The Haistes are my wife Melanie's father's side, and they came a long way to get here. The trail runs from a registration district in Yorkshire to a homestead in the Saskatchewan prairie to a life in Edmonton — three generations and an ocean.
Read the full Haiste story — thirteen generations, Yorkshire to the Peace Country →
The earliest confirmed Haiste in Melanie's direct line is John Haiste, born around 1840 in Yorkshire, who married Jessy Hobson in late 1866 in the Wharfedale registration district, near Otley. They had nine children. One of those children was Ernest Haiste, born October 16, 1881, in Pontefract, Yorkshire — a working-class family in industrial Yorkshire when the textile mills and coal mines were running flat-out.
Around 1900, Ernest emigrated to Canada. By the 1926 Canada Census he was farming in the Assiniboia district of Saskatchewan with his wife and several children. Ernest is the great-great-grandfather on this branch.
His son Sydney Haiste was born around 1906 in Saskatchewan and came of age on the family's prairie farm. The next generation — Sidney's son — is the one Melanie knew as her grandfather.
Sidney James “Jim” Haiste was born April 23, 1931, in Alberta and died August 18, 2018, in Edmonton at 87. He spent the last 23 years of his life with Parkinson's disease. His funeral was held at St. Patrick's Anglican Church in Edmonton. Jim's brothers were Cliff (married to June), Bob (married to Audrey), and Grant, who predeceased him.
Jim's first wife was Margaret E. “Betty” Funnell Haiste — Melanie's grandmother — born around 1930 in Manitoba to Thomas Ernest Funnell (1892) and Ethel Bastin (1893–1975). Betty and Jim raised their family across Dawson Creek, Edmonton, and Calgary in the post-war decades. After Betty passed, Jim married Catherine Caroline Barclay (January 18, 1936 – April 26, 2016).
Jim and Betty had six children: Patrick (married to Karen), Cynthia, Patricia, Daniel “Dan” (Melanie's father), Eric (married to Cheraty), and Chris, who passed before his father.
The Haistes are an Anglican family, deep into prairie agriculture going back to Ernest's homestead, and now spread across Alberta from Edmonton to Grande Prairie. There's more to gather — I want to track Sydney's full life and find out where the Haiste name actually lands in Yorkshire records (probable spelling variants include Haste and Hayste).