The Steinkes

A companion to the Rycroft story. The Steinkes reach this family through Bette Doreen Steinke, who married Sam Rycroft in 1959. For years the record went no further back than Bette’s parents, Henry and Martha, and the chase across the ocean sat on the to-do list. Then a single evening of records work dropped the floor of the story. How deep it now goes — and on the strength of what one document — is what this page tells.

PrologueDurchhalten

central Poland · the Canadian plains · 1858 to today

There is a German word for what carried families like the Steinkes: durchhalten — to hold out, to endure, to keep your grip on a thing through a long hard stretch when letting go would be easier. It is the word for a German Lutheran farm family pinned for generations between two empires, that pulled up its roots, crossed an ocean, and held a corner of cold Canadian prairie until it became home. The Steinkes did that. We now know the names of the parishes they came from, the names of the people who carried the holding forward, and the order in which they crossed.

What follows is the record of as much of them as the documents and the family tree have so far given up. What rests on primary record is told as fact; what rests on memorial-derived or family-tree sources is named as such. The page will keep growing as the German parish registers and the older Canadian records release the rest of what they hold.

Chapter OneMichał Steinke and Euphrosine Ratz — a Lutheran marriage at Ossowka, 1858

Rybitwy · Bialebloto · Ossowka parish · 1858

The deepest verified record this line yet stands on is a single page of a Lutheran parish register from central Poland — a marriage entered at the parish of Ossowka in February 1858. The translation reads in part:

That one document carries the line three generations beyond Edward at a single stroke. Michał Steinke had been born around 1827 in the village of Rybitwy, son of Jerzy and Doroty (née Schwartzroc) Steinke — the line of German Lutherans who had been settled in this stretch of central Poland by the eighteenth-century Lokationsbewegung and held to it through partitions and wars under the Russian Empire. Learn more about the German Lutherans of Russian Poland → He had married once before, to Ewie (Eve) Lemke, and they had had a son, Ferdinand (born 1853, the eldest of all his children). Ewie died at Białebłoto in December 1857, and seven weeks later Michał stood at the Ossowka chapel and married Eufrozyna Ratz — twenty-two years old, born at Białebłoto, daughter of the house-owner Jakob Ratz and the late Maryanny Scheffler.

Michał and Euphrosine had six more children together across the next fifteen years: Emilie (1859), Michael Jr (1862), Juliana (1865), Gustav (1867), Mathilde (1870), and Eduard — Edward — Steinke, born 6 September 1873, the youngest. Through that youngest child the line runs to the family in Grande Prairie.

Chapter TwoAcross the ocean — 1891 and 1901

Hamburg · Boulogne · Plymouth · Emerson · 1891 and 1901

The Steinkes crossed in two waves, ten years apart, and it was the children who went first.

In 1891, Edward — eighteen years old, the youngest of his father’s seven living children — sailed for Canada. He travelled in the company of, or close behind, his uncle Ludwig Steinke and his aunt Juliana (Steinke) Kreutz, both of whom also arrived in 1891. They were part of a wider chain of Volhynian and Russian-Polish Lutheran emigration that crossed through Hamburg in those years and entered the Canadian plains at Emerson, Manitoba, on the rail line up from St. Paul. Augusta Woitt came in the same wave. The two of them stood in front of a Winnipeg clerk on 27 November 1892, and were married. The registration sits in the Manitoba Vital Statistics index as marriage number 1892,001370. From that one entry the entire Canadian arc of the Steinke line proceeds.

Michał Sr did not come for another ten years. On 25 October 1901 he arrived at Ellis Island aboard the S.S. Pennsylvania — Hamburg to Boulogne-sur-Mer to Plymouth and across — together with his daughter Mathilde, her husband Julius Rentz, and Julius’s parents Anna and August. From New York the party made their way to Emerson, Manitoba, where Edward had already been a homesteader for ten years and his uncle Ludwig had settled the year of his own crossing. Michał and Euphrosine spent their last years in the Steinbach district of southeastern Manitoba, among other German Lutheran families from the same Russian-Polish settlements. Michał died there in 1908, aged eighty-one, and was buried in an unmarked grave at the Friedensthal Zion Lutheran Church Cemetery, Fredensthal, Manitoba — funeral record page 345 number 9. Euphrosine outlived him; the family tree carries her death some years on.

One son did not cross. Michał and Euphrosine’s Gustav (born 1867) is recorded as having died around 1891 and was not known ever to have reached Canada. The pattern of the migration — the youngest first, the parents and a married daughter ten years later, one son lost — is the shape this story takes.

Chapter ThreeEdward and Augusta — the prairie years, 1892 to 1940

Franklin · Wetaskiwin · Webster · 1892 to 1940

Edward and Augusta began their married life in the Rural Municipality of Franklin, in southern Manitoba near the Emerson border, where Edward had homesteaded since his arrival. Learn more about prairie homesteading and the Dominion Lands Act → Their first children were born there. A son Albert Steinke, born at Emerson on 4 January 1899, is on the Manitoba vital index — primary confirmation of the family’s southern-Manitoba years. Fourteen more children would follow, across two more provinces.

