Neighbours are important people. They are today and they were in the past. They are sources of aid, comfort, and companionship. Studying the neighbours of your ancestors can even assist you in understanding your ancestors themselves.

I discovered when looking at census data that groups of families kept showing up together, even when they moved from one place to another. In one case, the men worked together in the same trade and belonged to a religious minority; it made sense for them to stick together since they could help one another find work and they belonged to the same religious community.

Often neighbouring families were related to each other. Spouses really were found in the boy- or girl-next-door! Sometimes grown siblings moved with their own young families from one place to another. This makes sense, since this would guarantee assistance in a time of need. In other instances, the relationship was more distant, with cousins living next to each other. Extended family connections seem to have been more important in the past; again, settlers of a new area needed all the help they could get. An additional consideration in the pioneer regions was language: relatives spoke the same dialect and this may have been different from the predominant language of the area.

By studying marriage and parish documents in addition to census records, I discovered that my ancestors and a group of twelve neighbouring immigrant families were actually bound not only by friendship, language and cooperative labour, but by an intricate network of family bonds. My husband finds this to be a fruitful source of inbreeding jokes, but I know that I now have a better understanding of the immigrant experience my great-grandparents went through when they homesteaded on the vast Saskatchewan prairie. They created their own community that provided mutual economic, spiritual, and emotional support. Good neighbours were and still are essential.

This article was originally printed in the Bergen News and is being reprinted with permission.