Family Research Leads to Ravenscraig

My mother, Mary Krawchenko and her mother Tillie Bachynsky, with me and my sister Margaret, 1958.

Like many people who have worked to learn about their family history, I have a real fascination with old black and white pictures

I expect this is a familiar feeling for anyone who has looked through old family pictures and wished that there was someone still around to explain who was in the picture and what was happening on that day. Was it a birthday?  A visit to a relative?  Or did someone save up to see a professional photographer? These proud young ladies who posed in traditional Ukrainian costumes in 1924 are my grandmother, Tillie Strumbicky Bachynsky and her sister, Ann Strumbicky Harcott.

Tillie Bachynsky and her sister Ann Harcott, 1924

If I had to settle on a single reason why I wrote Ravenscraig, it would have to be the interest I developed in learning the stories of my ancestors; how they came to Canada and what happened after they arrived. That led to learning about the social history of the City of Winnipeg and the tremendous hardships the new immigrants had to overcome.

Here’s a video I produced with the help of radio host, Karen Black, as my interviewer of choice.

Watch this video on www.youtube.com

Ravenscraig is a novel that tells the story of some of the major events in Winnipeg during the height of the immigration boom that began in the 1890s.  Two families, one Jewish, poor and struggling to put down roots in the New World and the other rich and resistant to accepting the foreigners among them together provide a view of what life was like in a booming frontier city in Western Canada at the turn of the 20th century.

The research for the novel was a most gratifying journey that has never ended. I continue to learn the stories of early Winnipeg and how people faced the issues of the day and shaped the city.

This blog came out of the writings of my previous website which remained sadly neglected in recent years. I have rescued a number of posts that I wrote about the Titanic, the history of Winnipeg’s North End, my family history and many other topics I find interesting. I will be refreshing many of those stories and sharing them here along with new ones.

Thank you for stopping by.

I close this post with one of my favorite pictures. Nikola and Aksana Strumbicky were my mother’s grandparents, and it is their two daughters, Tillie Bachynsky and Ann Strumbicky Harcott who are in the picture above taken in 1924.

Nikola was 21 years old when he traveled with his parents and four siblings to Manitoba in 1896 as part of the first group of 27 Ukrainian speaking families to settle in the area near Vita, Manitoba.

They came from Zalischiky, Galicia, Austria, which is now part of Western Ukraine. They were among the “Stalwart Peasants in Sheepskin Coats” as Clifford Sifton, the minister responsible for immigration had called them.  

They came to Canada to farm, answering the invitation for free land in Canada’s determination to populate the prairies.

My mother, Mary Krawchenko (1931-2021) gave me this picture. She said, “It must have been a Sunday when it was taken, because Baba is wearing shoes. She was always barefoot in summer except on Sunday.”

Nikola Strumbicky and Aksana Shmigelsky Strumbicky, 1936, Vita, Manitoba.