Those Places Thursday: Evadale School in Saskatchewan

I’ve long wanted to write an article about my husband’s elementary school days, especially because he had such a different experience than I did. For instance, he went to a one-room rural school on the Prairies, while I went to an urban school in northeastern Ontario. He received a public education, while I was taught by nuns and secular teachers.

Michael attended Evadale School, located about seven miles northwest of Arran, Saskatchewan. He was there for Grades 1 through 5, from September 1959 until June 1964. Later, when his sister was old enough, she too went to Evadale, but only for Grades 1 through 3, because the family moved into the nearby town of Kamsack. Michael took these photos on a trip to his home province in the summer of 1973.

I've gathered his reminiscences in point form.

• My Dad told me that we lived exactly the same distance from three schools, but he chose to send us to Evadale.

• The school was three miles east from our farm. For the first couple of grades, my Dad drove me until I was old enough to walk by myself or with friends.

• My Mom used to tell me the story about my very first day at school (Grade 1) and how I couldn’t wait to get there, but when I arrived, I started to cry and refused to go inside. It took a lot of coaxing and I finally went inside.

• The school was on two acres. There were swings and teeter-totters, a teacher’s residence, and off in the distance, a barn and an outhouse.

• It was one large building: 2/3 of it was one room for the classroom with a wood-burning stove, then the other 1/3 was divided into the entrance (we’d hang our coats and leave our boots here; firewood was also kept here) and a storage room for supplies.

• Just about every year we had a different teacher. There were about 28-32 kids in all per year. Sometimes there’d be only one student in a grade. Our teacher taught one grade at a time.

• I think I started walking to school in Grade 3. I remember meeting up with my friends Dmitro, Doris, and Lawrence on the way.

• I’d leave about 45 minutes before class started. Some days I’d take my time and explore the bushes on the side of the road. One day I was late and was scared to go inside, so I stayed outside and sat by myself. A student going to the outhouse saw me near the school door and he told the teacher. She came out and asked me why I didn’t go inside. After talking to me for a bit, she told me to not worry and just go to my seat and that no one would notice.

• In good weather, my sister and I would walk or take a two-seat horse buggy that we’d park at the school’s large barn. There was room for about a dozen horses.

• I don’t remember which horse it was, maybe Fly or Prince, but after it was trained, it knew the route to take, enter the school grounds and pull up to the barn. I’d unhitch him, take him inside to his stall and then give him some hay.

• In winter, we’d get into an old car that my Dad had removed the roof and dashboard, and added runners. Our horse would pull the car to school. When it was very cold, my sister and I wrapped ourselves in blankets and duck under where the dashboard used to be to keep warm.

• I remember we had sports days before the end of the school year. I usually would enter track-and-field events like broad jump, high jump and 100-yard dash. Sometimes, I’d get ribbons for broad jump.

• I did well at school and almost always got straight As. It was hard to leave all the friends I made there when we moved into town in July 1964.

Copyright © 2016, Yvonne Demoskoff.

Sunday’s Obituary: Peter F. Plotnikoff

Peter F. Plotnikoff obituary (1998)

Peter Fred Plotnikoff passed away on 5 September 1998 in Grand Forks, British Columbia. I never asked Pop about this particular obituary, but I suspect that he saved it, because he and Peter were friends going back to their days when they picked fruit in the Okanagan orchards of BC in the 1940s. My husband Michael remembers working with a man named Pete Plotnikoff at the Grand Forks’ division of Pope & Talbot, a lumber company, in the 1970s, so that’s probably another connection.

The text appears to have continued in the next column, so Bill wrote the remaining few words at the end of the obituary. (I recognize his handwriting.)

Source:

“Peter Fred Plotnikoff”, obituary, undated clipping, from unidentified newspaper; Demoskoff Family Papers, privately held by Yvonne (Belair) Demoskoff, British Columbia, 2015. Yvonne received an assortment of family memorabilia (including Peter’s obituary) in January 2012 from her father-in-law William (Bill) Demoskoff.

Copyright © 2015, Yvonne Demoskoff.

52 Ancestors 2015: #25 Little House on the (Canadian) Prairie

I’m participating in “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: 2015 Edition” by Amy Johnson Crow of No Story Too Small.

For the 25th week of this challenge, I used the optional weekly theme (The Old Homestead) and chose to write about the prairie home of my parents-in-law Bill and Ann Demoskoff.

