In 1997 I became interested in the history of my father's mother's family, immigrants from Czechoslovakia at the turn of the century. Initially I thought researching our story would be fairly easy; after all, Nova Scotia's Pier 21 was the cornerstone of Canadian immigration and thus documentation should be readily available.

I was to discover that my presumptions were incorrect. Pier 21, recently re-opened as a heritage site brimming with immigrant data, does not stock records for the period in which my family arrived.

On Christmas Eve, 1904, Anna Sumara and her four children landed at the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, aboard the R.M.S. Ionian out of Liverpool, England.

This information came from a single record, preserved in microfiche, at the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. Many hours of scanning the ship's manifests resulted in an oddly emotional moment. On the screen, reproduced in a microfiche image, was the scripted handwriting of a member of the Ionian's crew. It was easy to spot, compared to other names on the list. Anna and her children were listed sequentially, taking up five lines.

The manifest lists interesting comments. Anna and her children are listed as "Austrian Poles" while the section for "Nationality or Country of Origin" has the letters "Je" scratched out, perhaps indicating a mistaken reference to "Jew". We do know that Vencel's family was Roman Catholic.

[View the manifest]

The family left the European region that at different times has been part of Poland, Austria, Moravia and the Chech and Slovak Republics.

Anna's husband Vencel had come earlier, securing work as a coal miner in Sydney, Cape Breton. The record of his arrival in Canada has yet to be uncovered. We do know that it was no more than a year or so, as Anna's namesake daughter was registered as an "infant" on the manifest, in fact arriving at the age of 2 years.

We are currently bringing together the material that will tell the story of the Sumara's time in Sydney, Cape Breton. Vencel is known to have worked as a coal miner there. His son, Frank, married Tillie Lazars in Sydney Mines.

In 1908, the Sumara family moved to a farm in Roslin, near Hansford, in Cumberland County outside of Oxford. Frank would eventually move to Springhill. The children moved on with their lives, with Sumaras now living in Springhill, Wolfville, Annapolis Royal and in Ontario. In Canada, there are only one or two other people with the surname Sumara, and are not believed to be closely related.

The greatest difficulty in continuing this research, apart from the loss of the eldest members of the family who still remember Vencel and Anna, is the language. Seeking relatives among the Sumara, Grybus and Pastor families back in the area of the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Poland is challenging when one does not speak an Eastern European dialect.

The Sumara children were also told to consider themselves Canadians in their new country, and to forget about the "old country." This was less a desire to abandon their heritage than simply an effort to ensure the children were not excluded socially for their non-English origins. Now, a century later, the descendents of Vencel and Anna are looking for that lost heritage, to identify their roots.