Foundation Supports 1918 Flu Epidemic Research
Glen Klassen with the Hochfeld cemetery memorial stone.
Credit: Ron Friesen, Manitoba Cooperator.
In 1918-20, pandemic flu swept Europe and North America, killing millions. In Canada, an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 died; across the prairies, about 9,000 people succumbed to the illness.
One poignant testimony to the tragedy can be found in the Chortitzer Mennonite Church Heritage Cemetery in Hochfeld, a Mennonite village near Steinbach. On a stone memorial are the words: “In memory of the epidemic in the year 1918-20 lay 20 children.”
At its spring Board meetings the Foundation awarded Glen Klassen, a Professor at Canadian Mennonite University, a grant of $4,685 to identify and collect historical materials relevant to the pandemic of 1918-20 in southern Manitoba, and to produce articles that tell the story of how the southern Manitoba Mennonite churches faced the killer epidemic.
With the assistance of CMU student Kimberley Penner, Klassen will gather materials from diaries, obituaries, newspaper accounts, interviews with survivors or their descendants, cemetery records, family histories, school attendance records, and other available sources.
One story he has already heard involves Bishop Peter Dueck of what is now the Evangelical Mennonite Church in Manitoba. “I’ve been told that he got so run down from visiting the sick and doing funerals during the pandemic that he died of exhaustion in 1919,” Klassen says.