At 100 Years World War One is now History

2014 is the 100 year anniversary of the start of World War One.   The war is long enough ago that it is history for most people and not something that is a personal experience.   The last veterans of the war are dead, most of the children of the veterans are dead as well, the first hand stories have faded away.  World War One is history now.

I had one grandfather fight in World War One, August von Schulmann.  I never met my grandfather because he was shot and dumped in a mass grace 20 years before I was born.  He was 28 when the war started and was called up as a Russian cavalry officer.   I never had a chance to ask him about his experience.  My von Schulmann grandmother died in 1945 in a Soviet labour camp which means she was not around for me to ask what it was like for her.

My mother's parents were both alive for World War One, but my grandfather was only 12 at the start of the war and my grandmother 9.   I was only 14 when my grandfather Patrick von Dellingshausen died and never spoke with him about the war.   He was also in Germany and I only saw him four times in my life, though for extended periods each time.

My grandmother Maria von Fersen lived in Vancouver and was around all the time.  When I was in my late teens I did have a chance to ask her about World War One.  She did not really remember anything about the war because it did not directly effect her life.   What she did remember very well was the Estonian War of Independence in 1919.   She remembered having to hide from the Reds and the utter fear of the time.   She also remembered that it was then when they went from being very rich to middle class.  

I am talking about World War One through my family because as a youth I asked everyone in my extended family and ethnic community what they did in World War Two.   Iwould have asked about World War One but by the time I was asking this in the early 1980s there was no one around any longer to ask about it.    For me World War One is on the edge of history.   The Western Front and allied experience is history as is the German experience.   My small direct connection to World War One is only through what happened to my family.

For my family World War One was a major watershed in our history.   The war marked a fundamental change to our 700 years in the Baltics.  Our position as part of the aristocracy came to end in 1917.  We ended up losing our standing and losing most of our lands.  I say "our" because I grew up with the stories of this change, this is the history of World War One that I connect to.

For my family World War One is intimately connected to the Russian Civil War, the two flowed into to each other as one ongoing conflict with the Russian Civil War being the much more traumatic.  For my mother the civil war meant that as a child she grew being very much in fear of the Bolsheviks.   The fear was enough that her father owned real estate in Germany in the interwar to protect the wealth of the family.

The experience of World War One still showed itself in the 1970s in my family.  My grandfather Patrick von Dellingshausen lived in Lübeck for the last years of his life, he feared a Soviet invasion of West Germany and moved some of his money to Canada to protect it.

For my parents generation who did not personally experience World War One and the Russian Civil War the much bigger impact on their lives was World War Two.   The worst that happened between 1914-1919 paled in comparison to what happened between 1939 and 1947.  My grandparents witnessed the end of the life of privilege, my parents lived through Stunde Null.

For the next four years there will be a lot of talking about events of 100 years ago during World War One.  I worry that the personal connection is no longer there and the war will no longer be truly horrific to the world.

 

The Beaverbrae II - the ship that brought many Baltic Germans to Canada

Growing as a Baltic German in Canada, most of the people I met that came over as immigrants did so on ship, the Beaverbrae.

The ship was initially known as the Huascaran by the Hamburg America Line.   She was intended to serve on their Mexico-Panama Canal-South American Service with her sister ship was Osorno and made a single voyage to the west coast of South America before being requisitioned by the Kreigsmarine.   The ship was launched on December 15th 1938 as a 10,480 gross ton freighter with a speed of 17 knots.  She was ready for service on April 27th 1939

During the war she served as a submarine depot at Trandheim in Norway.   and then taken over by the Canadian War Assets Corporation managed by Park Steamship Company

Muendels on the Beaverbrae in 1952 I think

After being captured by the Allies at the end of the war and came into to the possession of the War Assets Corporation.   In November 1945 she was handed over to Great Britain as part of the War Reparations.  Later in June 1947 she was allocated to Canada as part of this country's war reparations.  After arriving in Montreal she was purchased by Canadian Pacific on September 2 1947 and renamed the Beaverbrae II.   CP had a previous ship known as the Beaverbrae that had been sunk in March of 1941 by German Focke Wulf Condor bombers.

The Beaverbrae II  was refitted in Sorel Quebec into a cargo liner of 9,034 gross tons with space for 773 passengers, 74 in cabins and 699 in dorms.

