Some of our participants had seemed to really enjoy telling their stories, so about two years after we launched the project, we began asking some if they’d agree to a follow-up interview. Mrs S agreed readily, but we proceeded very cautiously. I’d first spoken to Mrs S when she lived in an assisted living facility. In her small apartment, she was mobile and independent. When we spoke to her the second time, she was in a care home and, sadly, she was completely blind. What we wanted to do with this interview was hear some of the detail she summarized too quickly in her original, very careful, narrative.

Maryanne explained that she would read portions of the first transcript and ask Mrs S to fill in the details.

MARYANNE reads: “When I was expecting my first baby, there was a medical book that my father-in-law had, it was left at our house and it was in the German language. I think he must have brought it from the states. I studied that book. There were even pictures of childbirth and I was very anxious about it. It made me frightened to know what it was like but all just from the book.” What areas of the book did you study? Was it a general book on medicine?

MRS S: Yes, I studied a lot by reading, from reading books. Books were more scarce, you know not as available as we have them now. As a young girl I liked to fish up every bit of information that I could. And these books interested me. I can’t tell you the book that you refer to but I know that my father-in-law had books on doctors you know and one was about childbirth and what to do in the first day or so and because the babies were delivered at home and by midwife or doctor—if you could afford to get a doctor and if he was available, because things were so difficult to get by you know. (She means a doctor cost a lot more than a midwife.)

MARYANNE: So that book you had was—

MRS S: It was all about childbirth and tending to people at home that were sickly. And I don’t even know what the name was of the book but that was very helpful to people. To have good books. And he had two books. One was about the early life of children and babies and the care of the mother and the other was more general. He was a farmer you know and also did work besides. He did a lot of doctoring because he had a very sensitive feel. This is my father-in-law. Yes, and he had a very sensitive feeling of the bone-system of a human being and people would just come and ask him to come to their place if they were in trouble in the house or also with animals outside. And as a general thing besides his farm work and caring for his own family. My mother and father-in-law they raised a family of, let me see, of ten children themselves. And they had a lot of people come and stay overnight there because travelling took so much time and they were always pretty sure of getting a good care for the night. It was a very important time and I’m glad that I remember a little bit of it because people that were not born at that time, they don’t have any knowledge of what it was. It was a difficult time but was a very interesting time.

KAREN: Yes. That’s what you’ve told us. That’s what we enjoyed so much about your story. How much you expressed your feelings about those days and the joy you seemed to take in your family and in your life. It was difficult but you still expressed a lot of joy. Was your father-in-law a doctor?

MRS S: He should have been.

ALL TOGETHER: But he wasn’t.

KAREN & MARYANNE: Okay.

MRS S: Because that part of his life was very meaningful to him. Just as meaningful as his farming life. Because he was often taken away. He also had a threshing machine, in those days they weren’t able to get their crops in like nowadays, but he was the owner. As a boy he had, through the years, worked for a farmer that had a great big outfit, you know, and that’s where he got his experience.

MARYANNE: You mentioned that the book was in the German language.

MRS S: Yes it was in the German language.

MARYANNE: So is your background German?

MRS S: Oh! You know, I remember my family speaking the German language. … We were taken away from the German language until finally it was forgotten more or less. But this book, they were in German and these books that I’m talking about that my father-in-law, he had brought along from the States. See he came from Kansas, from the middle part, where the climate was warm and he often talked about a doctor that he got to know and he was a c******d man (This is a time for sensitivity. It’s the word they used at the time, and she was being respectful of the person she was referring to, but the word doesn’t need to be spelled out in 2020, especially when I’m not the one to decide if seeing it is hurtful.) That was how it was, it was interesting, you know and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the knowledge that he had marked up in his book came from that direction. It wasn’t so easy to get a good schooling as it is now.

KAREN: Schooling was important to you, and your family?

MRS S: Oh! I started going to school as a six year old. But that was here in Saskatchewan when the schoolhouses were being built. One after another, It was a nice time too. They hired teachers from the East, mostly. And some even had come from England and across from Europe but as time went on people got more educated and they were able to get high school and get educated well enough so they could teach the little tots. And it was a helpful time, you know. I remember my own family, we had a family of six, that is my husband and I, and they were all born at home except the last one. And it was a nice time, you know how people would help each other. Also the children, as they started going to school, one would learn from the other and homework was a common thing and they always brought their books home and… Mind you for scribbling and figuring out they used slates. And then had the scribblers later on that were more numerous for each subject, but as a young child they would erase and then clean their slates and as soon as it was dry they would be ready to copy words on the blackboard.

MARYANNE: Asks about their early days as a married couple and around the time of the first baby’s birth. Were your father-in-law and mother-in-law living with you, at the time?

MRS S: No, they got the homesteads here. My dad and my mum they filed on a homestead. My father had his sister and they also had a little girl, which was a baby, and I was the baby in our family. And we got together a lot and whenever there was a job like digging a well and so forth they could not do alone they would help each other. It was a helpful world. And they would dig, one would be on top of the other and be down and they would dig and that’s the way they got their first well. And when I was coming to this country that was in the early 1900’s I was just a two year old baby and all winter we couldn’t go visiting but my father had brought along a (unclear, sounds like “car of freight”). Mother insisted that she have a pony to drive with and it was a one-seater and oh! What driving we did! Florie was the horse’s name. And we were twenty-four miles from Rosthern.

Ninety some years later, she remembered the pony’s name. I was just enchanted.