As a Grade 12 student in a Mennonite history class, I chose to write a family history paper on the Fasts.¹ My father directed me to his Taunte J’steen (Justina Fast Reimer). Here I learned the story of my great-great-grandfather Cornelius Fast’s tragic death resulting from his blacksmithing efforts to neutralize a bomb during the Crimean War that had been found in a nearby village.² But I wonder now why my father didn’t direct me to his Taunte Jreetje (Margaretha Fast Reimer). She was, as I have learned in my research, not only the family historian, but a woman who exerted great effort to remain connected to her disparate family; she would have known so much. My father may not have pointed me to her because she would have been ninety-two with a failing memory, or maybe he did, and I was too shy to visit such an old woman who was a stranger to me. But he did introduce me to the genealogical booklet she had compiled of her Fast family and Reimer and Friesen stepfamilies.³ It was here that I learned that I had had a great-aunt in Mexico named Helena.

This article examines two women on the “Fast” page of Taunte Jreetje’s Familien Register: sisters Margaretha Fast and Helena Fast. I tell the life stories of these sisters, who embraced traditional Mennonite impulses in ways that none of their siblings did, most clearly evident in their joining Mennonite migrations to Mexico. I tell these stories with the backdrop of my other Fast great-aunts and uncles, who are not featured, but nevertheless are very much a part of my understanding of these two great-aunts.

The Fast family was a large and complex blended family. My great-grandfather Cornelius Fast married three times; as a result, the age span of his twenty-four children is forty years. Six died as infants or young babies and two died as teenagers. Three sons married German immigrant women: Jacob became Lutheran, and Isaac, and perhaps John, became German Baptist. Aganetha married a Scottish Presbyterian WWI veteran. Peter married a Holdeman woman, and Helena married an Old Colonist. Eight others also married Mennonites: Heinrich, Margaretha, and Katherine married and remained Kleine Gemeinde. Benjamin and Justina also had Kleine Gemeinde spouses, but in time, Justina joined the Free Church, and Benjamin was not affiliated with a church for much of his life, but was baptized in the Church of God in his old age. Susanna remained Mennonite, David is identified as Church of England in his WWI military record, and Cornelius may not have had a church affiliation in his adult life. Anna, who never married, joined the Bruderthaler, and the religious affiliation of Abraham, who married an American non-Mennonite, is unknown.⁴ The Fasts were not a typical or ideal Kleine Gemeinde family, but perhaps not so unlike other Mennonite families in Manitoba in experiencing assimilation at various rates. I list the religious affiliations and spouses of my great-uncles and aunts not because I consider these the most important aspects of this family but because they indicate that Mennonites in Manitoba were interacting with a breadth of communities in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries. As members of this family, this context influenced the choices made by Margaretha and Helena, shaping the directions that their lives took.

Helena Fast was born September 3, 1865, on a Mennonite colony in imperial Russia. Her much younger sister Margaretha Fast was born twenty-three and a half years later on March 12, 1889, in Hoffnungsfeld, West Reserve, Manitoba. Helena was the oldest daughter of Helena (Born) and Cornelius Fast. Margaretha was the second-youngest daughter of Helena (Fehr) and Cornelius Fast. Her younger sister Katherine died at six months. What connects these two sisters is that both joined their coreligionists in migrations to Chihuahua, Mexico, from Manitoba, Helena in 1923, and Margaretha in 1948. Helena settled in Thalbach, Manitoba Colony, and Margaretha on Quellen Colony. Helena was Old Colony and Margaretha Kleine Gemeinde.

The life stories I tell are based on research I have conducted in the last half year. The material on Margaretha is extensive compared to what I found about Helena. Margaretha kept a diary, wrote letters, wrote a short account of her life, submitted letters and articles to the Kleine Gemeinde paper Christlicher Familienfreund, and is vividly remembered by step-grandchildren. If Helena wrote anything, I do not have access to it. Only a few of her grandchildren are still alive, and they were either too young to remember her when she died or were born after she died. The most informative source for information about her life is an interview conducted by my sister Rosabel Fast, around 1994, with Helena’s granddaughter Elizabeth (Friesen) Rempel. Other bits of information about her life exist in census records, village tax rolls, and photographs.