The Commissioner of Immigration Arthur Jolliffe placed the Beaverbrae at the disposal of the Canadian Government and the Canadian Christian Council for the Resettlement of Refugees (CCCRR).  The ship sailed about every 28 days with 773 passengers. In its service to the CCCRR, the Beaverbrae completed 52 voyages carrying a total of 33,259 passengers from Bremen, Germany, Rotterdam, Holland and Antwerp, Belgium to Halifax, St John or Quebec City, Canada..

Her final trip carrying people to Canada left Bremen on July 28th 1954.

Both my parents and my aunt Nata Runge came over on the Beaverbrae.  My grandmother Maria von Fersen, her two young sons  and my cousin Charlie did not come on the Beaverbrae, but on the Arosa Kulm.   The first job both my parents had in Canada was on the Beaverbrae as translators, so they were hard working immigrants before they even got off of the ship at Quebec City.   They were both expected to do work on the ship to "pay" for their passage, this meant cleaning and cooking.

My father sailed on her in 1951 leaving Bremerhaven on August 22nd and arriving in Quebec City on September 3rd.  He spent the trip playing cards for money and winning.   My father would have made a good professional poker player if he had any real desire to play for money.

My mother sailed in August 1952 from Bremerhaven arriving in Quebec City on August 19th.  Her trip was a non-stop party for her.   As a 23 year old woman travelling on her own she spent most of the trip cavorting with the crew.

In Quebec City  my mother boarded a special immigrant train that took her, and many others to Winnipeg from where they traveled onto their final destinations by train.  My mother was headed to Penticton to work as a nanny and housemaid for the family of Dr Wickett.  Her first home in Canada was 689 Winnipeg Street in Penticton

Maria von Fersen's 1954 German Passport

Interesting is that in his passport her citizenship is listed as Deutshe and not  "Einem deutschen Staatsangehörigen gleichgestellt" which is that is was in her 1950 Deutshe Kennkarte and as my father had in his 1951 German Passport.

Her passport was issued on May 3 1954, about six and half weeks before she sailed for Canada

Nils and Lorenz were on her passport

Maria von Fersen's Canadian immigrant visa issued May 26th 1954 in Hanau

Maria von Fersen landed in Quebec on July 2nd 1954

Seems that in April and May of 1957 my grandmother was in eastern Canada and visited the US from there

So my grandmother arrived back in Vancouver October 2nd 1960 via air - I assume she was returning from Germany but  had no idea she had gone there in 1960

Early documents from my Grandmother Maria von Fersen 1947 to 1954

My grandmother Maria von Fersen was born in 1905 in Estonia when it was a territory of the Russian Empire.  She was barn as part of the Stackelberg family

The front over of her Deutsche Kennkarte dated from 1950 - this has to be her second one post war

The inside of Maria von Fersen's Deutsche Kennkarte issued January 6th 1950
Interesting is that the document lists where she was living on September 1st 1939
She, like my father is listed as "Einem deutschen Staatsangehörigen geleichgestelt" in the nationality portion of the document

Cover of Maria von Fersen's de-Nazification notice

On June 9th 1947 my grandmother was declared not to have been a Nazi under the March 5th 1946 law about  National Socialism and Militarism

Maria von Fersen's Passage Contract to Canada.   She sailed with her two sons and her grandson.
Total cost was $425 to sail on the the four of them on the Arosa Kulm.  They left Bremerhaven on June 22nd 1954 and arrived at Quebec City on July 2nd 1954.
You can see pictures of the Arosa Kulm from a summer 1956 sailing to Canada.  The Arosa Kulm seems to be much fancier ship than the Beaverbrae which brought the bulk of the Baltic Germans to Canada in the early 1950s

An Interview with Maria von Fersen (nee Stackelberg) about her life story

In 1973 my grandmother, Maria von Fersen nee von Stackelberg, was interviewed about her life story as an immigrant woman to Canada for the Vancouver Project. I found this interview by accident on day in the BC Archives in 1988 as she was in the hospital in Vancouver.

 

Granny, as we called her, was born into the Baltic German nobility in 1905 and had a priviledged life till the Russian revolution.   She lived in the interwar Estonian republic.   From her first marriage to Patrick von Dellingshausen she had two daughters, my mother Lita and my aunt Nata.   She and Patrick divorced in 1941 and both married again almost immediately.

