A news article about Jackie’s great-great-grandmother Wilmina Bachmann JACKIE HOFFART PHOTO
3月8日は女性の平等な社会参加を目指す国際女性デーであり、ジャッキーの誕生日でもあります。この日を前に、ジャッキーは自分の祖先の女性たちについてより良く知ろうと、母親に尋ねてみることにしました。
International Women's Day, March 8, is a day mostly concerned with women's rights, but it also happens to be my birthday. I thought it might be interesting to talk about the history of women in my family as far back as we know. So I called my mom for help.
My mom is the family expert on genealogy — she's the only one in our family who has done real research into our family's history. She's gathered birth and death records, ordered military transcripts, interviewed distant relatives and much more.
The woman whose story has always captured my imagination is that of my father's great-grandmother (my great-great-grandmother), Wilmina Bachmann. From the stories I remember, she sounded like a brave and adventurous woman. My mom thinks I have inherited a lot of her spirit.
She was born in a village in Austria in 1870 and is said to have received a very good education. But her life took a drastic turn in 1889, when she left her homeland and came to Canada. The common wisdom in our family is that she traveled across the Atlantic Ocean all by herself, which, at her age (she hadn't turned 19 yet) would be remarkable, but Mom said that in fact her father's name is also listed on the ship's manifest. Mom thinks her father returned to Austria and Wilmina appears to have had to make her way by herself in Canada. I'm curious about the circumstances that would lead to a young woman being sent off to the New World at such a young age. We think she may have gotten pregnant and was sent away, or perhaps she was just really adventurous.
I thought this grand voyage was the high point in my great-great-grandmother's life, but I learned from talking to my mom that Wilmina also lived to 99 years of age — this is very unusual in Canada and especially unusual in my family — and, what's more, she was the first woman in her town to vote in a federal election.
When my mom casually said, "Oh yeah, I'll send you the news article (about her historic vote) from the 1950s," I couldn't believe it. Not only did Wilmina have an honored spot in the story of women's rights in her town, but there was also an ancient newspaper article to back it up! It's a gold mine!
Reading this 1959 article about my great-great-grandmother made me feel so connected to this tall branch of my family history. I learned that she had three daughters, only one of whom survived (my great-grandmother, the mother of my father's mother) and that she loved gardening. She seems to have made quite an impression on this journalist, who describes the then 87-year-old Wilmina as having "a certain sparkle in her eye" and as being "a fine old lady who lives life to the full."
But not all women of my family had such happy lives. My mother's grandmother came to Canada in 1911 when she was 8 years old. My great-grandmother was born Mary Krikau, in a German-speaking enclave of Russia on the Volga river, not too far from modern-day Kazakhstan. They were a very religious, peace-loving family and part of the reason they moved was probably to avoid the boys in the family being conscripted to fight for the Russians. But their family struggled in Canada. They were swindled a few times and struggled to make ends meet. The Great Depression was especially hard on them. My great-grandmother, in my mother's words, lived her entire life in poverty.
My mother's mother (my grandmother, Vivian) had seven children (that survived) and lived her whole life in poverty, too. She was also manic depressive, which was very difficult for her and her children. She worked in diners and cafeterias her whole life, and died at the age of 64. Her mother, Mary, outlived her by a few years.
I am not an expert on issues of poverty, mental health, class, childbirth, access to health care and education, and how they pertain to women globally. But I do feel like I know a little about how these issues pertain to the women of my family through the past four generations. And it may be that we have a lot more tools and technology to combat some of the problems they faced, but a large amount of these issues are every bit as important as they were in 1889.
Next time my topic is ... epilogue
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