Helena Fast Fehr (1865–1945)

Helena Fast was the third child and oldest daughter of Helena (Born) and Cornelius W. Fast. Another four children were born into this family (two died as young children). It is not certain where Helena was born. Her parents had both been employed in the village of Lindenau, Molotschna colony, when they met and married in 1861.⁵ By 1872, when Helena was seven, the family was living in Steinbach, Borosenko colony, established by the Kleine Gemeinde in 1865. Cornelius Fast was the village schoolteacher here.⁶ Whether the Fasts lived elsewhere before moving to Steinbach is not known, although it is possible.⁷ When and why Cornelius and Helena joined the Kleine Gemeinde is also not known, although Cornelius, prior to his marriage, had lived in Kleefeld with his parents, where several Kleine Gemeinde families lived.⁸ But their daughter Helena was raised Kleine Gemeinde.⁹

Shortly after the family moved to Steinbach, Helena’s mother died of smallpox, as did three other women in the village.¹⁰ Four months later, her father married twenty-three-year-old Helena Fehr from Kronsthal, Chortitza colony. In July 1874, less than a year after Helena and Cornelius married, the Fast family joined the Kleine Gemeinde migration to Canada. The Fast family, now with the addition of an infant, were accompanied by Helena (Fehr)’s parents Maria and Jacob Fehr, her two unmarried brothers, and her sister Katherina Bergen and her family. They arrived in Manitoba on September 15, and on October 1 they finally reached their destination in the village of Steinbach.

The Fast family was unable to pay the travel costs of their migration to Canada, and as the Kleine Gemeinde was committed to travelling as a group, a fellow Kleine Gemeinde, Abram S. Friesen, paid $105 for the travel expenses of the Fasts, for which the community reimbursed him.¹¹ Two sons, eleven-year-old Peter and seven-year-old Jacob, travelled with other families, who covered their costs. Peter lived with the Henry Wiebe family in Blumenort till age sixteen, working for them to pay his travel debt.¹² Jacob was sponsored by the Peter Kroeker family but was too young to be indentured like his older brother. It fell to Helena in subsequent years to do domestic work for families to pay off his travel debt.¹³

The Fast family spent their first winter in Manitoba in a semlin (sod house), as did the other Steinbach families. Cornelius Fast recalled being the schoolteacher in Steinbach in these early years.¹⁴ But he was soon at odds with the Kleine Gemeinde and did not hesitate to discuss his dissatisfaction with his fellow villagers. Seemingly the issues stemmed from the family’s poverty. He was unhappy that he had not received oxen and about a matter having to do with his children, perhaps having to give them up to be cared for by other families.¹⁵ The Kleine Gemeinde ministers expressed concern about his “self-righteousness” and that he was “inclined against the brotherhood.” Cornelius, on the other hand, accused the ministers of “abundant false talk.” He had already been in conflict with the Kleine Gemeinde in imperial Russia, but this time the result was excommunication, although eventually they sorted out their differences and Cornelius was reinstated into the community.¹⁶

In the fall of 1876, two years after they had arrived in Manitoba, the Fast family travelled to the West Reserve in response to a call from Helena’s father, Jacob Fehr, who with his family and his daughter Katherina’s family had relocated to the West Reserve in 1875. On his deathbed, he wished to see his daughter Helena and her family. The Fasts arrived too late – an hour after Jacob Fehr died. “Due to circumstances,” Cornelius Fast wrote, the family remained in the West Reserve until 1892.¹⁷

By the time the Fast family relocated to the West Reserve, Helena (Fehr) Fast had given birth to two more sons, and the son born in imperial Russia had died in Steinbach (Manitoba). The Fast family’s life on the West Reserve was an itinerant one, continuing to be marked by poverty as Cornelius moved his family from village to village as a teacher and cowherd. They lived in at least three villages during their sixteen years on the West Reserve: in 1881 they were in Waldheim, in 1889 in Hoffnungsfeld, and in 1891 in Edenburg.¹⁸

There is very little evidence of their family life and activities during their years on the West Reserve, just snippets of information. The oldest Fast son, Peter, remained on the East Reserve as he was still paying off travel debts.¹⁹ In 1877, shortly after arriving in the West Reserve, Cornelius Fast “resigned from the [Kleine] Gemeinde.”²⁰ As there was no Kleine Gemeinde community in the West Reserve and Helena (Fehr) Fast’s extended family was Old Colony, they must have joined the Old Colony Church. Helena provided domestic labour for other families, and it is fair to assume that her brothers and sisters also worked for others to support the family when they were deemed old enough. This probably meant that these children spent much of their time apart from the family. Helena’s granddaughter Elizabeth Rempel relates a story of Helena’s domestic work where class distinctions are clearly evident, giving us a hint at what other members of the family might have experienced:

When Grandmother was fifteen she had to work as a Kjäaksche (maid) with an Ens family. She enjoyed working at this place very much. At that time, laundry was taken to be mangeld (ironed) in the village or maybe another village where someone owned a Mangel. One day when Mrs. Ens and Grandmother had taken the laundry to be mangeld the Weatsche (housewife) made her eat her dinner at the Häwelbankj (carpenter’s bench) with the hired hand – different food, not as good. Grandmother told me exactly how badly Mrs. Ens had felt. On the way home Mrs. Ens had told Grandmother that if she got treated like that she would never take her laundry there again.²¹

On July 18, 1883, seventeen-year-old Helena married twenty-year-old Cornelius Martens. She was the first of her siblings to marry, and by this time she had an additional four living half-siblings. Helena gave birth to three children during her marriage, but after five years of marriage, her husband died. Six months later she remarried, the same year her three-year-old daughter Susanna died. Three months after her second marriage, her sister Margaretha was born in Hoffnungsfeld, a village about eleven kilometres north of Neuenburg, where Helena now lived with her second husband. Helena was twenty-three years old.

