Ted Tatarynovich
Ted Tatarynovich was twenty-three when he arriving in Canada in 1926 and settled in the Crooked River area where he still lives on his farm. He is Polish yet handles English with ease. The portion of Poland that was his home land is East of Warsaw on the Steppes, that land that over the centuries changed hands andnames regularly and is now known as Belarus.
Ted has been married for fifty-eight years and still shares his life with his wife whom he waited until he was thirty-nine to marry. He has a passion for his brood of pigeons which he still tends and when I met him yesterday he was shopping at the bakery. His vision is not good, to the point that he can not see the numbers on his money, but he is independent and was more then able to chat about his life and experiences.
During Ted's ninety-six years of life his home land saw four major wars, the fall of the
Russian
Empire, the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire. As a Canadian he has seen his village
grow to a bustling saw mill town and railway junction to a crumbling
village.As we shook hands and parted he told me we should talk more when I was ninety.
If you know of other living pioneers let me know so we all can meet them on the pages of Ensign.
If you would like to contact Ted, his daughter Bernice Tornquist will pass the message on to him.