by Ernest Braun
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The last issue of Manitoba History (No 75, page 19) included this arresting photograph of Katharina Braun (1890–1927) in a casket surrounded by her grieving family. It prompted reader Ernest Braun, one of her descendants, to write with additional information.
Source: Preservings No. 10, June 1997, page 46
My grandmother died from complications of pregnancy in early 1927 and was buried at Puerto Casado, Paraguay, leaving a husband and six little children, the oldest 13, including my father. In our extended family, she was the motivating spirit behind the trek from Manitoba to South America, dragging her husband along against his will, and then dying within three months of getting there. Grandpa Braun chafed at the situation but could not bring his family home, for his parents and all his siblings and their families were there too, and he could not abandon them. They eventually returned here, in August 1929. When the family had left Manitoba in 1926, they were reasonably well-to-do, but the three-year adventure left only enough money to buy the poorest land in the same area they had left. They started over, living in the kind of huts that Mennonites in southern Manitoba had not used for a generation, on land that nobody wanted. The district was then derisively called the “Chaco,” a term one can still hear occasionally when old-timers talk about the area about five miles east of St. Malo.
My father, instead of inheriting a solid family farm and threshing business at the age of 18 as he had every right to expect, spent those years as a migrant farm labourer, walking to farming areas in southern Manitoba, and working at anything as long as he would get something to eat at the end of the day. In later years, when he was a young married man, he worked as a hired man for the very Mennonites who had purchased the farms that his family had sold as they left. The huge barn of my father’s grandfather in Gnadenfeld survived until about 1999, but my father never talked about that to my mother, even though they socialized regularly with my mother’s sister, who lived a few hundred yards east of it. My mother did not know anything about that background, I suspect because my father never told her.
Ironically, my mother worked as a housemaid on that farmyard, never realizing that this would have been part of the inheritance of the man who became her husband, an inheritance lost in the ill-fated migration to South America. And of course the moment they disembarked here in 1929 was also the moment that the stock market crashed and the Great Depression made any immediate progress impossible. But please do not hear me saying that this is “sour grapes.” It is what it is. Decisions were made with the highest ideals and great sacrifices were made in that cause, and so I believe my background is extraordinarily rich in experience and colour, though laced also with tragedy and loss. I choose to see my family’s history as fascinating, admirable, and poignant.
We thank Clara Bachmann for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
We thank S. Goldsborough for assistance in preparing the online version of this article.
Page revised: 2 April 2020
