The Time in Hillsboro, Kansas (When Dad's Granny Was Dying)

In the Fall of 1934, Bill and Mary and family were summoned to come to Hilsboro, Kansas, to be with his dying mother. The picture above was taken of Fraser's parents, Bill and Mary, with their children in Winter 1934-35 in Hillsboro, Kansas,. Joy and Fraser went to school in Hillsboro while they were ther there. My Dad Fraser, 7 in this picture) told me of some of his memories, the scariest one for him was of going to the Mennonite Church. perhaps for a healing service for his grandmother and seeing her prostrate herself in prayer. I think he thought she had collapsed and died. It sounds like no explanations were offered to the grandchildren.

Bill's mother, Auguste Ewert Rempel, passed away on January 26, 1935. The family probably stayed there until after she passed away and the Will was read. They returned home so Bill could seed his crops on their farm at Cherry Ridge, Saskatchewan (near Nipawin), and the children could resume their schooling at the small one-room rural schoolhouse in Cherry Ridge, where Fraser had attended with his siblings until he began attending the new high school in Nipawin, starting in Grade 10. He boarded with the Patterson family while attending high school.

SOME ADDITIONAL WORDS THAT MIGHT APPEAR ELSEWHERE, if so, sorry:

My Dad seemed quite scarred by his religious experiences. Later on, apparently, there was a fire and brimstone preacher who made the rounds of the small communities around where they lived. He would have community families gather in a host home and then preach for a long time (whatever that meant to my Dad as a little boy). Finally, my Dad and his buddies learned they could slip out, purportedly to use the biffy or ?, and then just go off and play on their own somewhere away from the sermonizer. 

My grandmothers on that side of the family ranged from conventionally church-involved to quite dogmatic. My Great-Granny Flatt was a suffragist and one of the founding mothers of the United Church in Canada (if I can say that) in that she heavily supported the Methodist-Presbyterian Churches ' union and was likely part of bringing them into her community in Saskatchewan back in the day. According to my Dad, she knew the Bible like the back of her hand and could take on anybody of other denominations that made their way into her daughter's yard to proselyze.

 And my Dad's other grandmother was the Great-Grandmother I mention here-- a more liberral Mennonite (Mennonite Conference) but tied into the conventional Anabaptist beliefs and practices. 

Great-Grandma Flatt was Scottish and Great-Grandma Rempel was of German-from-Russia stock. I think they were both fairly well educated and I am thinking, Matriarchs closely involved with their adult children. My grandfather played ''farm league" baseball in the summer in Saskatchewan when he came up from Kansas to homestead (when he was around 20/21) and his widowed mom came along as his housekeeper, returning to her home in Kansas when he married my Grandmother. She also took him to California with her in the winter so he could play baseball there. (She had a daughter, I think, in California, or maybe a son-- she had 10 adult children. I think my Grandfather was the youngest. 

My Grandmother Fraser-Flatt came to visit her daughter on the farm and would sleep (sometimes?) in the little log playhouse Grandpa had built for Joy as a little girl.