Above: German immigrant family getting ready to board the train heading west.Below: Picture of a typical CPR passenger car in which the immigrants would have travelled.
Above pictures from the CPR and Canadian archives.Are we there yet?
For a few days now, Emil and Adolina and hundreds of other new immigrants have been travelling on the CPR heading west. They boarded the train in Quebec City, heading west to Montreal, then to Toronto, and then north-west through northern Ontario to the Manitoba border. Winnipeg was the next city to pass through before heading across the prairies into Saskatchewan.
The CPR may have provided food along the way for a fee. This journey they were taking by train in 1929, was nothing new for the CPR; it had transported tens of thousands of immigrants on this westerly journey to locations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Albert and British Columbia. Emil and Adolina had docked in Quebec City on the 19th of May, and are probably rolling across the prairies where the land is so flat and treeless that one can see a complete train.
At some point, Emil and Adolina will leave the westward bound train and switched to one heading south, as their destination is Oxbow SK - near the US border. Emil's cousin, Lidia Stahl, and her husband, Edward, live near Oxbow, having entered Canada as landed immigrants two years earlier in 1927.
For a few days now, Emil and Adolina and hundreds of other new immigrants have been travelling on the CPR heading west. They boarded the train in Quebec City, heading west to Montreal, then to Toronto, and then north-west through northern Ontario to the Manitoba border. Winnipeg was the next city to pass through before heading across the prairies into Saskatchewan.
The CPR may have provided food along the way for a fee. This journey they were taking by train in 1929, was nothing new for the CPR; it had transported tens of thousands of immigrants on this westerly journey to locations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Albert and British Columbia. Emil and Adolina had docked in Quebec City on the 19th of May, and are probably rolling across the prairies where the land is so flat and treeless that one can see a complete train.
At some point, Emil and Adolina will leave the westward bound train and switched to one heading south, as their destination is Oxbow SK - near the US border. Emil's cousin, Lidia Stahl, and her husband, Edward, live near Oxbow, having entered Canada as landed immigrants two years earlier in 1927.
NOTE: The above picture of the Stahl family was taken in Volhynia Ukraine in 1927, just after Lidia Neumann married Edward Stahl, and just before they left for Canada to settle in Oxbow, Saskatchewan. The newly married couple are standing centre-rear in the photo.
According to information I found on-line from the Canadian onl-line encyclopedia, and from the archives of the University of Regina, two thirds of the German speaking immigrants who entered Canada before 1950 were not from Germany; they were mostly from central and eastern Europe. For German speaking immigrants entering Canada after 1950, more than half were from Germany itself.
As far as those leaving the USSR after the revolution - mostly during the 1920s - the situation changed dramatically in 1930, and the border was tightened and no exit permits were issued. By 1930, however, 19,891 German speaking Mennonites from Russia had entered Canada, as compared to the 12,310 German speaking Lutherans who had left USSR (mostly Ukraine and Russia) during the 1920s. Almost all of these immigrants headed to western Canada. In the early days of immigration, Canada made it easy for immigrants to buy land cheaply. By 1929, the situation had changed, and newly arriving immigrants, such as Emil and Adolina, they were required to become farm labourers, and work on farms for at least one year (farming season).
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