She was married to Olaf von Fersen for seven years and had two sons from that marriage, Nils and Lorenz.

In 1952 my mother came to Canada as a happy go lucky 23 year old wanting to see the world.  Within a few short years Maria saw a better for her young sons in Canada than bombed out West Germany and decided she would emigrate to join her youngest daughter in Vancouver.

Maria arrived in Canada in 1954 at age 49 as a single mother with few job skills.   She ended up working as a cleaning lady at first in Vancouver.  She eventually worked at St Paul's hospital as a aid till she turned 65 in early 1970.   Since she spoke fluent French, part of a good pre World War I noble education, she would be the translator for Quebecois that came into the hospital.

After retiring from the hospital she continued to work as a live-in caretaker till about 1977.

All four of her children ended up in Vancouver which meant she had the core of her family around her.  Growing up my family was defined first and foremost as the children and grandchildren of Maria von Fersen.

I feel lucky that I got to know her as an adult without my parents around.

Starting when I was 16 I would go to the Vancouver Symphony with her a couple of times per year.  This started because she thought I should understand what classical music was all about. I suspect she was European enough to feel that I was becoming too much of an uncultured Canadian.

Once I was at University when I was coming over to Vancouver from Victoria for a day or two I would try to make it for a Tuesday.  This was the day each week my grandmother and Lorenz had lunch at her place and I would join them.   I had a chance through those lunches and the time I would spend with her in the afternoon afterwards to get to know her as an adult.

I remember the moment in 1988 in the BC Archives when I stumbled on her name in the card catalog.  Maria von Fersen is a unique name so I was certain this was my grandmother but because there was a restriction on the file it did not tell me this was.  It took me a second daytime visit to get access to the file which I then found out was this interview.

I found this interview as she was in her last days.  I got a copy of the interview from the BC Archives 25 years ago, but it took my till now to finally get it into a format to easily share it online.

The name Granny lives on in the family in my sister how has chosen that has her name for her grandchildren.

Peter von Tiesenhausen: Elevations

I suddenly have a huge desire to go to Grande Prairie for next Friday, I am not going to make, but it would be great if I could be because Peter von Tiesesnhausen is having the opening reception for his new exhibition called Elevations.

The show opens December 14th and runs to February 10th, the odds of me seeing it is almost nil.

I think Peter is the most thought provoking artist Canada has ever seen.   I know of no one else that has managed to connect the natural world and art in such a way as he has.   HIs eploration of how place and the natural world can be part of art, can be the fundamental forces to create art, are truly unique.   Elevations sounds like it is amazing.   Here are Peter's own words:

Elevations targets the extinction of desire, the end of time.It searches out significance and engagement to pursue being.The stories growing of our own making, each telling different, even while it is the same.Which of them allow ascent?-Peter von Tiesenhausen About the ExhibitionThrough relics, sculpture, ‘painting,’ video, and documentary photography, Peter von Tiesenhausen reveals his voyages in his upcoming exhibition Elevations at the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie.The exhibition brings together significant artefacts and relics from von Tiesenhausen’s lifelong search for meaning, his lifelong attempt to understand the world and the artist’s place within it. Elevations is a work of research and of definition of place, a journey through space and time, and an attempt to perceive a sense of the essence of that meaning by capturing its residue.After twenty years of total immersion in his artistic practice, von Tiesenhausen’s journeys today are less epic odysseys than they are explorations of inner space.In this, von Tiesenhausen’s most ambitious exhibition in more than 10 years, the artist employs over 10,000 pounds of wood, steel, and bronze, along with video and photography to share his explorations with his home region.Peter von Tiesenhausen resides in Demmitt, Alberta, and is one of northern Alberta’s most prominent contemporary artists. He has exhibited his works around the world and across Canada, and frequently lectures on his work and his remarkable life at universities, colleges, and conferences near and far. His work is held in numerous significant public collections, and several of his public sculptures are on permanent display in cities across Canada.

Peter von Tiesenhausen: Elevations On Friday, December 14, please attend the opening reception for the new exhibition Elevations by Peter von Tiesenhausen. Peter von Tiesenhausen is one of the Peace Region’s most celebrated artists. Elevations brings together works in wood, bronze, and steel, weighing a total of over 10,000 lbs, along with photography and video, for Tiesenhausen’s most ambitious exhibition in over a decade. Friday, December 14, 2012 7:00 pm This event is open to the public. Admission is Free. Join this event on Facebook.