Her second husband, Abram Fehr, had three daughters from his first marriage. To this blended family of five children, Helena gave birth to nine more, eight living to adulthood. A substantial housebarn now became Helena’s home.²² Her husband was well off, which meant that Helena’s life of poverty was over. In 1881, Abram Fehr’s village tax assessment, including buildings, acreage, livestock, and farm implements, totalled $427, for which he paid $2.14 in tax. Financially, he was comfortably positioned amid his fellow villagers, according to tax assessments.²³ But later in life, Helena recounted her husband’s mean-spiritedness and the physical violence she had experienced at his hand, the scars of which remained on her body for life.²⁴

Helena and Abram did not join the initial migration to Mexico in 1922, led by Aeltester Johann J. Friesen, who was married to Helena’s stepdaughter Maria Fehr.²⁵ It is possible that Helena and Abram intended to move to Mexico, but Abram died that year in August at age sixty-five, and perhaps his illness necessitated a change of plans. The majority of Helena’s children, all married by this time, joined the migration, and the following year her youngest daughter Katherine and husband Johann Friesen returned to Manitoba to move Helena to Mexico.

Of the seventeen households from Neuenburg that relocated to Mexico, thirteen settled in the new village of Neuenberg in Manitoba Colony, where Helena initially lived with her son Isaac and his family.²⁶ She also lived with her daughter Katherine in the village of Thalbach, but in time she built her own house in the same village.²⁷ She was fifty-eight when she moved to Mexico.

As Abram Fehr’s widow, she received half of his estate, and this left her well off. Her granddaughter Elizabeth recalled how her family in Mexico would sometimes eat her grandmother’s bread made of wheat flour – considered a luxury – rather than the less expensive corn tortillas that many Mennonites lived on because, unlike Helena, they could not afford to buy wheat flour.²⁸

Although Helena was Old Colony for most of her life, her Kleine Gemeinde schooling and upbringing continued to shape her piety, as apparent in a delicate exchange between Helena and the Old Colony Aeltester, Isaac Dyck, seen through the eyes of her granddaughter:

Once the stern Eltesta Isaac Dyck confronted Helena about singing sole Wies (numbered scales used for singing in the Kleinegemeinde Church).²⁹ The bishop insisted that his congregation sing nothing but lange Wies (the chant-like singing practiced in the Old Colony Church). While living on the West Reserve in Manitoba, Helena had joined the Old Colony Church but her education had been in the Kleinegemeinde system, so she had not learned the lange Wies. And this is also what she told the bishop. At church she could sing along with the others, she explained, but she wasn’t enough of a singer to carry the difficult chants on her own. At that Eltesta Dyck relented, saying, “Oh, then you probably don’t sing sole Wies because you think the lange Wies aren’t good enough for you,” and he left it at that.³⁰

In 1927 or 1928, Helena returned to Manitoba, following the death of her father Cornelius Fast, although she did not come in time for his funeral. It is about this visit that the only material evidence of Helena and Margaretha interacting exists. At the close of Cornelius Fast’s obituary, written by Margaretha, she addresses her sister Helena:

I would like to take this opportunity to ask you, dear sister Helena, whether you have now moved here from Mexico or whether you have just come to visit. We had a letter from brother Peter, he wanted to know a lot about you, he had been on the train at midnight and didn’t meet you. I also don’t know whether you are now in Winkler, Manitoba.³¹

In the mid-1930s, Helena again returned to Canada to visit her children who had remained there and relatives in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. This is when she visited my grandmother, her sister-in-law, and presumably other siblings.³² On her train ride back to Mexico, she missed a train connection, but all turned out well:

Her children had written down all the instructions she needed to get back home safely. But at one point she got off the train to stay in a hotel for the night. Here the proprietor assured her that he would wake her up at six, and the boys would take her to the train. At six Helen began to wait but nobody showed up. Finally she went down to see why no one was coming for her and only then did the proprietor remember his promise. He apologized profusely and comforted Helena, saying, “Just go up to your room again and stay the night. It won’t cost you a thing. It won’t cost you a thing.” . . . The next morning she was awoken as promised and taken to the train.³³

As Helena aged, she eventually moved to the village of Eichenfeld, approximately forty kilometres north of Thalbach, and lived in a small wooden house on the yard of her son Isaac Fehr. Much of the care she needed was given by her granddaughter Elizabeth, but when this became too onerous, her son Isaac moved her into the family home, where she died July 3, 1945, four years before her sister Margaretha moved to Mexico. She is buried in the Eichenfeld cemetery.³⁴

Margaretha Fast Reimer (1889–1984)

