Genealogy and agriculture in Canada – passing knowledge down through the ages

In this post, I reflect on my garden journal and how the slow accumulation of agricultural knowledge transferred down through aeons. As I harvest and preserve the produce from my small garden, I think about how settlers learned to farm the Prairies, and how that knowledge passed to them. Reaching further back, I look at the underappreciated role of Indigenous women during the fur trade, and then the Indigenous who chose the Wanuskewin, north of Saskatoon, for their agricultural activities. I close with some observations about that Canadian obsession – the weather – and how forecasts were carried across the rails by the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The pleasures of pickling and how preserving food fed a family through the winter

I’m not a pickle girl. That’s what I thought, no, genuinely believed about myself until I grew pickling cucumbers this year. I hadn’t known what Corentine and Saladmore Bush cucumbers were like when I was eyeing the cute four inch plants at the greenhouse. But as the plants grew up the trellis and started to produce – first flowers, then cucumbers – I realized I had way more cucumbers than we could eat. I would need to think about pickles. And there is something deeply satisfying and atavistic about the process of food preservation. About eating what you’ve grown. So I found a recipe and made fridge pickles.¹

Atavistic means to recall the characteristics of a previous culture, yet whose culture am I recalling? We didn’t make pickles growing up. Perhaps I’m channelling the history of the people who settled this land, so different from the coast where I grew up.

As a genealogist I’m deeply curious about how our ancestors survived.

I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. I’ve had two good years of gardening, five middling years, and five terrible years. The first five years I couldn’t grow anything. I thought the hard part was digging out the garden from the corner patch in the yard but in retrospect that was simple. A host of issues followed: the soil was clay, insects ate the tender greens, zucchini needed to be hand pollinated, potatoes were scabby, birds tore into the peas, and bunnies scavenged what the insects missed. The garden was arid, rainfall was sparse unless it was torrential, and winds toppled the tomatoes I grew in pots. It seemed ridiculous that I, with all the resources at my disposal, couldn’t grow a thing in a place where pioneers once grew the food they served.

How did the Prairie pioneers do it?

I learned this week that our growing season ranges from 110-144 days.² A very short growing season might mean planting out by June 10th and seeing the first frost on September 28th. Gardeners and farmers use the zone system to help plan growing. Saskatoon is Zone 3b. Canada encompasses Zones 0-9, with Johnson, NT at Zone 0B and Victoria, BC at Zone 9A.³

I know this now but how did the pioneers know?

Six thousand years ago, the Indigenous knew the land

Just 20 kms north of Saskatoon is Wanuskewin. Long before European settlement, Wanuskewin was an important gathering and habitation place for Indigenous peoples of the Northern Plains.⁴ Archaeological evidence shows repeated occupation for more than 6,000 years, with people returning to the opimihāw Creek valley to hunt bison, gather and process plants, make tools, camp and conduct spiritual activities. Plant remains recovered from Wanuskewin sites include Saskatoon berries, chokecherries, wild raspberries, plums, goosefoot and amaranth, among many others. Archaeology can demonstrate that these plants were used for food, medicine and other purposes, although it cannot always tell us whether a particular plant was simply harvested or whether useful patches were deliberately tended, protected or encouraged.

Wanuskewin itself helps explain why people returned. The creek valley creates a remarkably different environment from the exposed prairie above it: water, shelter, diverse vegetation and relief from both summer heat and bitter winter winds are concentrated within a small area, making longer stays entirely practical.

Before books, knowledge was wrapped in story.

A 2026 study by Shalen Prado and Andrew Lints argues that archaeologists have often underestimated Indigenous plant management on the Canadian Northern Plains because they looked for agriculture through a European lens – cultivated fields and domesticated crops – rather than considering practices such as tending, encouraging and managing useful plant communities.⁵ Their work does not prove that particular plants were cultivated at Wanuskewin, but it makes the abundant plant remains there worth viewing as more than evidence of opportunistic gathering. People who returned to this valley over thousands of years would have accumulated detailed knowledge of where useful plants flourished, where water remained available and where people and animals could find protection from the extremes of prairie weather.

