Perhaps another seven years in Manitoba?

Well the vital stats records arrived last week, they come very quickly if the request is emailed instead of faxed.  Unfortunately the registrations are not as detailed as the records i got for my other Ukrainian ancestors who lived well north of Winnipeg.  The death registration for my great grandfather, George was submitted by the doctor. His place of birth was recorded simply as Austria and his DOB, unknown.  He died from stomach cancer which metastasized in his liver.  He became toxemic,then died.  The record did provide his dad's name and his mom's name (phonetically), which gets me back one more generation. 

  His second oldest son David died three years earlier due to post operative shock following an operation to treat chronic empyema.  Not a pleasant condition to suffer from for four years.  Unfortunately David's date of birth was unknown and is also in Austria.  His mom's last name (no first name given in this case other than what looks like an E) seems to be a close match to the name of his dad's mother in his dad's death registration.   I wondered if maybe whoever provided the information misunderstood the question and when asked for the maiden name of "his mother" they thought they were talking about George.  For example:

What was the name of David's father?

George Krovetz

Ok and what was the maiden name of his mother?

Then i had a look at the third record I ordered,  the birth registration of the third son Peter.  Like his sisters, Peter had to register his birth as an adult because a record could not be found.  He did it in 1977 (he wanted his old age security).  His record states he was born in Winnipeg (according to the 1921 census he was born in Austria) and his  parents were born in the Ukraine.  His father is recorded as Peter (hmmmm) but this time i have a non-phonetic name for my great grandmother: Helen Tkaczyk.   I think Tkaczyk sounds pretty close phonetically to Kachuk (which is the maiden name of George's mom on his death reg) and even Karchuk, so i think my theory that someone misunderstood the maiden name is probably wrong. Maybe George and Helen were distantly related on his mother's side or perhaps they were first cousins. Hmmmm. 

Now, this is the conflicting information  I have about my great grandmother:

According to my great aunt she was Helen Poworoznyk

In the 1921 census she was named as Annie

In David's death registration, she was E Karchuk

In Peter's birth registration she is Helen Tkaczyk

In my great aunt's birth registration she is Helena Catchowka

In my grandmother's very late baptismal record she is Helen Poworoznyk

My next steps are to order my great grandmothers 1945 national registration and to order a copy of my great aunt's original birth registration...

Seven years in Manitoba

For about the last 7 years I have been looking for any information about my maternal grandmother's family. My grandmother was born and raised in Manitoba.  She went to Toronto for her sister's wedding and never went back.  I interviewed my great aunt when she was in her 80s and was able to get alot of details about the family.  She explained to me that the family lived in Winnipeg but were relocated to Lorette because they were poor (I was under the impression that it happened after her dad died).  Her father died when she was young and she didn't know alot about him, only that his name was John (on a different visit she said it was George), he was Ukrainian, served in the Russian army, and married his wife after her entire family was killed. At my great aunt's funeral her cousin told me that that the family name was Krywyj but anglicanized in Manitoba to Krovetz, by school teachers. 

 Last night I was organizing my genealogy material and I came across some Manitoba cemetery transcriptions that I had purchased on the off chance that I might find a familiar name.  I ordered them at a busy time in my life and didn't really look at them but decided to take a quick peek last night. In the Notre Dame de Lorette transcription I found a George Krovetz who died in 1926, I figured it was a long shot. In my mind I thought anything I uncovered would be registered under his original last name.  I did a quick internet search and found a picture of his stone: http://billiongraves.com/pages/record/person/5194078. Although I was initially surprised to see the anglicanized version of the name, the stone looks more recent to me than 1926 and based on the inscription "father" I believe his children erected well after his death (and explains why the name appears as Krovetz).  A further search of Billion Graves revealed another Krovetz stone for Joseph (born 1922-died 1939).  I remember my grandmother and great aunt talk about their brother Joey but I didn't realize he had died young. The stone is very similar to George's so they were probably erected at the same time.

  Armed with this new information, I decided to see if I could find the family in the 1921 census.  Searches by Krovetz and Krywyj on Ancestry did not find them so I started a manual line by line search.  Lorette is in the electoral district of Provencher, but a manual search of each Provencher subdistrict showed that Lorette was not in that district at the time.  I then branched out to district just north of Provencer (Springfield).  Lorette was there.  Eight pages in I found George, his wife Annie (not Helen?) and their eight children (a ninth was on the way).  There were two big surprise for me:
-The first 5 children, including my grandmother were all recorded as being born in Austria (nationality Russian)! 
-My grandmother had a an older brother named David and an older sister named Marianne.
-They came to Canada in 1915 (I thought it was at the turn of the century)

This explains a couple of things:
-Why my grandmother could not find a record of her baptism or birth back in the 60s when she applied for it.
- Why I could not find them in the 1901, 1906 & 1910 census records.

I visited the Manitoba Vital Stats website and discovered that there are death registrations for George, David (who died at 17) and Joseph. I've ordered the records and I'm excited that I am one step closer to discover where the family originated from, before settling in Canada!

When is James really Jacob?

The kid's 5x great grandmother Mary Taylor (nee Thomas) was married in 1877 at the age of 20 and had three children before she died in Georgetown, at the age of 23 and 6 months.  What surprised me was her recorded place of birth, Oakville, which is where I grew up.  Merrick Thomas was a predominant settler of early Oakville, one of roads in Old/downtown Oakville is named after him and the town has preserved Merrick Thomas' house as a museum. Based on Mary Ann's marriage record, I knew that her father was James Thomas and not Merrick but I did wonder if she was somehow related to the famous family. 
  I decided to dig a little and found Mary Ann in the 1861 & 1871 census.  The problem was that the head of the household was Jacob (Nathaniel) Thomas not James.  I searched for and found the baptism record for this Mary Ann Thomas in the Wesleyan Methodist Registers, which a wonderful woman (Ida Reed) transcribed (100,000+ records).  I also found her brother Jacob but for both baptisms, the father's name is Jacob not James.  A review of tax rolls for Trafalgar Township in this time period also do not list James Thomas as a land owner. 
 I did some Google searches using the string "is Jacob the same as James" and discovered that the two names are indeed interchangeable.  I just find it odd that it was done in the marriage record.   
I still wanted to be sure that the connection was correct, so I kept researching.  I did a sideways search of siblings and found something helpful.  All of the children in the 1861/1871 census record stated in their marriage record that their father's name was Jacob except for one brother, who married the year after Mary Ann did.  He too referred to their dad as James. 
  At this point I think I can safely assume that I have the same family which is great because in the course of my research I dug up some interesting information:  Mary Ann's place of residence at the time of her marriage was Toronto which lead me down the wrong path for a bit as I searched the 1881 census for any signs of Jacob and family there. In the end I found Mary Ann (Sr)  living in Georgetown as a widow with a number of her children. Interestingly however, I found Jacob living with his daughter Emma and her husband in Waterloo, where he is  also listed as a widow!  While I haven't found Emma in the 1891 census yet nor have I found Jacob's death record, I did find Mary Ann (still listed as a widow) living in Toronto in 1891.