Margaretha was the twelfth child of Helena (Fehr) and Cornelius Fast, and the youngest living child. She was born in Hoffnungsfeld, where her Fehr grandmother lived, but within a year or two, the family relocated to Edenburg, approximately fifty kilometres southeast of Hoffnungsfeld. It was here that her younger sister Katherine died at six months.³⁵ In 1892 the family returned to the East Reserve to the village Heuboden. Again, extant sources provide only a few glimpses of what family and community life was like for the Fast family in Heuboden. It is not certain how many family members returned to the East Reserve, but it is likely that only the children of Helena (Fehr) Fast moved, as all of the children of Helena (Born) Fast were adults and most were married by 1892. The oldest Fast son, Peter, who had remained in the East Reserve to pay off his travel debt as a teenager, had by this time joined the Holdeman church, married, and moved to North Dakota with his wife’s family. Margaretha’s four oldest full siblings were teenagers when the family moved, and based on Helena’s and Margaretha’s experiences of being hired out as girls (Margaretha was hired out at age ten, as I describe later), these four Fast children and perhaps also younger ones were probably hired out at various times to help support the family. The family rejoined the Kleine Gemeinde, of which there was a congregation in the neighbouring village of Gruenfeld. Cornelius Fast taught school in Heuboden and was also responsible for the common pasture. John L. Dueck, a resident of Gruenfeld, recorded interactions he had with Cornelius Fast as the keeper of the common pasture. In the course of three months, Cornelius Fast bought a bull from him, received Dueck’s cows for the summer to be kept on the pasture, had seven of those cows escape, to be returned the next day, and hired out his stallion to service Dueck’s mare.³⁶ The 1891 census lists eighteen households in Gruenfeld;³⁷ their livestock no doubt kept Cornelius and some his children busy in summer.

In amongst her husband’s daily business of managing the common pasture, Helena (Fehr) Fast took ill, and after a thirty-six-hour illness, died. On March 16, her grave was dug, and the following day, her funeral took place at the home of a Jacob Dueck (perhaps Jacob L. Dueck’s son). She was buried in the Gruenfeld cemetery.³⁸ Margaretha turned four two days before her mother died. Family life changed dramatically following her death. According to family lore, the children were distributed among Kleine Gemeinde families, not necessarily Gruenfeld or Heuboden families.³⁹ This disruption came to an end six months later when Cornelius Fast married Anna Baerg, the daughter of a Kleine Gemeinde minister and a widow with one son, at which time the children, at least the younger ones, probably returned to their family home. Margaretha now had a new mother and not only gained a stepbrother through her father’s marriage but also three sisters and a brother who died in infancy. Sadly, Margaretha’s teenage sister Maria died when she was seven.

When Margaretha was eight, the family moved to Ekron, near Steinbach, and at age ten she began doing domestic work for families, much like her sister Helena had done, and probably her other two older sisters as well. Among the families she worked for, she mentions in her memoir her aunt and uncle Susanna (Fast) and Jacob Goertzen, who lived in Minnesota, where she helped cook for a work crew of thirty men. She also cried a lot, she recalled. When she was eleven, she started doing field work as well. When she was twenty-three, her work turned more towards caring for the ill, which prepared her for nursing victims of the influenza epidemic of 1918.⁴⁰ Her older sister Aganetha, who was a nurse-in-training in Minneapolis, was the primary caregiver in Steinbach’s school-turned-hospital during the influenza epidemic, working long days and into the night.⁴¹ It is not known whether Margaretha worked with her sister or cared for patients in their homes; however, she likely gleaned valuable knowledge about how to care for the ill from her sister. Unfortunately, she contracted the flu and “though [she] was never seriously sick [she] was unable to go to work for a year or more and was weak for many years after that.”⁴² It was also around this time that she lived with her brother Henry on his farm near Steinbach, doing the cooking and domestic work until he married in 1919 – at which time he joked that he didn’t miss her cooking.⁴³

In 1917, when her older brother David, a widower, enlisted to serve in the military in Winnipeg, she was listed in his military record as his children’s guardian and hence the recipient of his military separation allowance.⁴⁴ For a while the children lived with their uncle Henry; whether Margaretha also lived there at the time is unknown. This was a time of happiness for the two girls in what was a troubled domestic life. Especially memorable was the resident parrot and their kind uncle.⁴⁵ Margaretha’s name was struck out as guardian in David’s military record in favour of his young bride, Yordis Stevenson, whom he married a month after enlisting. Seventeen months after being deployed to France, David returned to Winnipeg, having been discharged for health reasons; his daughters are listed as living in Winnipeg at that time.⁴⁶ But Margaretha maintained a connection to her two nieces, visiting them periodically in Winnipeg in subsequent years.⁴⁷

