Family and Kinship

During the first decade of immigration to western Canada, Walloons showed a greater tendency than Flemings to come as family units. Flemings from the agricultural regions of Belgium usually sent one or two young men, occasionally the head of a family, to scout out the country, earn some capital, and so pave the way for relatives, and eventually neighbours, to follow in chain migration. The community of Manor, Saskatchewan, for example, drew almost exclusively upon the Lommel area of Limburg province, which was not otherwise a usual source of immigration to Canada.

Both Flemish and Walloon immigrants brought with them strong traditions of a patriarchal family that functioned as an economic unit. For example, the practice of unmarried children turning over their earnings to the head of the household until such time as they married, coupled with the tradition of families of both the bride and the groom equipping the new household according to their means, was transplanted to Canada. Such a family structure and the pooling of family resources were an asset in pioneering days in the prairie west. They were an asset, too, in southwestern Ontario during the Depression of the 1930s, when tobacco farmers were able to survive largely because of combined family labour and financial resources. The oral history survey compiled by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario in the Delhi tobacco belt in 1977 indicated that almost 90 percent of Belgian tobacco growers had been farm labourers when they arrived and that they had emigrated to improve their financial status. Family ties were most important; scarcely any gave political considerations and none gave religious reasons for choosing Canada over other destinations. About two-thirds had come as family units, conscious of the need for labour and capital, and two out of five respondents said that they had not intended to remain permanently in Canada. The family units were most inclined to remain.

The role of women was particularly crucial in mining and agriculture. In addition to running boarding-houses for single men, they tended the kitchen gardens, did the domestic work, cared for the children, and organized the social life of the ethnocultural enclaves though their names do not survive in most archival records. Women’s sustaining role was never better demonstrated than during the Depression on prairie farms. They made clothes from whatever material was available, watered the surviving vegetables, cared for the chickens and pigs, milked the cows, and strove to maintain family morale. Because the traditional concept that a man should provide for his family was upheld, the men desperately sought supplementary work in lumber camps or mines. Guy Vanderhaeghe in the collection Man Descending (1982) has captured the complete demoralization of his Flemish father in these years as he lost his employment and then his self-esteem.