Data transfer, 17th century style

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, one of the most important channels through which Europeans acquired knowledge of the Canadian interior was marriage. As Sylvia Van Kirk wrote in Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870, Indigenous women were fundamental to the functioning of the fur trade.⁶ Through them and their kinship networks, traders gained languages, geographical knowledge, food and preservation techniques, appropriate clothing, routes of travel, information about weather and seasons, and the innumerable practical skills required to survive in an unfamiliar and unforgiving environment. This was data transfer before databases: knowledge passed orally, demonstrated through work, learned by observation, and embedded within relationships. The European trader may have been the one whose name appeared on the expedition’s records, but much of what made his work possible came from his connections to Indigenous communities through his wife.

The surviving archival record can blur that transfer. Knowledge that had existed within Indigenous communities for generations might eventually appear as a sentence in a trader’s journal: where a river could be crossed, when animals would arrive, which plants were edible, how food should be stored, or which route led through the mountains. Once written by a Hudson’s Bay Company employee, copied into correspondence, and preserved in the company archives, that knowledge acquired a European author and a documentary pedigree. The person who wrote it down became visible while the people who supplied it could disappear.

We should be cognizant of whose knowledge we are reading in colonial records today. The Hudson’s Bay Company Archive⁷ contains an extraordinary accumulation of information about the land and its peoples, but some of what appears to be European observation can be better understood as Indigenous knowledge that crossed a cultural boundary before it crossed onto paper. Before it appeared in a Hudson’s Bay Company journal, report, or correspondence file, it may have existed for generations as Indigenous knowledge of place, season, plants, animals, and survival. Marriage created one of the principal bridges across which that knowledge travelled. The result is an archival imbalance that can make European authors look like the originators of knowledge when they were often its recipients, translators, or recorders.

1888 – the diaries of the Loveridge family, Grenfell, SK

The first white settler Prairie farmers watched, learned, and tried again. What worked? What failed? They compiled their knowledge, year over year, noting every detail, from the costs of seeds, to the amount of rainfall, to the temperatures. Even the experienced farmers coming from generations of agricultural knowledge in places like Britain, Germany, Ontario, Scandinavia, and the Ukraine had to use their considerable experience to relearn how to farm. Early farmers keep diaries, account books, calendars and farm notebooks. In the 1888 diaries of the Loveridge family of Grenfell, SK, Thomas Loveridge recorded planting seeds on May 14, frost damage on August 9 and 31, and mixed results for their wheat crop.⁸

Friday, Sept. 21: Very fine and summerlike. Drew last of wheat today. 39 loads of wheat altogether. Some good, some frozen.

Thomas Loveridge, 1888, “A Year on the Farm”

I look at my own garden diaries about 135 years later and marvel how they follow the same patterns of planting dates, frosts, and results.

Trees were a 19th century Prairie success story

On the prairies, farmers needed trees for shade, wind protection, gardens, and landscaping. Even today, you can see lines of trees delineating acreages and around homesteads as windbreaks. But trees were hard to come by. Some, such as the Mennonites of the Ukraine transplanted riverside cottonwood trees in Southern Manitoba, proving that trees could survive the Prairie’s combination of poor soil, little rain, heavy snow, and severe winters.⁹ As the prairies were settled, residents started horticultural societies to share knowledge, such as which recommended trees and shrubs to plant. Trees as shelter was such an important concept that from 1886-1890, the Ottawa-based Central Experimental Farm shipped half a million trees westwards to the Prairies for transplanting, and noted carefully which survived and which did not.

On our small plot of land, we learned through trial and error that the hot west side of our home was a terrible place for grass. We had replaced the patchy grass with high quality sod and spent hundreds of dollars each summer watering. The year we stopped the careful watering was the year the sod began to pull back. But we noticed something else: the sour cherry trees, a cultivar developed by the University of Saskatchewan for harsh Prairie conditions, were doing well. Who knew you could grow stone fruit in Saskatoon? What if, instead of wasting water to keep grass from getting crispy, we took out the sod and planted more fruit trees? Speaking of the University of Saskatchewan, the research continues at locations such as the Crop Development Centre, where the seeds that grow food to feed the world are developed.¹⁰

In truth, I owe it to the whole system of systemic, accumulated agricultural know how as I survey our corner lot with its mature spruce and cedar, Saskatoon and lilac, and now sour cherry trees, because without the years of effort, we would be roasting under the merciless sun, buffeted by the endless dusty winds, and enjoying our crispy lawn.