After Margaretha recovered from the flu, she continued her nursing and domestic work, adding midwifery to her skill set. As an adult, like in her childhood, she lived an itinerant life, going where work took her. She travelled throughout Kleine Gemeinde settlements, from Blumenort to Prairie Rose to Rosenort and Morris, spending anywhere from a week to a few months in one location, living with the families she worked for.⁴⁸ In 1929 alone, she relocated fifteen times. She spent January in Morris and Rosenort, February in Rosenort, and March in Île-des-Chênes and Kleefeld. In April she was in Steinbach and Ekron, in May she was in Blumenort, and in June and July she was back in Ekron, then in Kleefeld, and then back to Ekron. In August and September, she spent time in Steinbach then Rosenort and back to Steinbach. In October and November, she was in Blumenort, but spent the latter half of November in Prairie Rose. In December she was in Steinbach but made a trip to Winnipeg.⁴⁹ While her diary describes her daily activities and interactions, it does not give details about how she negotiated her jobs and the remuneration she received. At a minimum she received room and board, but was she paid for her services as well? It is clear she had built up a reputation that served her well. In 1925, while on a road trip to Minnesota and Kansas with the Frank Kroekers from Steinbach, to visit family, she received a telegram asking her to come to Kleefeld to care for the sickly Mrs. Dueck. She ended her holiday early, boarded the train in Meade, Kansas, and stepped off on February 2 in Otterburne, Manitoba, to be taken to Kleefeld.⁵⁰ While she was sought after for her nursing care, she served families in other ways as well. On October 25, 1934, Henry P. D. Reimer brought Margaretha from Blumenort to Neuenlage (a neighbouring settlement) to tend to his wife, Lena, who was about to deliver a baby. On October 29, Margaretha butchered nineteen chickens for the Reimers, to be sold. On November 1, she assisted Peter P. and Elizabeth Reimer (Henry P. D. Reimer’s parents) with butchering pigs, and on November 2, she assisted Lena Reimer in the birth of her daughter Elizabeth. She stayed with the Reimers until November 18, no doubt caring for the mother and infant and looking after domestic needs. From Neuenlage, she caught a ride to the John E. Barkmans in Kleefeld. And so her life went.

When typhus broke out in Kleine Gemeinde communities, she nursed the sick as she had during the 1918 flu epidemic.⁵¹ On November 20, 1930, she travelled from Blumenhof, where she had been nursing typhus patients, to Prairie Rose to tend to members of the D. D. K. Plett family, who were also sick with typhus. A temporary hospice had by then been set up in the Prairie Rose Kleine Gemeinde church, and she, with the help of Gertruda Plett and Isaac Reimer, nursed the sick there. She also prepared bodies for burial, as she had already done in Blumenhof, evidence of how traumatic this outbreak was for these communities. In quarantine, they depended on community members to bring food and supplies, and community members sang hymns at the windows of the church to offer spiritual and emotional support.

On December 1 or 2, Dr. Royal, the attending physician, wanted to hospitalize Margaretha because she had a fever. Two families offered to take her in instead, and she persuaded the doctor that, with the attendance of a nurse, this would be a preferred option. Her brother Henry and sister Katherine, both living in Prairie Rose, took her by sleigh to Blumenort to the Cornelius Penners, approximately twenty kilometres. Her brother Ben brought the nurse from Steinbach to Blumenort.

On December 24, she was no longer contagious, and the nurse disinfected her room.⁵² Henry and Katherine visited her, as did her sister Aganetha. On December 30, she was able to sit up in bed for the first time, but “for only a minute.” It was not until April 18 that she was strong enough to join the Penner family at the table for a meal. To occupy herself during her prolonged recovery, “she started to make black kerchiefs or shawls, with fringes, some square and some triangles, whatever the ladies wanted, she did a very neat job.”⁵³

When she had recovered significantly, “she had a small house built for herself,” more to store her belongings than as a place to live.⁵⁴ Although her health had been compromised, she continued her itinerant work of caring, nursing, and midwifery.

On April 30, 1939, Margaretha married Peter P. Reimer, a widower and the Kleine Gemeinde Aeltester. Only six weeks earlier, she had delivered his grandson Peter Reimer.⁵⁵ Given her familiarity with Kleine Gemeinde communities throughout southern Manitoba from her many years of tending to the needs of her coreligionists, it is not surprising that the Aeltester considered her to be a suitable wife. She knew his “parish” in a way even he did not and had built enduring relationships with many people throughout the Kleine Gemeinde world. She had also resided in his household on several occasions, and so he was aware of her skills and personality. Margaretha was fifty years old when she married. For the previous forty years she had lived more often with others than with her family and had never lived for any length of time at one place. It is not surprising that she is known to have said, “I, Margaret Fast, have worked for other people for forty years, now I shall have a ‘Home.’”⁵⁶ Margaretha did not end her service to the Kleine Gemeinde community after her marriage, but she did use a different platform. She was an essential part of her husband’s pastoral work, as Kleine Gemeinde decorum made it impossible for him to attend to the needs of households headed by women on his own.⁵⁷ She also wrote several letters to the Christlicher Familienfreund to inspire readers. For example, she wrote a letter about the need for sensitivity when visiting sick patients, based on her experience of a prolonged illness and her many years of tending the sick.⁵⁸

