Preface


My grandparents, Jacob & Lena (Zimmerman) Willems, were step-brother and step-sister in a marriage my family says was arranged by the Mennonite Brethren Church. Grandma's father, Heinrich H. Zimmermann (1866-1934), was a widower with 5 children, whose wife, Maria Dyck Zimmermann (1861-1905), died soon after the family arrived in Canada (1903) from a Mennonite colony in what is now Ukraine. Grandpa's mother, Elisabeth Bolt Willems (1858-1943), was a widow with 9 children whose husband, Cornelius Willems (1885-1902), died two years after the family arrived in Saskatchewan in 1900 from Mountain Lake, Minnesota, the place where the family settled after emigrating from a Mennonite settlement in Crimea in 1875. Jacob & Lena were married in 1909. They moved to Reedley, California in 1919.

There is an even earlier couple important to this history, Gerhard Willems (1820-1900) and Katharina Rempel Willems (1823-1875), Cornelius' parents. Their story reaches back to the early years of Mennonite sesttlement in the land they knew as South Russia, a story of migration from the North Sea to the Black Sea, from Eastern Europe to North America.

COMMENTS are very welcome. You may reach me by clicking on the "view my complete profile".

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Early Zimmermann Photos


Below are photos found in my father's files.  The first is of Maria Dyck Zimmermann, my great-grandmother.  The second is a school photo taken in Manitoba, Canada,  in 1904 that includes my grandmother, Helena (Lena) Zimmermann Willems.

Maria Dyck Zimmermann 1861-1905




Written on the back in my grandmother's handwriting:
     "Frank J. Berg, teacher in Windom S.D. 615 in the year 1904."
My grandmother, Lena Zimmermann, is the tall girl on the far left.
Posted by at