Ernest and Suzanne Peterson
Family Pictures
Ernest was the youngest son of August and Anna Peterson. He was born near Nut Mountain, Saskatchewan March 19, 1917.
His wife to be, Suzanne Pauls, was born in Friedensdorf, USSR June 28, 1923, in an area that is now part of the Ukraine.
The Pauls family left the Soviet Union in the fall of 1925, initially settling in Alberta. Note: The ethnicity of Mennonites is not certain,
but generally German or Dutch.
Ernest and Suzanne grew up on farms in adjacent provinces. The Pauls family left the prairie for Vineland, Ontario in 1937.
Abe Pauls, my uncle, told me of planting one thousand acres of wheat in 1929, when they had finally gathered sufficient resources to begin
a scale of farming that could support the family, only to have that crop fail
(see note at the end of this describing the agricultural failures that began in 1929).
Ernest and Suzanne shared this prairie background, and they also shared an educational background, with public schooling
ending at eighth grade, but continued formal schooling in Bible colleges (three year programs). Ernest attended the Bethel Bible
Institute of Saskatoon, graduating April 10, 1942 and Suzanne attended The Ontario Pentecostal Bible School of Toronto,
graduating April 27, 1945.
On graduation Suzanne returned to the west as a deaconess, teaching children in Saskatchewan. It was there she was introduced to Ernest.
Ernest had just been discharged, in June of 1945, from the Canadian Air force, after serving three years in Saskatchewan
as an airframe mechanic. They returned to Ontario to marry on April 20, 1946, in Hamilton.
They had churches in Huntsville, where Lloyd was born in 1948, and Georgetown, where the twins, Donna and Dianne, were born in 1951.
They left Canada in October of 1952 to take over the Dansville Highway Tabernacle (later the Revival Tabernacle).
The small parsonage was at the back of the church. They lived there until 1968 when they bought a house in the town of Dansville.
Ernest died in November of 1993. Suzanne continued as the minister of the church until about 2000, when she retired.
She moved to Las Vegas to live with Dianne in 2001 (flying about three days after the 9/11/01 terrorist attack on New York City),
dying in Las Vegas in September of 2002.
As for the children of Ernest and Suzanne, Terry and Donna have lived in the Rochester, New York area their entire married life. Frank and Dianne Cataldo married in Rochester, New York and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2000. Lloyd Peterson and Marguerite Fontaine (she retains her maiden name) have lived in Tennessee, and in Germany, and now live in Fair Oaks, California. Before marriage Lloyd lived at sea (US Navy Pacific) for two years; and in Logan, Utah for three years.
This quote is extracted from Notes and Correspondence, Comparison between the Droughts of the 1930s and the 1980s in the Southern Prairies of Canada, Nkemdirm and Weber, Journal of Climate, American Meteorological Society, Volume 12, 1999, "Three successive crop failures in 1929, 1930, and 1931, with yields of 70-150 kg/ha, were attributed to lack of timely rainfall. The next two years both began with optimism and good crops but turned into economic disasters. In 1932, falling grain prices did not cover the cost of harvesting, and in 1933, great sun-blocking clouds of grasshoppers stripped the land of all growing things. The year 1934 was one of the driest on record to that point, and vast clouds of dust accompanied the continent-wide drought. In 1935 rust fungus decimated the wheat crop, and an outbreak of equine encephalitis, spread by mosquitoes that hatched during the moist spring, killed many of the remaining hunger-weakened working horses. Abundant spring moisture due to record snowfall in the winter of 1935/36 gave way to new drought and heat records in the summer of 1936 throughout the North American plains. The dry spring of 1937 introduced the driest summer yet in the southern Canadian prairies, and the combination of even more intense heat waves, dust storms, and grasshopper plagues left the region devoid of greenery."
This article provided by Lloyd E. Peterson.