Margaretha was a member of a complex blended family, and she married into another one. Peter and his first wife, Elizabeth, had had twelve children, ten of whom reached adulthood. His second wife, Anna Friesen, was a widow with ten living children. Many of these twenty children were already married (some Reimer and Friesen children had married each other) and had children when Margaretha and Peter married. But five children (one Reimer and four Friesens) were still living at home – three of the Friesen children, who had lost their mother only months previously, were still teenagers.⁵⁹ How well Margaretha navigated these dynamics is not known, but she did bring a playfulness to her role as mother and grandmother. One Christmas she gave each of her stepdaughters and daughters-in-law fabric for a dress, and the following Christmas she asked that each wear that dress to the family celebrations. Given that the fabric she had gifted was the same for all the women, some of the younger grandchildren were confused about who their mother was among all the skirts they saw from their short vantage point.⁶⁰ Grandson David Reimer recalls as a young boy sitting next his grandmother at a family meal. Having eaten his food, he looked down the length of the table for a slice of bread to clean out his plate, as he had been taught to do. Unable to find what he was looking for, he was uncertain what to do. His grandmother noticed his consternation, leaned over to him, and whispered in his ear, “Deis daut bloos schwind uetletje” (Just quickly lick it clean), perhaps with a twinkle in her eye, knowing his mother would not approve of that.⁶¹

As the Kleine Gemeinde Aeltester, Peter P. Reimer joined the 1948 migration to Quellen Colony with Margaretha. Sadly for Margaretha, her husband developed cancer and died five months after they moved. Margaretha remained in Mexico, living with her stepchildren Abram P. D. and Anna Reimer, who had also migrated. In a letter to the Familienfreund written several years after her husband died, she describes the time after her husband’s death as “drückend schwer” (oppressively difficult).⁶² A few years after her husband’s death, Quellen Colony built a clinic, and Margaretha was sought out to work there because of her extensive experience earlier in her life.⁶³ She enjoyed working with the younger head nurse (Oberschwester) Margaret Reimer, and they travelled together to Kansas in the fall of 1957, Margaret to visit family and Margaretha to visit her brother Peter.⁶⁴

Margaretha had few relatives of her own in Mexico. My parents lived on Quellen Colony for three years, and my father and his children were her only Fast relatives there at that time. This connection was meaningful for her. But she also had many other nieces and nephews in Mexico, children of her sister Helena, and she formed strong connections with some of them as well. In 1948, her nephews John Fehr from Winkler and his brother Isaac from Eichenfeld visited Margaretha and Peter for lunch.⁶⁵ These brothers came again to Quellen Colony on April 11, 1949, the day after Peter P. Reimer’s funeral, in time to join a group of Kleine Gemeinde bidding farewell to Aeltester David P. Reimer, who had come from Manitoba to be by his brother’s bedside. Deeply moved by the hymn “Wir, in der Fremd geboren” sung in farewell, Isaac Fehr, who was an Old Colony Vorsaenger, taught himself this hymn (which he might have heard his mother sing) the sole Wies way, and it became a family favourite. In subsequent years, when Margaretha would travel to Cuauhtémoc on business with Abram P. D. and Anna Reimer, they would stay the night at Isaac and Elizabeth Fehr’s home in Eichenfeld, through which the road to Cuauhtémoc passed.⁶⁶ Her sister’s spirit may not have lingered in the little wooden house on the Fehr farmyard, but the family connection did.

While the Fast connection was important to Margaretha, her warmness extended to her stepfamily as well. With tenderness and forthrightness, caring and scolding, part midwife and part mother, she addressed her step-daughter-in-law Justina, who had just delivered a baby girl, in a separate note included in a letter sent to the family:

Now Justina, something for you alone. How did things go for you? Did you feel sick before? Were you worse? You have so quickly been up. How do you feel now? I always wish that you women would write me about such situations. But I think it will already be in a letter for me that is on the way. Thank you for what you have already written. Be joyful in hope.⁶⁷

Margaretha remained in Mexico for ten years, but returned to Manitoba in 1958 when Abram P. D. and Anna Reimer moved to British Honduras (present-day Belize) as part of a Kleine Gemeinde exodus from Quellen Colony. In Manitoba, she lived with various of her children until they built her a small house on the property of her stepdaughter in Blumenort, the very property where she had convalesced after contracting typhus. After two years, she moved into the Rest Haven in Steinbach, where she lived for twenty-three years. She died on April 11, 1985, ninety-five years old, almost forty years after her oldest sister had died in Eichenfeld.

In the fall of 2023, I spent two months in Chihuahua. It was here that the idea to write an article about my two Fast great-aunts who had lived in Mexico began to germinate. I wanted to find a way to feature my great-aunt Helena, about whom I knew so little, and to honour my great-aunt Margaretha’s dedication to and love of her family, which I had first glimpsed on the pages of her Familien Register as a seventeen-year-old girl embarking on a family history project, one that is still a work in progress.