Demoskoff family home in late 1952

Bill and Ann lived in the central Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Their house wasn’t an ‘old homestead’, but it was their first home as a married couple. Since the house was purpose-built, I decided to record my husband’s childhood memories and conversations we had with his late father about their Prairie family home.

Before he married, my father-in-law Bill owned some property (two quarter sections, each 160 acres) about ten miles north of Pelly, located in Saskatchewan’s Aspen Parkland region. Since neither land had a house, Bill lived about half a mile away to the north of his quarter sections in a house he shared with a friend.

In the spring of 1952, Ann’s brother Larry asked Bill where he and his sister were going to live after their June wedding. My husband doesn’t know what his father replied, but whatever he said, it seems that Larry had other plans. He and his brothers Fred and Pete decided to build Ann a house as their gift to her. (She was their only sister and the youngest of the family.)

The brothers needed lumber, so they asked around to see if any farmers were allowed to harvest timber. Fred eventually found two loads of green timber and borrowed a neighbor’s portable planer to convert the timber to usable lumber. Larry, Fred, and Pete began by digging out a basement (on one of Bill’s quarter sections) using horses to drag out the dirt. They made forms and poured cement to make a foundation. After they back-filled the dirt to the foundation, they started framing the house. Later on, Larry got more sizes of lumber for finishing work, like cupboards.

My husband thinks the house was about 30’ x 40’. It had five rooms on the main floor: a living room, kitchen, pantry, and two bedrooms. A staircase in the living room led to the upstairs, which was divided in two large rooms that were used for storage. While they were young, my husband and his sister shared a bedroom on the main floor, but when he was about six years old, he moved upstairs where the south-facing room was converted into a bedroom for him. The bathroom (outhouse) was fifty feet down the hill at the back of the property.

The front door faced south towards the highway about fifty feet away. The kitchen, which faced north and east, had a wood-burning stove and a cast iron hand pump for water from the basement well. The house was wired for electricity, but Bill couldn’t afford the cost of residential power in the early years. Instead, a wind generator provided energy for indoor lighting.

My husband and his sister (seen above, ca 1963) and their parents lived here until the summer of 1964. That year, Bill sold his farm and moved with his family to the nearby town of Kamsack.

Copyright © 2015, Yvonne Demoskoff.

Pop’s 100th Birthday

Today, we celebrated Pop’s 100th birthday!

Pop on his 100th birthday

Pop is William (Bill) Demoskoff, and he’s my husband Michael’s father. He’s lived at Menno Hospital, a seniors’ residential care facility in the lower mainland of British Columbia for the past two years.

Menno reserved the private dining room for us and even set the table and decorated the room; such a nice gesture!

Just before the meal, Michael wheeled Pop into the main dining room for the staff and residents to sing him “Happy Birthday”. Pop was very touched and thanked everyone.

Nine of us were gathered: Michael, myself, our son Nicholas, my mother Jacqueline, Margaret (my husband’s only sibling), her husband Sid, their sons Ted and Sid and Ted’s wife Nasim.

Margaret and Sid prepared homemade borscht (Doukhobor style) and bread, while Michael and I were in charge of the meat and cheese tray and the birthday cake.

Pop with his birthday cake

After lunch, we toasted Pop with Canada Dry Ginger Ale, and then presented him with gifts. There were also congratulatory messages from The Queen, the Governor-General, the local MLA (Member of Legislative Assembly, BC’s provincial government), and the city mayor.

Michael set up our video camera, and we took lots of photographs.

Back: Sid, Yvonne, Michael, Margaret, Ted and Nasim
Front: Nicholas and Pop

After nearly three hours of partying, it was time to say our goodbyes to Pop, and let him have a well-deserved nap and quiet time.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.

52 Ancestors: #13 Polly Poznekoff – Russian Baba

Amy Johnson Crow at No Story Too Small has issued herself and her readers a challenge for 2014. It’s called “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks”, and as Amy explains, the challenge is to “have one blog post each week devoted to a specific ancestor. It could be a story, a biography, a photograph, an outline of a research problem — anything that focuses on one ancestor”.

For the past three months of this challenge, I’ve been featuring my paternal and maternal ancestors, but now I’m changing directions to look at my husband’s family. For the 13th week, I chose Polly Poznekoff (1887-1971).

Polly was my husband’s maternal grandmother. She was born in 1887 in Russia and died in 1971 in Canada. Her obituary is available here. Polly was part of a large group of Doukhobors who immigrated to Canada in 1899 to seek a life free from the religious intolerance they had known in Tsarist Russia. She settled in Saskatchewan, married George Cazakoff, and had a family. Late in life, she lived with her only daughter Ann and her family that included her grandson Michael, my husband.

