March
31, 1930 Mother, Helena, and Susie took
us to Meade. At 5:50 we left by train. The tickets cost $13.42 each. The farewell was hard. At 2:10 we arrived in McFarland and
stepped right onto the next train. We arrived
in Bellville at 5:40, where the Bernhard Kroekers picked us up. We arrived at the Kroekers at 8:10 and had a
good supper. We visited a little and
went to bed.
Cornelius and Margaret had spent their first eleven days
of married life in a round of visiting relatives and friends in Meade. Now the day had come for them to begin their
trip back to Manitoba because they had agreed that Margaret would return with
Cornelius in order to meet his family and for him to wrap up his affairs. It might be years before they would be able
to go to Canada again, and Cornelius wanted her to meet his relatives and to
see the places where he had lived. Even
though they would only be gone for six months, Margaret must have shed a lot of
tears.
Cornelius had much more experience in the broader
world. He had settled two homesteads,
lived in two countries and three provinces/states, had buried his father and
been the administrator of his estate, married and then ten years later buried
his wife, raised four children, and endured poverty and hardship. Margaret, on the other hand, had lived with
her parents all her life and probably had made only one trip away from home,
when she had traveled back to Jansen with her uncle and aunt, the K. B. Reimers. True, her father had died when she was 28,
and she had experienced her own personal difficulties, but she was the youngest
child and had had so much less experience of the world outside the Mennonite
community at Meade. Now she was leaving
on the longest trip of her life, with her new husband whom she had met less
than four weeks before. It must have hit
home that she was leaving the nest where she had grown up and starting an
independent family.
The first stage of their journey was to Jansen, Nebr.,
where Margaret had been born and lived until September, 1908, when she moved to
Meade with her parents at the age of thirteen.
Early in the morning, they boarded the Rock Island train at the station
in Meade after the tearful good-byes and rode to McFarland, Kans., which was a
tiny town about 280 miles northeast of Meade and just west of Topeka. They arrived at 2:10 p.m. and immediately
stepped onto another Rock Island train to Bellville, Kans., which was another
small town about 125 miles northwest. They
arrived here at 5:40 p.m., where the Bernhard Kroekers picked them up and drove
them the fifty miles to Jansen.
Bernhard O. Kroeker was from the Evangelical Mennonite
Brethren church in Jansen, and he had married Margaret’s cousin, Katharina B.
Friesen, in 1903. Since Katharina would
have left the Kleine Gemeinde when they got married, the Kroekers did not move to
Meade with the KG. And Margaret still
had quite a few relatives at Jansen.
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