After completing her PhD at the University of Toronto more than fifteen years ago, Kerry Fast has been a freelance academic editor. She also works part-time as an editor for Manitoba First Nations Education Resource Centre. She has been keenly interested in her family’s history for decades.

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I have many people to thank for help with this article: My uncle Edmar Fast, who explained the geography, past and present, of Chihuahua as it pertains to Mennonites and told me about his Tauntes Leentje and Jreetje. My late Aunt Eva, who loaned me Taunte Jreetje’s writings, which are now in my possession. Taunte Jreetje’s grandchildren: Peter and Elma Reimer, David and Karen Reimer, Margaret Reimer, Leona Reimer, Denver and Anne Reimer, and Emily Fast, because of whom I know so much more about my Taunte Jreetje. Helena Fehr’s grandson, Jacob and Katherina Fehr, Winkler, who told me stories of his childhood in Mexico and his aunt Margaretha Reimer. Those who transcribed and translated Margaretha Reimer’s letters and diary from German Gothic script: Henry Fast, Hanna Rempel, and the late Bertha Plett (also a granddaughter of Margaretha). My friends Veronica Ens and Raúl Kigra, with whom I explored the Old Colony church in Eichenfeld and its graveyard, where my great-aunt Helena is buried. To my cousin and his wife, Abe and Mary Petkau, who hosted me on Quellen Colony and showed me my great-uncle Peter P. Reimer’s grave and the clinic where my great-aunt Margaretha worked.

