My father’s side was a little more mysterious. I’ve only ever known my grandmother, and my aunts and uncles. That’s it. My grandparents got divorced when my father was young. The family moved away from the Leamington, Ontario area and ended up in Toronto. They never had any contact with their father’s family since.
Before I started looking, I didn’t know very much about my grandmother, Katharine Mary Klingler. I knew that she was German and born somewhere in Europe. Her and her family came to Canada while she was young. I remember one Christmas around 1993, my grandmother brought a magazine article about the war in the Balkan states. She showed us the map from the article. She pointed at an area north of Belgrade in Serbia and told us that was where she was born. I thought that was weird, because I thought she was German and Serbia was not part of Germany.
My father and his siblings were born in the Leamington area of Essex county and that was where their father, Harold Rivait’s family was. While I was growing up, the only Rivait’s in the Toronto area phone books were my uncles and us. However, I heard there would be at least a full page of Rivait’s in the phone book in Essex County. Rivait is a French name, but that’s all I know about our family.
When I visited my parents after they came home from Arizona, I looked for any information that they had. Luckily, my dad had given my grandmother a Family Tree book to write down all that she could about her family. My grandmother had written down all about how her family came from a little German village in Yugoslavia called Backi Jarak. With a quick Google search I found DVHH – Remembering Our Donauschwaben Ancestors . It was a wealth of information on the German migration into the Balkan states. I had no idea that there were any German villages there. Now the story my grandmother told us made sense. She was born in 1920 in Yugoslavia and came to Canada in 1930 with her parents, sister and brother. They settled in Kamloops, British Columbia for about 15 years and then moved to South-eastern Ontario.
This was my introduction to my father’s side of the family. I had no idea what a rich and interesting heritage we belonged to on my German side, but little did I know, there was more amazing information to come…
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