By about 1905 the Steinkes had moved west to Wetaskiwin, south of Edmonton, where a Volhynian-German settlement had taken root. The 1911 census finds Edvard (in the enumerator’s hand) and Augusta in Strathcona Sub-Districts 33 to 52 with seven children at home: Ludwig 17, Wilhelm 13, Albert 12, August 10, Augusta 5, Gustave 3, and Henry, age 2 — the son through whom the line runs to Bette.

The full count of Edward and Augusta’s children, as the Find a Grave memorial sets it down, is fifteen: Ludwig “Louis” (1893–1937), Wilhelm “Bill” (1897–1971), Albert (1899–1987), Helena (1899–1899), August (1901–1912), Bertha (1902–1903), Mathilde (b. 1904), Rudolf (b. 1905), Augusta (1906–1936), Gustave (1908–1975), Henry (1909–1984), Frederick (1910–1990), Herman (1912–1969), Martha Mae (1916–2008), and a daughter Lydia — who, the memorial text records simply, “was to have drowned, however dates are unknown.”

Five and possibly six of those children — Helena, Bertha, Mathilde, Rudolf, August, and Lydia — did not live to grow up. That was the rate of child mortality a Russian-Polish farm family was still meeting on the Canadian prairie in the first decade of the twentieth century. Augusta bore those graves and nine living children, and held the line.

By the late 1920s the family had moved one more time, north to the Peace Country, settling at Webster, the German-Lutheran district just west of Sexsmith. Learn more about the Peace River Country → The 1931 census, taken at Grande Prairie sub-district on 1 June, finds Edward at the head of a household at section NW 9 of township 76, range 4, west of the sixth meridian, with Augusta and a clutch of the youngest children still at home — including Henry, then twenty-one and single, working alongside his father. A second Steinke household, almost certainly one of Edward’s married sons, sat on the very next quarter section. The clan had pulled itself together again on the last farmable ground the prairies had to offer.

Edward died at Webster on 22 November 1940, aged sixty-seven — the Province of Alberta death certificate is record number 2698. Augusta outlived him by twenty years and died at Sexsmith on 12 May 1961, aged eighty-seven. Both are buried at the Emmaus Lutheran Cemetery, Teepee Creek — the German Protestant burying-ground earlier drafts of this page had already named as the family’s likely ground, before the records confirmed it.

Chapter FourHenry Steinke (1909 to 1984) — the son who carried the line into the Peace

Alberta 1909 · Sexsmith 1932 · Grande Prairie 1984

Henry Steinke was born on 20 April 1909 in Alberta — the eleventh of Edward and Augusta’s fifteen children, and one of the first to be born after the move west of Manitoba. He spent his boyhood through the family’s last migration, from Wetaskiwin up to the Peace, and his early manhood working the Webster farm.

In 1932, in the same Sexsmith district where the family had finally come to rest, he married Martha Mildred Gouchey, born 1911. Together they raised five children. Among them were the eldest, Allan Henry Steinke (born at Sexsmith 31 July 1934, died 15 September 2020); and Irvin Edward Steinke (1935 to 2011). The remaining three were daughters. The middle of those daughters was Bette.

Henry died on 24 May 1984, aged seventy-five, and was buried in Grande Prairie. Martha outlived him by fifteen years and died in 1999. Henry and Martha had five children — and that, in the end, is the shape of their life together.

Chapter FiveBette Doreen Steinke (1942 to 2025) — into the Rycroft line

Sexsmith 1942 · married 1959 · Grande Prairie 2025

Bette Doreen Steinke was born at Sexsmith on 26 April 1942 — the middle of Henry and Martha’s three daughters, and the fourth of their five children. She came of age in the post-war Peace Country, and on 30 October 1959, at Sexsmith, she married Samuel Eric John “Sam” Rycroft — the grandson of a man born under a Hawaiian sky. A Russian-Polish-German Lutheran farmer’s daughter and the descendant of a Honolulu soda-maker, married in a small prairie town: a meeting the Canadian west was built to make.

Sam and Bette raised four children — Lorne, Lana, Vance, and Clark — in the Grande Prairie country.

Bette outlived Sam by ten years. She died at Grande Prairie on 19 January 2025, aged eighty-two — recent enough that she is not a name in an archive but Nana Bette, remembered, photographed holding each of her great-grandchildren in turn.

The Living LineWhere the Steinke line joins the others

Grande Prairie · the confluence

The Steinke line runs through Bette Doreen Steinke to her daughter Lana Lyn Rycroft (1961 to 2015), and through Lana to her daughter Melanie Lyn Haiste (born 1983), and through Melanie — with Thomas Cheesman, the parents of three children — to Patience, Daniel, and Faith, raised in Grande Prairie.

That is what durchhalten was for.