The agricultural fair – 19th century data transfer with a side of fun

Genealogists will be familiar with the lists of winners at the regular agricultural fairs. These announcements of prizes for everything from livestock to vegetables provide a glimpse into the lives of rural ancestors. I’m thinking about the fairs now in terms of an early form of data transfer. The fairs combined competition, friendly rivalry, and the latest in agricultural developments. This article entitled, “Whitewood Fair – the Second Exhibition of the Season a Decided Success – Prodigious Roots and Vegetables,” conveys some of the excitement of winning prizes while also learning which varieties of potatoes were having the best results:¹¹

…probably the greatest wonder of all was the roots and vegetable department. The number and variety of mammoth turnips, cabbages, cauliflower, potatoes, onions, beets, and other delicious looking edibles was so great that it was really inspiring. Mr. John King showed some enormous Early Rose potatoes. Mr. Wilfred Wilde of Grenfell, however, took the cake in this line. His Queen of the Valley potatoes were a marvel for size.

The Leader-Post, 7 Oct 1890

Canning – learning to preserve the harvest

There are a plethora of similar, casual, community-oriented places where farmers learned all the insider knowledge, from the seed merchants to the quilting bees. Families got together to preserve the harvest, and many today have fond memories of making jams and jellies and canning dozens of jars of beans, carrots, cauliflower, potatoes, and tomatoes. What they made shelf stable then fed them through the long, cold winters. In this image from the 1920s, women are pictured canning outdoors.¹² There is no information on what they are processing but whatever it is, there is a high water content, judging from the woman in centre foreground using a large piece of fabric to strain the liquid out. [Click on the image to see full size.]

I aspire to fill my shelves with shelf stable food from things I grew but I struggle with food preservation. So far I’ve been successful with canning tomatoes via water bath, and I’ve made dozens of jars of Saskatoon berry jam. Last year we had a bumper crop of Saskatoons and I decided to make jelly. But the pectin didn’t set and I now eat my plain yogurt with Saskatoon berry sauce. One day I might learn to pressure can.

The Canadian obsession: what’s the forecast?

In Canada, we talk about the weather as a way to make conversation. In Vancouver, we talk about the rain. In Calgary, we talk about the Chinooks. In Saskatoon, we talk about storms. Everywhere in this vastness, we keep a careful eye on the weather. It connects us. For gardeners and farmers, the need to know the weather forecast takes on extra significance.

Dominion of Canada Meteorological Service

Canada began organizing a national meteorological service in 1871,¹³ although it took considerably longer for those services to include the Prairies. It is startling to read this observation from an expert that, “… prior to 1869, there was… no true description of the climatology of the country.” Imagine farming and homesteading without environmental data. You don’t know if this year will be a dry one or a wet one, if the snowfall will be heavy or light, if the growing season will be short or long. You don’t know if your homestead is in a hailstorm belt and prone to tornadoes. The Meteorological Service of Canada began publishing the Monthly Weather Review in 1877.¹⁴

Canadian Pacific Railway and Telegraph – weather reports

By the early 1880s, the Canadian Pacific Railway brought more than transport with the lines: it brought weather data. Telegraph offices transmitted information about the weather, and these reports were posted both in the offices across the country, and on the trains themselves. The image above depicts the CPR Station at Moose Jaw. [Click on the image to see it full size.] By 1899, there was enough accumulated weather data for the service to make forecasts for Manitoba, with reports for the territories of Alberta and Saskatchewan by 1903. By the 1920s, weather forecasts were issued twice daily across the country, and published in the morning and evening editions of major newspapers.

Wireless radio weather reports

The 1920s brought the next wave of innovation: radio.¹⁵ Information could be broadcast to even the most remote locations. The central weather office in Toronto collected data from two hundred weather stations across North America and issued twice daily weather bulletins at 9:40 a.m. and 9:40 p.m.

