My husband Kelvin’s grandparents lived through the Great Depression. Both his mother and father’s parents lived in the parkland area in the northern part of Saskatchewan. Between his father’s parents and his mother’s parents experience a different living situation in the north.
Kevin’s grandfather, William Jr. on his mother’s side was already working and living on the homestead that his father had already established in the 1920s. This homestead was also the Little Buffalo Post Office. William Simpson Sr. (Kevin’s great grandfather) was the postmaster from 1926 to 1950. William Sr. was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and first came to Manitoba, Canada 1903. The post office log building was also their home that would be filled with neighbours …show more content…
Max’s sister and his brother-in-law had come to Canada a few years earlier, wrote letters back home telling them of lots of land being available and not too many people in Canada. The four of them would work in the logging camps. The women would cook and the men would work in the bush. At one bush camp, they all worked in the kitchen cooking for one hundred and twenty five men who were making railway ties. The women baked bread and pies every day and the men peeled the potatoes and carved the meat. In the early thirties Max and Clara bought a quarter of farmland. Trying to make a start in farming in the early thirties was not easy. They had some cows that died after eating poisonous plant roots one spring, the water was always a problem and to pay for the land was twenty-five dollars a year. This yearly amount was paid with great hardship during the thirties. What made it worse, in the forties when more money became available to pay off the farmland, they found themselves paying most of those payments over again because proper receipts had not been sent and payment could not be proved. To make other income, they sold eggs and butter at the store, but sometimes these were brought back because of oversupply. They also made extra money by trapping and skinning muskrats. They raised sheep and spun their own wool, which they made sweaters, socks, hats and mittens. They too grew their own
Kevin’s grandfather, William Jr. on his mother’s side was already working and living on the homestead that his father had already established in the 1920s. This homestead was also the Little Buffalo Post Office. William Simpson Sr. (Kevin’s great grandfather) was the postmaster from 1926 to 1950. William Sr. was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland and first came to Manitoba, Canada 1903. The post office log building was also their home that would be filled with neighbours …show more content…
Max’s sister and his brother-in-law had come to Canada a few years earlier, wrote letters back home telling them of lots of land being available and not too many people in Canada. The four of them would work in the logging camps. The women would cook and the men would work in the bush. At one bush camp, they all worked in the kitchen cooking for one hundred and twenty five men who were making railway ties. The women baked bread and pies every day and the men peeled the potatoes and carved the meat. In the early thirties Max and Clara bought a quarter of farmland. Trying to make a start in farming in the early thirties was not easy. They had some cows that died after eating poisonous plant roots one spring, the water was always a problem and to pay for the land was twenty-five dollars a year. This yearly amount was paid with great hardship during the thirties. What made it worse, in the forties when more money became available to pay off the farmland, they found themselves paying most of those payments over again because proper receipts had not been sent and payment could not be proved. To make other income, they sold eggs and butter at the store, but sometimes these were brought back because of oversupply. They also made extra money by trapping and skinning muskrats. They raised sheep and spun their own wool, which they made sweaters, socks, hats and mittens. They too grew their own