Category: General

Blog Update

Welcome to 2020. My apologies for disappearing. 2019 was a big year—for me (I got a new job and moved apartments) and for the Kelm family in general. First of all, my grandma, Lyla Kelm, passed away on June 18, 2019. She was ninety-eight years old. I have copied her obituary in the preceding post, but I am looking for stories about her, even short anecdotes. If you have a story about Lyla, I would appreciate if you would allow me to share it here. My email is sarika.l.kelm@gmail.com.

I have big dreams for this blog, but am waiting to acquire a few things in order to really get going: a decent scanner for several family photos I acquired this summer and a subscription to Adobe Photoshop so I can edit. My computer is very slow, so it may be a month or so before I am adequately equipped to share all that I want to.

Introduction

Welcome to Little House on the Canadian Prairie, a blog about the Kelm family. This blog was born because I wanted a way to record and share family stories–and because I love history and puzzles. As much as I am interested in birth dates and death dates, I am even more interested in the stories that happened in the middle. The foundation of this blog will be the Kelm family’s journey from Russia (present-day Ukraine) to Canada in 1906, as well as life in Winnipeg and Camper, Manitoba. I will also try to unravel what happened before and memorialize those who reside in today’s collective Kelm memory.

A little about me: My name is Sarika. I started seriously researching family history in 2008, but the seed of my interest was probably a book made for my grandparents’ 50th anniversary. My dad kept it with the family photo albums–a gray binder with photocopied pages telling the story of my grandparents, their children, and their grandchildren. I read it over and over when I was a kid, and sometimes, when I think about why I became an archivist, I think about this book.

I welcome any comments, corrections, suggestions, additions, and takedown requests at my email here: sarika.l.kelm@gmail.com. Are you a Kelm descendant? Tell me your story if you want–tell me about where you grew up, what you love, where you live now (and let me know if it’s ok to share here). Our now stories are just as interesting and worth collecting.