Art Gallery of Grande Prairie

www.aggp.ca

Peter von Tiesenhausen

hausen@telusplanet

POW Camp 2226 - where my father was from February 1945 to September 3rd 1945

My father, Axel von Schulmann, was a prisoner in British POW Camp 2226 which was located in Zedelgem near Brugge and Ostend in Belgium.  Given my father's Baltic background, it is of interest to note that the neighbouring camp 2227 in Zedelgem was for Latvians.

 My father arrived there sometime early in 1945 after having captured late in the Ardennes Offensive.   He was in the camp until September 3rd 1945.  He was had the number A 476444 but I have no idea if this was his number from the German military or one assigned to him in the camp.  He arrived in the camp around his 23rd birthday with no knowledge what had happened to his family.   At about the same time his father August von Schulmann was shot and dumped in a mass grave just east of the pre-war German/Polish border.

Camp 2226 seems to have held close to 20,000 German POWs of which 1/4 were officers and a number very senior naval officers.

A letter of reference for my father

Camp 2226 was guarded by the 19th Fuselier Battalion, which was created in February 1945 from Dutch speaking Belgians.  My father spoke about two of guards in the unit that happened to Jewish - Weiss and Gruen if I remember correctly.  One was pleasant and the other was not.

Discharge papers for Axel von Schulmann - due to water damage the details are
very hard to make out

Conditions of the camp became worse after the end of the war, the amount and quality of rations dropped.  My father did well with food because he played cards well.   Since food was really all they had to bet with my father ended up with more than his fair share of rations.   My father also benefited from working on the administration staff of the camp starting on May 1st 1945.  He worked for a Captain but I can not make out the name on the paper, best I can get is S.R. Berge(?).

My father's knowledge of English allowed him to get the work in the documents office of POW Camp 2226..  In general his knowledge of English benefited him several times between 1945 and 1952, when he arrived in Quebec City he had his first job in Canada before he even left the ship.

Why did my father know English?   It comes from his high school in Estonia.   At age 16 he was fluent in German and English and spoke decent Estonian.   Even though his education was in a German school, it was not the same as what was learned in Germany.   He graduated in 1938 from the Pernauer Deutsche Realgymnasium.   Remember, this was a school without any ideological leanings and no mass purging of teachers.

My father was released relatively early because he was a of a low rank and had a place to go to.   The family had an central address to contact each other at.   I suspect the fact he worked well with the Camp staff helped gain him an early release.  Others remained in British camps for several years.

------------------------
update on October 5th - pictures of Camp 2227 can be found at this link, thank you to Meredith Schofield

Some more pictures from Estonia between the early 1930s and 1943

I posted this before, but this is better resolution.  The picture is of the 17th century clock on the Holy Spirit Chuch
in Tallinn - picture by Ernst von Stackelberg from 1938

This is where my mother lived as a girl, the address is Narva Maante 100
von  Dellingshausens lived upstairs, von Dehns donwstairs and von Fersens on the right

My grandparents often sailed on this boat in the 1930s

This is the manor Orgena/Orina, picture taken June 2nd 1943 - my great grandmother was born here in 1870

I should figure where in Tallinn this is

Patrick Baron von Dellingshausen 1902-1980

This is the notice for my grandfather's death, my mother's father.   

Patrick von Dellingshausen was born December 7th 1902 on the family manor of  Loop in the Russian province of Estonia.   He died August 25th 1980 in Hamburg.

He had two daughters from his first marriage (1926-1940) to Maria von Stackelberg, my mother Lita (1929-2009) and her sister Nata (1927-2009).   

He had two sons from his second marriage (1941-1980) to Ingeborg Sauermann , Patrick(1942) and Niki (1944).   Niki happened to drop by for a visit on Tuesday out of the blue.

Patrick also had two step children that came from his second wife Ingeborg's first marriage.

From his four children he had 10 grandchildren, though two of them were born after his death.  His first grandchild was born in 1946 when my aunt Nata had a son at age 19.

Nata - Charley 1946, Andreas 1968

Lita - Beatrice 1955, Bernard 1965, Nik 1969

Niki - Christoph 1973, Nils 1976, Olaf 1980

Patrick - Patrick 1982, Elizabeth 1984

He has 18 great-grandchildren, 16 born after his death. 