Reporting the weather in 2026

As I write this, I marvel at how far we have come. We have weather data available at all hours, updated constantly. But there’s a difference between the ability to collect data and the willingness to do so. Stations need maintenance, instruments need replacing, observations need to be recorded, and governments must continue funding the people and infrastructure. Data doesn’t collect itself.

It is concerning because Canada’s data pool is shrinking. The 2026 Canada’s Changing Climate Report notes that the number of active stations providing temperature and precipitation data in southern Canada is now about half what it was in the 1970s and 1980s.¹⁶ Fewer stations and missing observations mean less long-term data. The pioneers suffered from having too little weather information. We may be allowing our observational record to thin at precisely the moment we need more of it. In the past five years alone, I can identify at least ten Canadian rainstorms that reached or exceeded a locally calculated 1-in-100-year threshold—including three in St. Catharines, ON, in thirteen days in 2026.¹⁷ The problem is no longer simply forecasting tomorrow’s weather. We need enough continuous data to know whether the probabilities calculated from yesterday’s climate still mean what we think they mean.

Coming full circle

And this is where I come full circle with data, from too little to too much. Our ancestors struggled to establish gardens year after year, until they eventually learned not only what worked for Wilfred with his prizewinning potatoes, but also what worked on their own farm. Every drive into town, every event, every communal pierogi making day. Today it feels like I have the opposite problem. There is too much information out there and a lot of it is suspect. I’ve used sources from books to social media, using trial and error, and keeping a diary to figure out the optimal conditions for my own little garden in Saskatoon.

Cover Image

The image was scanned from A summer on the Canadian prairies, by Georgina Binnie-Clark (1910).¹⁸

The text preceding the image said, “Your place is a picture, I said; although I miss the blue flax blossom. Flax is well worth cultivation, if only for the joy of its flower. It’s worth more than that to a new settler. You see it will grow on newly broken land, and sells for a dollar a bushel. They get fifteen bushels to the acre at the Government farms. Of course I can’t expect any such return as that, but I reckon to have a few bushels for sale or trading; and linseed is useful enough with stock round. His wife was weeding the carrots. I was just going to send Gracie over with a dish of new potatoes, she said, with the becoming modesty that always hints of cause for pride in the background. I sat down on a packing-case and glanced round the garden, which was racing towards a fulfilment of its promise, and the end of the story of what a brave, patient, loving English mother can accomplish under the stress of circumstance. Scarlet runners had grown out of knowledge. Dwarf peas had passed from bloom to pod. Vegetable-marrows…”

Afterword

I enjoyed writing this piece, comparing my little garden journal and its experiments in growing against the vast body of historic knowledge transfer from thousands of years ago to today. It got away from me twice, and I had to edit out entire sections, but one of the discoveries I made as I was writing was the rich sources of possible genealogical data available through agriculture: almanacs, newspapers, journals, county fairs, agricultural and horticultural societies, diaries, weather stations, and even the Canadian Pacific Railway. I’ll talk about that in my next blog.

Next time: [Five] lesser known places to research your Canadian farming ancestors

Thank yous

Farm families appreciate food in a whole different way. This month I’m looking forward to joining my friends in a day of pie-making. Since moving to their new place, my friends have marvelled at the bounty of fruit trees on their land – from apples to plums and Saskatoon berries – and have invited friends over to kick it old-school. I finally understand what it’s like to get together with a group of women for the day while we turn a chore into pleasure. More than that, I’ve finally learned the secret of pastry, which is like being introduced to old magic.

