“I feel fortunate to be a female in a lineage of strong Slovak women.”

Angela Meady lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario where many Slovak people settled from the 1880s through 1950s. Angela has degrees in English Literature, Philosophy and Information Science and is director of collections for the Thunder Bay Public Library. Her interest in Slovak history, genealogy and culture has led her into many interesting projects. She has been involved with the Canadian Slovak League, with the Slovaks in Canada project directed by Ondrej Miháľ among others. Angela is the eldest of five children, loving partner and perceived servant of a sleek tuxedo cat.

Angela Meady’s story is part of a Global Slovakia Project- Slovak Settlers, authored by Zuzana Palovic and Gabriela Bereghazyova. The book is available for purchase via info.globalslovakia@gmail.com.

I am honored to share what I know about my ancestors, people whom I loved and that I am proud for their boldness, their tenacity, their many skills and talents, and their great ability to survive. 

I was born and raised in Canada, but I nevertheless had a hunger to understand what being Slovak meant and what the homeland of my predecessors was like. I absorbed every word, gesture, object, and reference to the old world, listening to the musical tones of the Slovak language and collecting images, artifacts, stories, and bits of history. All of that spoke directly to my soul and told me who I was and who I came from.

The first ancestor who came to Canada was Michal Mikita. He travelled from a village in Šariš region to Bremen, Germany, to board a steamship to New York where he arrived in December 1883. Two years later, he ended in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada. It was there, in the literal heart of the country, that he encountered the woman whom he would marry. Teresa  Kaštyák was there thanks to a twist of fate.  She was on her way to Fort William, where other Slovaks lived, when a fellow train passenger informed her that Fort William was  “no place for a woman,” and so she continued further to Winnipeg instead. 

All stories about my great-grandmother Teresa begin with a wide smile and a sense that one is about to tell a folktale or legend. Perhaps Andrej Potocký, chronicler of the early Slovak pioneers to Fort William captured it best when he wrote “perhaps you imagine her to be an example of delicate Slovak femininity, but you would be wrong. Teresa had a strong build and robust energy and a voice as strong as a bell.” 

It is no wonder, she came from Orava, one of the toughest regions of Slovakia. Prior to leaving for Canada, Teresa had worked in Budapest, Hungary, in the lowlands and even in London, England, where she learned English as she picked wild sloe berries for Gordon’s Gin (thereafter, the only brand of gin she would imbibe).

Life prepared her for the arduous journey to the other side of the world. Just to get to the nearest city and train station, she and a fellow villager had to traverse the forest and mountain! From then on, she went to Bratislava where she boarded a train to Bremen. Her English skills were rudimentary (which was still a great advantage over the countless other migrants who could not speak or understand a word of English), but at over six feet tall and used to hard work, she was willing to take a leap of faith. 

Teresa  Kaštyák. (source: Angela Meady)

The voyage was a perilous one, as low wind moored the ship in the middle of the Atlantic while food and water supplies grew dangerously scarce. But eventually, Teresa arrived in Montreal in 1885 and from there boarded a train that took her hundreds of kilometers to Winnipeg where she knew no one. Would there be a fellow Slovak speaker? Would there be a job? 

Somehow, she managed and found both and more. On January 9, 1888, she married Michal Mikita at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. According to Andrej Potocký, this was the first marriage of Slovaks in Canada. The first daughter Teresa was born in 1889, and Teresa senior determined that it was time to go to Fort William, her original destination. From then on, Fort William was the base of the Mikita family who were considered one of the Slovak pioneer families in the town which later became Thunder Bay. 

Life would take my ancestors to Illinois and Wisconsin in the United States in search of jobs and opportunities. They even succumbed to the allure of an ad in a Slovak American newspaper which promised “veľmi pekné farmy” (lovely farms) in Connecticut. Along with their growing brood of children, they sold their possessions, only to discover that the land was rocky and forested. Even after a year of clearing, there was no evidence that it could ever be arable. The family lived by selling the trees they cut down until they could afford to return to Fort William. 

Teresa also made several more trips across the Atlantic, returning to her native Orava. There was always the hope that they might be able to live again in what is now Slovakia, but once their money ran out, it was time to return to Canada. Not even pregnancy slowed Teresa’s formidable spirit down, and my grandfather Alois (Louis) Mikita was born in her home village in January 1896 during one such return. He would travel to Canada in his mother’s handbag. 

