I have the greatest of respect for both of my grandfathers; one I came to know personally, but not the other. I was six years old when Grandpa Neumann died. Having read about his life and written about it, for posterity sake, I’ve come to know him somewhat – at least well enough to conclude that he was indeed, a “family hero”.

     After years of indentured labour as a young man in Orenburg, Russia, the first years of his married life were filled with a very challenging pioneer life in Siberia, exacerbated by the Russian Revolution and Civil War. During WW I, he had to leave his wife and young children while he served in the Forestry Service. In 1921, he had become deathly ill during the typhus epidemic that struck Russia.

     Not long after he and his family had arrived in Canada, the Depression struck, followed by the war years, both of which increased the challenges of providing for his family through farming, first in Saskatchewan and following, in Alberta. His will to continue farming was severely taxed in 1937, when a bumper wheat crop and a sizeable flock of turkeys were wiped out in minutes by a hailstorm of epic proportions.

     In 1932, he walked away from their farm in Saskatchewan and moved his family to Gem, Alberta. Here he faced the challenges of irrigation farming during the Depression years and to the end of WW II.

     At war’s end, he moved the family one more time, to Sardis, BC. These years may have provided the greatest return on his time invested, but by then, he must surely have been physically spent. Heinrich Neumann had moved  a total of eight times following his birth in Sparrau, Molotschna Colony. Each new location came with its own unique set of circumstances and challenges.

    At a number of places in his memoirs, his son, David Neumann, commends his father to the reader as a man who did not shrink from hard work. David writes, “But he always saw to it that the family was