In August his first great-great-grandchild will be born, though there might be a couple out there because the connection to the kids of my aunt Nata's son Charley are very tenuous at best.  

Life a hundred years ago

Recently I have been watching Schwartzwaldhaus 1902 and Abenteuer 1900: Leben im Gutshaus.

Both are about life at the turn of the 19th century in Germany.   The first is about a farm in a mountain valley of the Black Forest.   A Berlin family moves to this farm to try and live as it was in 1902.  What struck about this is how life on this farm was in so many ways closer to 1602 than 2002.   No electrical power, no running water, no home entertainment, really nothing much more than work to keep the family sustained.    On going daily back breaking work is the one central focus of life.  

This is only 109 years ago.  

My one grandfather was born in 1902 and the other in 1881.   This is what the world was like for most people in the 'first world'.   In 1902 most people in Germany, France, Canada and even the UK still lived on farms.   The fundamental change in technology and how people lived in 109 years is astonishing.   The Black Forest farm was not among the global poor in 1902, but today if one lived like that, one would be on the bottom 10% the global incomes.

The second one is about life on an estate in Germany in 1900.   In this one it is not so much about changes in lifestyle and technology, they are big, but about what life was like in a house like this.   My family were the "Herrschaften" in estates like this in 1900.  My father's family owned Limmat.   My mother's family had Kattentack.   Limmat was a small estate, it is Kattentack that is like the one in the program, the scale of house that is beyond what anyone could use for a family.

The program has 20 people live in the estate of Belitz for eight weeks as if it was 1900, though it should be noted that the actual building used in the show was built in 1906.    There is a family of eight that are the Herrschaften and the rest of the people are the servants.   In 1900 my family would have been the Herrschaften.  

A quick detour about the word "Herrschaften" - it is a word that I grew up with that if you ask me to define I would still have trouble.   What came across to me all my life is that it means the gathered people.   This comes from my family being part of the nobility and it astonishes me because how long that has held through within my family.  It has been 94 years since we really had the status of nobility and 66 years since we had any standard of living better than the average .   In reality the word means gentry, sort of, it is also an old fashioned polite term a group of people, sort of like "gentemen".

The standard of living of the family in program is decent, but it is not luxury in the sense I would think of it now.  The house is huge and the family wants for nothing, but because of technology their standard of living is missing so much of what is possible for people today.   The only way they can make up for it is by having a house full of servants to make it possible.

The program focuses primarily on the servants, which is not really that surprising because that sort of work is really no longer at all done.   Having a house full of servants like this would cost someone something on the order of $500,000 to $800,000 a year.   There are very few people who could afford this today, not that they need them any longer in any case.

What strikes me is how much energy and effort that was required to maintain the estate and these servants are not the people that were actually producing the wealth of the estate.  I wonder if the success of Canada, the US and Australia between the 1880s and 1930s was in part due to the countries being much more egalitarian and not wasting so many resources on so few people?

For the servants there is no life.   They are servants from when they wake to when they go to bed, there is no time for themselves.   The life of these people was one of survival, working all the time so they had a place to live and food to eat with almost no income.   They could not live in their own space, they could not marry.  

Pictures from Tallinn in 1938 by Ernst von Stackelberg

These are a series of pictures that hung on the wall at my parents house for decades and decades.   The pictures were taken by my great grand father Ernst von Stackelberg (1868 - 1941).  Since he was over 2 meters tall, he had the nickname was Eifel.   One of his photos was used in the December 1939 National Geographic article about Estonia.

I will take some time and add the locations to the captions at a later date, I hope.  If you know where the locations are, let me know.

I 

Inhertiting Things

My family home in Tsawwassen is about to be sold. My parents bought the house in early 1966. It is the only house that has been my family home.

Sheila got back with the truck last night and it was filled with stuff from my mother's house, things that were anchored in the house at 962 Bayview drive. Small stupid things that were always there and are now here. I now have big collection of books related to Baltic German history and genealogy.

I have so many pictures to find a home for on the walls of his house. Old ones related to the history of my family.

The genealogical resources make me want to start up the work I had been doing on my family tree, work that I stopped afterr my father died. I feel a burden on me to be the famy archivist - I collected all the old papers from mother's house. I will have one book shelf solely dedicated to family history in the house.