Polly (back, left) with some of her grandchildren, including Michael (centre), about 1962

Recently, I did a short interview with my husband to record some of his memories of his grandmother.

Q: What did you call your grandmother?
A: I called her Baba, which is short for Babushka (grandmother in Russian).

Q: What are some of your memories of your grandmother?
A: She made great borscht and other Doukhobor food like pyrahi [small baked vegetable-filled pastries], piroshky [the fruit tart version of pyrahi], and vareniki [perogies]. I remember one time (I was about 9 or 10 years old) when I must have had a very small breakfast and by 11 o’clock I was hungry again. She said lunch isn’t ready yet, why don’t you have a soda pop [to fill you up]. There was some pop in our basement, so I had an Orange Crush; half a bottle satisfied me until lunch.

Q: What languages did your grandmother speak at home?
A: Russian mostly, with very few English words only to my sister Margaret and me.

Q: Do you remember hearing your grandmother describe her life? What did she say?
A: I remember my mother, my sister and I would sit in the living room listening to my grandmother telling stories about life in Russia. Too bad I didn’t record these stories. The only one I remember is the one when she said when they [Doukhobors] first made plans to come to Canada, they heard that the soil was very rich and needed rocks and pebbles to break it up. She said everyone that was travelling to Canada decided to take as many rocks as they could in their luggage and clothing (pockets). The story went that when the ship sailed it was riding low in the water. When the captain found out that the passengers were hiding rocks, he had everybody throw the rocks overboard. Personally, this story doesn’t make sense (bringing rocks and weighted ship), so I assume it was folklore.

Copyright © 2014, Yvonne Demoskoff.

Treasure Chest Thursday: The Pocket Watch

My husband owns a gold pocket watch that used to belong to his maternal grandfather George Cazakoff (1884-1958), who emigrated to Canada from Russia in 1899. After George passed away, his watch eventually came into his only daughter Anne's possession. After her death in 1980, the watch stayed with her husband William. A few years after the birth of our son, Nicholas, Bill presented the watch to Michael, with the idea that it would eventually go to Nicholas.


George Cazakoff (about 1949)

Michael knew very little about this open-face pocket watch, except that it was in working condition, had belonged to his grandfather, was probably old, and had probably been in the family for a long time. He rarely looked at the watch, but kept it safely stored in his dresser until the day he would pass it on to our son Nicholas.

About a year ago, in April 2012, our local library hosted “Antiques in the Attic”. Three appraisers looked at family heirlooms and antiques. They gave their professional opinions as to the worth or value of the items, tips on how to care for them, and where to get more information. Michael and I decided to attend this free event and chose two items for appraisal: a serving platter that my Mom bought when she was first married and Michael’s grandfather’s pocket watch.

It was our first time at an “antiques roadshow” and we looked forward to having our family treasures valued. We also wondered what interesting details the pros would share with us.


George Cazakoff's pocket watch (2012)

After a brief look, the appraiser checked his antique collectors’ handbook, but couldn’t find a listing for this “Solar - Birkdale” watch. He then carefully opened the back cover for a closer inspection. The case was 10K gold filled, made in Canada, with the mechanism housing made in Switzerland. The chain wasn’t gold, but maybe brass. He estimated that the watch was made in the 1940s. The appraiser explained that about five years ago, it might have been worth about $300.00, but since there were so many similar watches on auction sites like eBay, it now had a market value of about $100.00.

In the end, the fact that the pocket watch is of relatively recent manufacture and of modest value doesn’t matter to Michael. What’s really important is that the pretty timepiece has great sentimental value and has been in his family for three generations.

Copyright © 2013, Yvonne Demoskoff.

Matrilineal Monday: My Husband’s Matrilineal Line

Two weeks ago, I posted my seven-generation matrilineal line here. Today, I’m following up that post with a brief review of my husband Michael’s matrilineal line. His line is shorter than mine – it’s only four generations. His matrilineal ancestry goes back to his great-grandmother who died in 1925. I should emphasize that this is Michael’s known matrilineal line; of course, his line extends even further back, but at this time, it’s unknown to him and to me despite our research into his past.

Michael’s Matrilineal Line:

1. Michael Demoskoff

2. Ann Cazakoff (1926-1980)

3. Polya [Pelageya] (Polly) Poznekoff (1887-1971)

4. Oxenia [Aksin’ya] Malakoff (?- 1925)

Copyright © 2012, Yvonne Demoskoff.