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Where Money Grew on Trees: A History of the Romanian Pioneers of Lennard Manitoba

by John Goodes

Price: $30.00 CAN + shipping and handling

(Full proceeds go toward supporting the St. Elijah Pioneer Museum)

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Product Description

Now in its 4th printing Where Money Grew on Trees is an intimate portrait of 100 years of Romanian ancestry in and around the small rural village of Lennard, Manitoba. From the pioneers' grueling passage and homesteading years, to the building and lurking dissolution of a community, this is the story of transitions and traditions, economic changes and shifting identities, survival and adaptation.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION and analysis puts historical events in context, but it's the details that bring the story to life: the names of the people, the odours of the food, the fickle weather, the lost art of subsistence living, faith, farming and festivals, life and death.

For the descendants of these Romanian pioneers, Where Money Grew on Trees is the first comprehensive history ever written on their forebears. But it is also a true people's history, a vivid record of how peasant immigrants adapted, survived and contributed to shaping the Canadian rural landscape.

WRITTEN FROM oral accounts and archival research, the book also includes a brief history of Romania and the Voloca region.

Product Details

Description: Soft cover, black and white illustrations, 212 pages.
Publisher: St. Elijah Pioneer Museum, 4th printing, 2008.

About the Author

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John Goodes was born in Boulton Municipality in 1927, on a farm 4 miles north of Lennard, Manitoba. He is the grandson of Nicolai and Grapina Mintencu, two of the original pioneers from Voloca.

John left the farm in 1947 to pursue his education at the University of Manitoba and the University of North Dakota. Upon graduation his first job was in journalism, and then went on to a variety of posts in the federal and provincial governments.

While he never stopped returning regularly to the family homestead to visit his mother, and keeping contact with the community there, it wasn't until later in his life that he renewed an interest in his roots. He began by reacquainting himself with language of his youth. He also made a point of speaking with the elders and others who had remembered and retained valuable stories about the past, and noting all that he learned.

In 1998, once the Cold War ended and the Romanian political situation changed, John planned a trip to Voloca (now in Ukraine) with his three sons. There, he gathered more information and saw with his own eyes the village and the home of his ancestors, still relatively unchanged from the time that his parents and grandparents had left the community. They also spent some time in Romania, including the Carpathian Region. John and his wife Ollie returned to Romania the following year and spent another five weeks in several Carpathian Mountain villages.

Realizing that there was no formal written history of the Lennard community, and wanting to pass on the knowledge he had acquired over the years and more recently, John decided to write this history on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the St. Elijah Romanian Orthodox Parish in Lennard.

This important local historian died at the age of 89 in 2017.

St. Elijah Pioneer Museum: 20th century Bucovinian/Bukovinian immigrants of Lennard, Manitoba