Baltic German - a dialect that is about to die

My first language as a child was a very obscure dialect of German, Baltic German. This was the only language I could speak until I started kindergarten. At the peak maybe 100 000 people spoke this language as their first language. I grew up in this language and did not know I was the final generation that would speak this dialect. In fact I had no idea I was speaking a dialect at all.

Baltic German is in accent very similar to standard German, the most noticeable difference is that it is a drawl, my aunt Sabine von Schulmann has one of the strongest accents. I have heard Hessian, Bavarian, Austrian and other German Dialects and could hear the strong difference in accents to standard German. It is because of this that I had always assumed that I simply spoke standard German. It took me until I was in my 30s to understand how much of a dialect I had.

My German vocabulary is about 4000 to 5000 words I use on a regular basis, of that about 500 of them are words only used in Baltic German. I had never understood why many Germans looked at me oddly when I spoke, it turns out it had to do with the fact that I used words they had never heard. I finally understood when I read 1001 Wort Baltisch by Berend von Nottbeck in about 1999.

Turns out I not only spoke Baltic German, I spoke the Estonian variety.

A simple word like 'ets' (meaning a bit, the standard German is 'etwas') is one I use all the time, turns out it is not used in Germany. A lot of my vocabulary around food is pure Baltic German - Falscher Hase to Zakuska our world of food is our own.

I was born in Vancouver in 1965 and spent the first years of my life in a purely Baltic German environment. By the time my brother Nik came along four years later, my parents had moved out to the 'burbs and there was a lot more English around us.

Those of us born in Canada between 1950 and 1970 are the last generation of people born that speak this dialect. Most Baltic Germans after the war ended up in Germany, but the people born there were very heavily influenced by the German around them. Those of us born in Canada only knew the German of our parents from the Baltics. Our parents continued to speak the way they did before they were ethnically cleansed from the Baltics in 1939. We only spoke with other people that spoke the same dialect and therefore preserved it for one more generation.

Being one of the youngest people to speak a dialect and knowing that it will die out with my generation means I understand the issues and urgency aboriginal people feel with their one languages. Going back hundreds of years, all of my ancestors spoke the language I do but I children do not speak it. I live with the fact that my children can not speak my mother tongue, that they would not be able to understand the first words I said in this life.

I do not get the sense that a lot of the other people of my generation understand where we are at and what we are losing. I know my parents generation know what they are losing, but for them it was much more than the language, it was the very houses and land they had been part of for generations.

The death of Baltic German is also the death of a unique worldview. The Baltic Germans were a minority, but a well to do minority. As a people they were not stand offish or looking to separate themselves from the world. As a group the Baltic Germans were not very nationalistic at all. They were a people that did not connect ethnicity with the nation. They were a melting pot of people from all manner of backgrounds. They were some of the most unGerman Germans around. This worldview is being lost as the final pieces of the people and culture die.

November 11th

As a Quaker I come up to November 11th with mixed feelings, I am a pacifist but I would never want to do anything to denigrate the people that chose to fight in the wars and lost their lives.

I also have very mixed feelings because the side of the wars my family was involved with from 1905 to 1945 was normally on the side of the despots. I had family members involved in the following wars:

• Russo-Japanese war on the Russian side
• World War I on the Russian side
• The Russian Civil War on the White side
• The Estonian War of Independence on the Estonian side
• World War II on the German side
• The Russo-Finnish War on the Finnish side.

My grandfather, August von Schulmann, was an officer in four of those wars and was executed at the end of World War II.

World War II alone killed one in ten people from my ethnic group and displaced 99.99% of us from our homeland.

I grew up in Canada learning about the sacrifice Canadians made to defeat the Axis powers in World War II, but could not talk about or mourn the losses of my family.

The men I knew in my family when I was growing up that had been to war were all decent, kind, good men who wanted a better world for their families and their community. They also all fought for Nazi Germany in World War II or the Russian Czar in World War I.

So I am a religious pacifist who grew up only knowing the personal story of the people that fought on the wrong side of the war. I am also someone that respects the decision of others to go to war to fight for what they believe in.

Remembrance ceremonies have always been very hard for me to go to because of all my mixed feelings. I have not been to one since I was a youth and went as part of Air Cadets. I have been seeking something to do on November 11th because it seems morally wrong not to pay attention and show respect. My fear of the cenotaph ceremonies is that they will not touch me in a way that honours what is going on or means I will act in a disrespectful way. Sitting alone in the house and quiet has never really been meaningful enough.

