

Muench Ancestry ~ Leeson Ancestry ~ Vanek Ancestry ~ Gremaux Ancestry 

 

HOME