LIFE OF MY FATHER - 16

MARRIAGE

My parents first met in high school. Several years later, when my father was in Edmonton on vacation from Flin Flon, his sister Jacqueline invited my mother for dinner to greet him. On July 8, 1939, they were married at Lamoureux, Alberta, across the Sturgeon River from Fort Saskatchewan.

My mother, Donalda LePage (called Don by my father and Donna by her friends), was a school teacher. She was born in 1911 on a farm at Lamoureux, Alberta, but spent most of her childhood in Edmonton after her father's death in the influenza epidemic of 1918. My grandmother, Leonie, then sold the farm and, with her two children (my mother and aunt), lived with her parents, Docithee and Donalda Lamoureux until the children grew up.

Docithee, born in 1860, was an early pioneer who had a large farm at Lamoureux, and who, with a partner, had the contract to supply beef for the North West Mounted Police. The only time I recall seeing my mother cry was when she heard he had died in 1945 at the age of 85. Having lost her father at age six, he must have been like a father to her. She admired him very much and told me that during the Great Depression, unemployed men frequently went to his house for money. The word spread in Edmonton about his generosity so that after he died hundreds of I.O.U notes were found in his bureau drawer.

After their wedding, my parents had a honeymoon in Banff and Jasper, then went to live in Flin Flon where my father had bought a small house on Callinan Street.

In the photos from top to bottom are:

1) My parents' wedding photo.

2) My mother in her wedding dress.

3) The newlyweds leaving on their honeymoon (in the row behind my parents from left to right are Therese, my father's mother, Leonie, my mother's mother, and Albert, my father's brother; in the next row are Henry Pirot, my aunt Jacequeline's husband, and Jacqueline, my father's sister.

4) The Honeymooners.

5) My grandmother, Leonie, with her parents, Donalda and Docithee Lamoureux, and her brothers, Ernest and Hector.

6) My grandmother, Leonie Lepage, and her husband who died in the flu epidemic after going out every day to tend to the sick, and whose first name I don't remember.

All of these photos will enlarge considerably if you right-click and open in a new window.