1. The title of this paper in German is “D’rum machten wir uns auf den Gang,” a line from the hymn “Wir, in der Fremd geboren,” #450 in the Gesangbuch used by Helena Fehr and Margaretha Reimer in personal devotion and church worship. ↩︎
2. See Cornelius Fast, “Something of My Experiences,” Preservings, no. 48 (Spring 2024): 15–18. ↩︎
3. Margaretha Fast Reimer, Familien Register von Witwe Peter P. Reimer geb. Margaretha Fast (Steinbach, MB: self-pub., 1965). ↩︎
4. Eva Fast, Genealogy of Cornelius W. Fast, 1840–1927 (Blumenort, MB: self-pub., 2004); “Todesbericht, Anna B. Fast,” Christlicher Familienfreund, Jan. 1941, 9–10; “Notizen, Benjamin Fast,” Christlicher Familienfreund, Nov. 19, 1976, 6; Attestation Paper, Mar. 3, 1917, Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) Personnel Record for Dave Fast, RG 150, box 3009-21, Library and Archives Canada. ↩︎
5. C. Fast, “Something of My Experiences.” ↩︎
6. Delbert F. Plett, Dynasties of the Mennonite Kleine Gemeinde in Imperial Russia and North America (Steinbach, MB: Crossway Publications, 2000), 172. ↩︎
7. According to his obituary, written by Margaretha Fast, Cornelius Fast “served a lot as school teacher in Russia,” which suggests he taught in more places than Steinbach. Steinbach Post, Apr. 27, 1927, 2. ↩︎
8. Plett, Dynasties, 170. ↩︎
9. Rosabel Fast, “Helena Fast: Based on an Interview with Elizabeth Rempel” (unpublished manuscript, ca. 1994). ↩︎
10. Plett, Dynasties, 172. ↩︎
11. Plett, Dynasties, 173. ↩︎
12. “Autobiography of Peter B. Fast,” in E. Fast, Genealogy of Cornelius W. Fast, 15. ↩︎
13. “Helena B. Fast,” in E. Fast, Genealogy of Cornelius W. Fast, 47. ↩︎
14. See Plett, Dynasties, 173, for a discussion of whether Cornelius Fast was a teacher in Steinbach. ↩︎
15. Another possible explanation of the matter pertaining to the children may have regarded their mistreatment at the hands of their stepmother. Helena’s granddaughter Elizabeth (Friesen) Rempel recalled several stories from her grandmother about the mistreatment she received from Helena (Fehr) Fast. Once, she was tied to a post in the house and hit on the head with wood; her brother Cornelius tried to defend her, but their stepmother warned him off with an ax. Another time, when she went to fetch water from a well, she considered jumping in to alleviate her suffering, but then realized how sad this would make her father. See R. Fast, “Helena Fast.” It is not known when or where this abuse happened, so it is only conjecture on my part that this may be the matter the Kleine Gemeinde leadership was addressing, but given that Cornelius and Helena (Fehr) had been married less than a year when they departed for Manitoba, it is possible this happened in Steinbach, or later when the family lived in the West Reserve. ↩︎
16. Rev. Jacob Barkman to Aeltester Peter P. Toews, Jan. 6, 1875, in Delbert F. Plett, ed., Pioneers and Pilgrims: The Mennonite Kleine Gemeinde in Manitoba, Nebraska and Kansas, 1874 to 1882 (Steinbach, MB: D. F. P. Publications, 1990), 59. ↩︎
17. C. Fast, “Something of My Experiences.” Cornelius Fast does not elaborate on what those circumstances were. ↩︎
18. 1881 Canada Census; “Autobiography of Margaretha Fast,” in E. Fast, Genealogy of Cornelius W. Fast, 147; 1891 Canada Census. ↩︎
19. “Autobiography of Peter B. Fast,” 15. ↩︎
20. Aeltester Peter Toews diary, quoted in Plett, Dynasties, 174. ↩︎
21. R. Fast, “Helena Fast.” ↩︎
22. Henry Unger, The Survival of a Community: A History of Neuenberg and Birkenhead School District (Morden, MB: self-pub., 2012), 18 (photo of Abram Fehr house in Neuenberg). ↩︎
23. John Dyck and William Harms, eds., (Winnipeg: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, 1998), 22. ↩︎
24. R. Fast, “Helena Fast.” ↩︎
25. Unger, Survival of a Community, 40. ↩︎
26. Unger, Survival of a Community, 38. ↩︎
27. R. Fast, “Helena Fast”; Unger, Survival of a Community, 144. ↩︎
28. R. Fast, “Helena Fast.” ↩︎
29. Sole (or zol) Wies translates literally as “number way.” ↩︎
30. R. Fast, “Helena Fast.” ↩︎
31. Cornelius W. Fast obituary, Steinbach Post, Apr. 27, 1927, 2. Translation mine. ↩︎
32. Conversation with Eva Fast, Dec. 2022. ↩︎
33. R. Fast, “Helena Fast.” ↩︎
34. R. Fast, “Helena Fast.” ↩︎
35. 1891 Canada Census. ↩︎
36. John L. Dueck Diary, 1891–1894, trans. Henry Fast, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, vol. 6111, file 102, entries for March 11, and May 8, 12, 13, and 31, 1893. ↩︎
37. John L. Dueck Diary, introductory comments. ↩︎
38. John L. Dueck Diary. ↩︎
39. For example, my grandfather Henry Fast, aged five, was placed with a family in the Blumenhof/Blumenort area. ↩︎
40. “Margaretha Fast Reimer’s Account of Her Life,” in the author’s possession. ↩︎
41. “When the Flu of 1918 Hit Steinbach District,” Carillon, Sept. 7, 1967, 6. ↩︎
42. “Margaretha Fast Reimer’s Account of Her Life.” ↩︎
43. Memories and notes of conversations with Cornie Fast, Eva Fast, Edmar Fast, Albert Fast, and Agatha Grant. ↩︎
44. Separation Allowance, CEF Personnel Record for Dave Fast. ↩︎
45. Eva Fast, notes on conversation with Marie (Fast) Robinson, n.d., in the author’s possession. ↩︎
46. Confidential Information, Mar. 22, 1918, CEF Personnel Record for Dave Fast. ↩︎
47. Diary of Margaretha Fast, 1925–1934, Jan. 5, 1927, in the author’s possession. ↩︎
48. Interview with Peter Reimer and David Reimer, Blumenort, MB, Jan. 21, 2024. ↩︎
49. Diary of Margaretha Fast. ↩︎
50. Diary of Margaretha Fast, Feb. 1, 2, and 3, 1926. ↩︎
51. The following account is taken from her diary. ↩︎
52. Elizabeth Penner, handwritten note, n.d, in the author’s possession. ↩︎
53. Elizabeth Penner, handwritten note. ↩︎
54. Elizabeth Penner, handwritten note. ↩︎
55. Interview with Peter Reimer and David Reimer. ↩︎
56. “Margaretha F. Fast,” in E. Fast, Genealogy of Cornelius W. Fast, 147. ↩︎
57. Interview with Peter Reimer and David Reimer. ↩︎
58. Margaretha Reimer, “Das Berhalten am Krankenbette,” Christlicher Familienfreund, Aug. 1, 1947, 1–2. ↩︎
59. Edna Thiessen, “The Family Register of Mr. & Mrs. Peter P. Reimer” (unpublished manuscript, 2001), 8, 9. ↩︎
60. Interview with Margaret Reimer, Winnipeg, MB, Jan. 29, 2024. ↩︎
61. Interview with Peter Reimer and David Reimer. ↩︎
62. Margaretha Reimer, “Aus dem Leserkreise,” Christlicher Familienfreund, May 2, 1952, 1–2. ↩︎
63. Quellen Kolonie: Fifty Years (Los Jagueyes, Chih.: Centro Escolar Evangélico, 2008). ↩︎
64. “Quellenkolonie,” Christlicher Familienfreund, Dec. 20, 1957, 9. ↩︎
65. Margaretha Reimer to Ben P. D. Reimer family, Dec. 2, 1948. ↩︎
66. Conversation with Jacob Fehr, Winkler, MB, May 29, 2024. ↩︎
67. Margaretha Reimer to Ben P. D. Reimer family, May 18, 1952. ↩︎