“What will you do with these stories?”
If I’m being honest… I will probably forget them.
So much has already been forgotten, reinvented, rewritten. And I am no help.
In the spring of 2023, Andrew and I spoke at the Neufeld Garage AGM. Afterward the formal portion of the evening, a woman approached me, declaring, “I knew your great-grandmother.”
Nothing stops me in my tracks quite like that statement.
She then launched into a story to prove her point. Sylvia (or, as I think of her, my friend Patty’s mom) had grown up in Spencer, an area just east of Grunthal. This was the same small community where my grandmother had grown up, and her mother lived in the farmhouse well into her 90s. My dad often brought us there to visit his grandma.
She generously shared a story of how, when there was an outbreak of some sort, and various neighbours’ dairy farms were quarantined, my great-grandmother resolutely collected the milk from those farms and sold it as her own, non-quarantined milk, and returned the funds earned to the quarantined families.
That’s how I remember the telling, anyway. And maybe I shouldn’t tell it. There’s a lot going on there — her disregard for health and safety rules, and intense support for her neighbours, simultaneously.
But again, I am prone to forgetting and scrambling the facts and misremembering.
When Patty asked me if I’d like to join her and her mom for a drive around the old sites of Spencer. I said yes and we booked Saturday, August 5, 2023. (There is no way I’d remember the precise date if the pictures hadn’t time-and-date-stamped themselves.)
I loved the fact that she took me right to the site of my great-grandparents’ home, but Sylvia also shared new information with me on this day: she took me to the site of my great-grandfather’s store.
So yeah. My great-grandparents had not been farmers. My great-grandfather had actually been a teacher, beginning his career near Altona. (Now THAT’S something I need to search the West Reserve archives about.) This was where he met and married my great-grandmother and they started their family. (This means that both my grandmothers had their origin stories in yantzied! Oba nay!) But early on, they moved the family here, to Spencer. To the Spencer North School, specifically, where he continued his teaching career, after a year or two in Grunthal. I have learned a bit more about his teaching career from some more very old, very local books, but I won’t go into that here. The thing is, he stopped teaching and opened a store. When I was a little girl, I’d seen pictures of the store. I’d been fascinated by the oldness of the grainy black and white photograph, it was clearly very rural, essentially in the wilderness, and there he stood in front of his store, next to a retro Coca-Cola machine. (It was not retro at the time the picture was taken.) (I might have the picture somewhere. I’m not looking for it now. I’m just glad I found THESE pictures of my day with Patty and Sylvia!)
All these years, I’d wondered exactly where that store had been located. How far was it from their house? How did they get there? I don’t know if they ever had a car. I think it was walking or horses. And how did they ship the goods to the store? I have a lot more questions than answers. But I now have one big answer — the location of the store. Because Sylvia remembers it and knows the area like the back of her hand. How lucky I was, to have this day with her!
You know that story about my great-grandmother helping sell her neighbour’s milk? Apparently she even crossed the nearby Joubert Creek with to haul that milk.
This is the Joubert Creek:
I have heard many stories of how formidable my great-grandmother was. This, seems quite formidable.
And I am grateful for the Saturday morning I was able to spend discovering family memories with Patty and Sylvia.