References

1. Kimberly Killebrew, “Refrigerator Pickles,”27 May 2025, The Daring Gourmet (https://www.daringgourmet.com/refrigerator-pickles/ : accessed 6 September 2026.) ↩︎
2. Full years for 2009-25 were analyzed. For the raw datasets, see Environment and Climate Change Canada, “Historical Data,” Climate, database, Saskatoon RCS, Station ID 4057165, daily climate data, 2008–2025; Government of Canada https://climate.weather.gc.ca/historical_data/search_historic_data_e.html ↩︎
3. Natural Resources Canada, “Canada’s Plant Hardiness Site,” Canada’s Plant Hardiness Zones, Government of Canada (https://planthardiness.gc.ca/?m=1 : accessed 6 September 2026). (planthardiness.gc.ca) ↩︎
4. “Land,” website, Wanuskewin Heritage Park: https://wanuskewin.com/our-story/land/. ↩︎
5. Shalen Prado and Andrew Lints, “Time to Grow: Reevaluating Archaeological Approaches to Indigenous Human–Plant Relationships in the Canadian Northern Plains,” published online June 18, 2026, 1–25, American Antiquity: https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2026.10187. ↩︎
6. Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983). ↩︎
7. Hudson’s Bay Company Archives,” museums and archives, Archives of Manitoba: https://www.manitoba.ca/chc/archives/hbca/index.html, accessed September 6, 2026. ↩︎
8. W. Dale Loveridge, ed., “LOVERIDGE Family, Homesteaders and Pioneers,” Saskatchewan History Album, Saskatchewan History & Folklore Society, https://www.saskhistory.ca/loveridge-family-homesteaders-and-pioneers/ ↩︎
9. Lyle Dick, “The Greening of the West: Horticulture on the Canadian Prairies, 1870–1930,” Manitoba History 31 (Spring 1996), Manitoba Historical Society, https://www.mhs.mb.ca/docs/mb_history/31/prairiehorticulture.shtml ↩︎
10. Crop Development Centre, University of Saskatchewan: https://cdc.usask.ca/index.php : accessed 6 September 2026. ↩︎
11. “Whitewood Fair – the Second Exhibition of the Season a Decided Success – Prodigious Roots and Vegetables, The [Regina] Leader-Post, 7 Oct 1890, Regina, SK, pg. 4, col. 3, Newspapers.com, accessed 6 Sep 2026. ↩︎
12. “File:Women canning food outdoors in a wooded area 09711v.jpg,” circa 1925-30, United States, digital image of a print, reproduction Number: LC-DIG-ds-09711 (digital file from original), call Number: LOT 4777 [item] [P&P] Repository, no known restrictions on copyright, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Women_canning_food_outdoors_in_a_wooded_area_09711v.jpg: accessed 8 Sep 2026); Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print ↩︎
13. Morley K. Thomas, “A Brief History of Meteorological Services in Canada, Part 1: 1839–1930,” Atmosphere 9, no. 1 (1971): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1080/00046973.1971.9648323 ↩︎
14. Eleven of these reports may be found on Canadiana. Meteorological Service, Dominion of Canada, Monthly Weather Review 24, no. 1 (January 1900) (Ottawa: Meteorological Service, 1900), Canadiana, https://n2t.net/ark:/69429/m0m901z44p3v. ↩︎
15. Environment and Climate Change Canada, “From Telegraph to Mobile Apps—150 Years of Canadian Weather Service History,” Government of Canada, https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/weather-resource-centre/history-services.html ↩︎
16. Xiaolan L. Wang, Francis W. Zwiers, Megan Kirchmeier-Young, et al., “Overview of Past Changes in Climate,” in Canada’s Changing Climate Report 2026 (Government of Canada, 2026), sec. 2.7.2, https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/science-technology/changing-climate-report-2026/cccr-chapter-2-en.html. ↩︎
17. Examples of Canadian storms reaching or exceeding a locally calculated 1-in-100-year (1 percent annual probability) threshold between September 2021 and September 2026 include: British Columbia: the November 2021 atmospheric river in the Fraser Valley/Abbotsford; Saskatchewan: the June 2022 North Battleford rainstorm; Manitoba: the September 2025 Steinbach rainstorm; Nova Scotia: the July 2023 flooding, including rainfall at Bedford that exceeded the 100-year return period; Ontario: GTA/Mississauga storms in July and August 2024; three separate 100-year rainstorms at St. Catharines on July 21, July 27–28, and August 2, 2026; and the September 2, 2026 Toronto storm. In addition, Hurricane Fiona in September 2022, affecting Atlantic Canada, produced winds subsequently assessed as approximately a once-in-a-century event for the region. ↩︎
18. Georgina Binnie-Clark, A summer on the Canadian Prairies, (1910), digital image from a book, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_summer_on_the_Canadian_Prairie_(1910)_(14595604478).jpg: accessed 8 Sep 2026); originally published by Musson: Toronto, held by the University of Toronto, digitized by the University of Toronto. ↩︎