 As the time went by, the family gradually abandoned the surname Mikita in favor of Meady. 

In Fort William, Teresa’s husband worked as a coal heaver, just like the rest of the early Slovak settlers. When ships full of coal arrived at the port, he would shovel it from great piles at the coal dock into railway cars to go out to all parts of Canada. There is a history of immigrants being given free land to farm in Canada, but that was not the story of my ancestors. 

Great-grandfather Michal had a passion for horses and when he felt blue, he tended to drink a little too much and he would go out and buy a horse. He brought a curry comb from the old country, and he would groom the horse and sing to it and teach it little tricks before his wife would gently remind him that they couldn’t afford a horse and he would have to return it. I feel such melancholy for that man who dreamt of a different life than the one he was living.

Teresa herself ran a boarding house for single Slovak men, she washed the wooden sidewalks for the city, sewed clothing, interpreted dreams, and, most importantly, she was the midwife and neighbourhood ‘doctor’ for the local community. Men who had accidents were often brought to her home where she did what she could to mend broken bones, clean wounds, or treat infections. She brought many a Slovak into this world, and she was godmother to countless boys and girls.  Besides caring for her own family, Teresa would move in with the new mother, teach her what she needed to know about caring for a baby, cook, clean, and get the older children off to school. In turn, the family would give Teresa whatever they could in thanks. Sometimes it was a bag of potatoes, sometimes feathers for a new perina (quilt), or a bottle of homemade brandy.

Quite a few of children that Teresa helped to birth became National Hockey League (NHL) hockey players. When NHL officials needed to prepare contracts, they ended up having to interview Teresa for the confirmation of their birth dates. I heard countless stories about this exceptional woman, including one of making snares from her own hair to catch songbirds. Indeed, Teresa did have a store-sized bird cage full of singing birds.

Louis. (source: Angela Meady)

Louis, my grandfather, was a “handsome devil” to use my grandmother’s words.  Tall and blond and “whip smart” but with an inner restlessness which persisted until his old age. He loved to dance, to play piano and sing, to play pool and hang with the other fellows, and insisted on always having a new car. He justified this expense by driving the Slovak priests around and became a manager of the local Slovak-Canadian baseball team, because he could drive them to games in other cities.

Though he started work as a cooper who crafted the barrels for oil at the Imperial Oil Company, he soon rose to the role of an office manager and enjoyed dressing up to the nines. Women flocked around him, but his mother was very strict about who could date her children, especially her last unmarried son. Many recall that she was quite capable of physically throwing suitors out into the snow if she found them wanting. 

One day a new girl fresh from Orava arrived at St. Peter’s Church, a perfect match for Teresa’s mercurial son – someone religious, hard-working, and calm.  Maria was not the first from her family to set foot in Canada. Her father travelled to Canada where he laboured as part of a work gang that built and maintained railways to earn money and buy land back home for his family. He achieved that but hated every day of that treacherous job. Explosions from the nitroglycerin that was needed to blast through the rock were frequent. He witnessed many tragedies and thought it godless that the overseers simply buried the men alongside the track and continued on. At night, to protect his earnings from other workers, he slept with his money in a cloth bag around his neck and tucked inside his shirt.

Despite his experience, he let his daughters travel to Canada years later. With money loaned by her family, Maria said goodbye to her loved ones and booked a third-class passage. She left in the spring of 1922 and carried a trunk containing her loom, her cross, linens, her Bible which she earned for being the  top student at her school, and two head scarves—one white for marriage and one black for her funeral. She left knowing that she might never return. 

Maria disembarked in Halifax, the Canadian equivalent of Ellis Island. Unlike her sister, she was prepared to meet the black porters who worked on the trains as she had heard about them in letters. Her sister had nearly wet herself in fear when she first encountered a porter in Canada, because her only knowledge of someone with dark skin had been depictions of the devil in religious texts. Fortunately, Maria liked to learn and absorbed the many different things with curiosity and wonder. She adapted what she could and preserved what was possible to keep.

With Teresa Mikita’s blessings, Maria married Louis Mikita at St. Peter’s Slovak Catholic Church in May 1924, and though their marriage was one which had high peaks and great lows, they stayed together long enough to have seven children and 26 grandchildren.

