Violette Chapman (nee Turner) was born on May 16, 1898 in Ednas Cross, England. Her first job was making needle envelopes in a factory. When she was 16, she met Isaiah Chapman (1889-1966), a soldier in the 2nd Battalion of the Coldstream Guards in the First World War. Isaiah was given leave from France to marry Violette on October 16, 1918. The couple lived in England for serveral years after the war, but in 1921 they sailed to New York, then travelled by train to Montreal and through to Winnipeg.
Isaiah worked as a farm hand for a couple of years before joining the Canadian Pacific Railway at Treesbank. Eventually he was transfered to Glenboro. Violette took work in the kitchen of the Leland Hotel. She stopped working once their children - Verna and Sydney - were born. In 1932, the family bought a farm north of town in the Patricia District. Violette and Isaiah moved back to Glenbroro in 1949, where they owned a grocery store and then a cafe. In 1966, the couple purchased the old Connaught School and moved it to their farm where they planned to use it as their summer home. For the last nine years of her life, Violette lived at the Personal Care Home in Glenboro. Violette Chapman died in May 1993 in Glenboro, MB. She is buried at Glenboro Cemetery.
Custodial History
As part of the Westman Oral History Collection, this collection was accessioned by the McKee Archives in 1998. The original tapes from the Westman Oral History project were deposited in the Brandon Public Library. Copies of these originals were made by Margaret Pollex of the Brandon University Language Lab at the request of Eileen McFadden, University Archivist in the early 1990s. These copies compose the collection held in the McKee Archives.
Scope and Content
Item is an audiocassette tape containing an interview with Violette Chapman about her life story. Interviewer is Irene Brown.
Notes
History/bio information from the records, the Glenboro local history "Beneath the Long Grass," and obituaries for Sydney and Isaiah Chapman. Transcript by Sydney Wright (2023). Description by Christy Henry.
Audio Tracks
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Photograph shows Isabella Louisa Pope, mother to Brandon Sun editor Fred McGuinness. Miss Pope is wearing a white lace blouse with a black pinafore-like dress.
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