The Life of Louise Schultz and John Frank by Dorothy (Wiggins) Frank

On June 2^nd, 1864, just three years after Romania was formed, a daughter was born to Gottlieb and Justine (Bobermin) Schultz.  They named her Louise.  She was born in the town of Cetatia Alba, which is on the shores of the Black Sea between the mouths of the river Dniester and the River Danube.  some years later Louise Schultz married John Frank, who was born in the same area and at about the same time.   The lived in the village of Chukerovia.

At the beginning of this century, the Canadian government was anxious to have the prairies settled.  Both the government and the railways advertised overseas, and in the United States, to entice hard working people to immigrate and homestead.  A filing fee of ten dollars allowed them to file a claim on 160 acres of land.  Often these families arrived with  little more than the filing fee.  If you followed the rules for breaking the soil and for residency, the land was yours in three years.  John Frank was a farmer and the lure of this homestead land in Canada and the fact that many Romanian people were already going, influenced the family to come to Saskatchewan.  Some of their friends and neighbors were already living in the Fox Valley and Golden Prairie districts.  Statistics tell us that in 1945 the Romanian population in Canada totaled 20,000 and by far the majority of these people lived on farms in Saskatchewan.

My father, August Frank, was born August 2^nd, 1907 the twelfth in a family of fifteen children.  In the year 1913 when Louise was 50 and John was 56, an age when people usually slow down a little, the entire family, with the exception of two children, immigrated to Canada, Fred, the eldest, had gone to Argentina to avoid the army and to search for adventure and fortune.  According to one family source, Art Meyers, (son of Minnie and Gottlieb Meyers) who corresponded with his Uncle Fred many years ago, Fred took the name Fredrico Franko.  I suppose the name change would make him sound more like a native of Argentina.  Unfortunately the Meyers lost contact with Fred.  Emily, the daughter who stayed behind, had a child of her own.  The child's name was Fritz.  The father, who worked for the Russian government, came back and married Emily, when she became pregnant but after returning to his home country, she never heard from him again.  Apparently, the law was that if a child was conceived out of wedlock that child took the name of the mother.  Eventually, Emilie and her son Fritz Frank moved to Germany. (According to Art Meyers, Fritz died in a car accident a few years ago.  Fritz's son. John Frank and his wife Wilma lives in Braunschweig. Germany.   they visited Art Meyers and other relatives in Canada in 1993-94.

Upon entering Canada, so that all of the thirteen children would be within the legal age to be considered dependents and be able to enter the country with their parents, each child had to have its birth date set back a bit.  As a result, my father discovered many years later during a conversation with a fellow countryman, he was actually tow years older than he'd thought.

After the long slow trip across the ocean by boat and the journey across Canada by train the family finally arrived in Maple Creek, Saskatchewan.  Try to imagine traveling with all your personal belongings and 13 children.  Upon arrival in Maple Creek the first thing to be done was to purchase a good strong team of horses, complete with harness, a wagon, load of lumber and of course supplies before setting out to find the long awaited homestead in the Fox Valley district.  Now they had just another thirty miles by horse and wagon.  Imagine their thoughts and feelings as they crossed miles and miles of bald prairie, completely treeless and very, very sparsely populated, after having so recently left the forests, mountains and rivers of home.