I treasure the memories of visiting my grandparents. Their house smelled of the mixture of cabbage, garlic, dill, wood, and candles. There were dark corners and secret doors and an attic full of exotic things like the trunk from Slovakia, bags of scrap cloth to be turned into rugs, giant photographs of dead relatives and wicker baby carriages and wooden cradles. Best of all, in the basement there were old iron beds with fluffy quilts to jump on.  

Grandma occasionally let us light one of the votive candles on her altar, set up with a statue of Mary, a crucifix, and fresh and fabric flowers. Grandpa would slip a silver dollar (if he didn’t know you had been jumping on the beds) into our hands. 

We loved to hear them speak Slovak and picked up quite a lexicon of words although we didn’t all know what they meant. We would string together lists of words we’d heard and play at speaking Slovak on the phone to unseen callers—something like “čakaj, dobre, sluchaj, mrkva, pán, kocúr, mačka, pokoj, pozor. Jas nám ticho kvetky svetlo na veky amen”. Delightful to pronounce, said with great affection and emotion but absolute nonsense. 

Grandmother often babysat for us children and she told wonderful stories in her strong Slovak accent. Some were religious, some were creepy ghost stories, and some were stories from real life. One way that she adapted to the Canadian way while keeping up with her Slovak traditions, was by giving each of her children an English name by using the English calendar of saints as a reference. My father was born on the feast of St. Peter, so he became William and so on. She kept the name days but gave them a name to fit in. Likewise, she wouldn’t let her daughters get their ears pierced, as Slovak women do, because that would mark them as foreigners, and she did not want her children to face prejudice. 

William Meady and chicken. (source: Angela Meady)

Anytime the Pope was written about in the newspaper, Grandma would cut it out and save it in one of her prayer books to reread, along with memorial cards, photos of her grandchildren and the four-leaf clovers she found. There was only one non-religious article I found among her books after she died, and it was headlined “Studies show women in the home work much harder than men”. I imagined her cutting that one out, in order to wave around in some future argument with Grandpa. 

Maria (Mary) was able to return to Slovakia twice in her life. She kept close contact with her family in Slovakia through letters and telegrams when special news needed to be shared.  She also sent money to her mother, donated funds to both St. Peter’s Church and to her native village which was building a new temple at the time. 

When I was researching the history of St. Peter’s, I came across a notation in the church financial records which surprised me. Many parishioners had collected money to donate to the church. It was the Great Depression and most were only able to scrape together one or two dollars. Mary had donated 38 dollars, an unheard of sum! Mary had a powerful motivation—there was a prize for the person who raised the most money—a picture of St. Anthony, and my grandmother dearly wanted to win it. While others tried to beg coins from their neighbours and friends who were other immigrants just as poor as themselves, my grandmother went directly to the pool halls and bootleggers, barging in with her rosary and coin box telling them that it would be good for their immortal souls if they gave their ill-gotten loot to the church. 

At times in my life when things feel daunting or too challenging, I often think about my grandmother and great-grandmother who did not accept barriers to their goals and simply out-thought and out-manoeuvred the odds to achieve what they wanted. I feel fortunate to be a female in a lineage of strong Slovak women. 

Steeped as I was in such stories and in the culture, food, music, and traditions of Slovakia, I was left with a deep appreciation for my roots and a yearning to experience the homeland for myself. The cousins and family left behind were described with such reverence and color that I could almost see them, along with the descriptions of the mountains and the sound of the bells as the cows moved up the hills for grazing.

In the summer of 1996, I travelled with my parents to Slovakia. 

It is difficult for me to convey the great emotion I felt meeting my Slovak family and meeting the place where my ancestors had lived and left behind. I felt a deep peace and a strong feeling of returning to someplace I had known before. The hills, the fields, the wooden homes, the sheep and geese wandering down the same road as the Skodas and people on bicycles....it all felt so right and natural.

Family reunion. (source: Angela Meady)

On our last night in the ancestral village of Podbiel, northern Slovakia, our relatives surprised us by bringing a musical group to our guesthouse. In costume, they sang and played Slovak folk music on their violin and other instruments. We moved to the field where we danced with our cousins, old and young, until the sun set, and it was time to sleep. 

I am fortunate to have gone there on several other visits including one in 2007, when I buried my father William’s ashes in his grandparent’s grave. 

In Slovakia, I found what was missing from my heart. There, my heart was healed.