I believe I have found something I can do that will work for me. Shelbourne Avenue in Victoria was planted with trees in the 1920s and 30s as a memorial to all of the men from BC that died in World War I. Tomorrow I will spend an hour or two walking along the street and contemplating that each trees is a living memorial to a man that died.

The Schulmann family

This weekend I had some relatives from Finland come and visit. Gustav gave me a copy of the Schulman Genealogy book that was written in 1938. This is a book that I have looked at since I was a small child. My father had a copy. Now I have my own.

The Schulmann family can be traced back to 1495 on the island of Saarema in Estonia. It was a German family that came to the Baltics sometime in the 14th or 15th century. What is interesting is how the family evolved over the last 500 years.

Baltic Germans were a very pliable people. Whomever was the ruler was whom the Baltic Germans served. Through the different eras, some of the branches of the family moved from Estonia to areas under the control of the current rulers. One group ended up moving to Finland when Estonia came under Swedish rule. This branch of the family ended up becoming Swedish, though never lived in Sweden.

Another branch of the family was rapidly becoming Russian - by 1900 the Livonian branch was more Russian than German. That branch has died out.

One of the branches of the family in Finland moved to Sweden about 100 years ago and are now a fully Swedish branch. Think about, a family that was originally German and has never been based in Sweden but was Swedish speaking and is finally in Sweden as immigrants.

My own Estonia branch of the family has become a Canadian one, specifically a BC branch. In the thirteenth generation, there was only one man that had any childern, my father, that is how close the branch came to dieing out. My father had two sons and Nik and I have had four sons between us making for a strong start to a Canadian branch of the family.

What we have today is a family that was German that is now connected to Finland, Sweden and BC. I am of the last generation of a Baltic German family that still speaks German. What does it mean to any of us that are Schulmann's if no one is any longer a native German speaker? Who are we? Should we do as one of the Finish branches did and change our names to fit where we live?

Peter von Tiesenhausen

Peter is a 5th cousin of mine - he and his family are the closest relatives I have outside of Europe on my father's side of the family.

My father Axel von Schulmann was Peter's god father. I remember as a kid going on VERY long car trips up to Demmit Alberta to visit the Tiesenhausen's My father also bought Peter his first art supplies - totally out of character for my father to hit a present so correctly and so I think it was my mother than did the buying.

The Tiesenhausen's homesteaded in the Peace in the early 1960s. The land and climate reminds me a lot of the place where our families are from - Estonia.

I can remember the day that I was struck still by the sight of Peter's art. It was about 11 or 12 years ago and I saw an image of his ship in his hayfield. The thoughts and ideas that came into my head when I saw it were almost too numerous to name.

First off all, how cool to build a ship shape out of aspen branches in the middle of field?

Second, the hayfield is still used and the mower goes around the art - The Art Has Left the Building!

Third, I am captivated by the concepts of land, language, people and the environment and how it all comes together. I can see how much I have become disconnected from the land and the language of land since I left Lillooet for Victoria four years ago. Taking art out onto the land is brilliant.

Fourth, Canada is a big empty natural landscape where the forces of nature over come human creations. In the cities we do not see this, but such a tiny piece of Canada is located where the majority of the people live. Most of this land still has natural forces

Fifth - the very act of decay on the creation. His art on the land does not last, it decays, it can not last, it is consumed by the natural world around it. So much art is about preserving a single momentary vision forever. Keeping a painting static and the same generations after the artist has died.

Sixth - Peter's art is dynamic and changing, it never sits still.

Seventh - it is fun and unpretentious

Eighth - the themes are easy to understand but so complex that you could spend a lifetime thinking about it.

After seeing that one work I have been fascinated to see all the other things he has been doing. The complete brilliance of what he does leaves me in awe of the visions that live within his head.

A quote from Peter

"Having things go wrong always happens for a reason," he says, "whether it is the truck breaking down in the middle of nowhere or a painting not working out. If I'm open to the chaos that follows, the right path presents itself. Call it fate, karma, whatever – but something better than I could ever have imagined happens when my initial plan falls apart."

I showed some of his art to my middle son today and he fell in love with it. Ben has a skill with drawing that I would like to encourage. I had hoped showing him some inspired genius in art would open his eyes - my fear was that he would be too young to understand it.