1945

Amelia Victoria Itcush was born on September 16, 1945 to Victoria D. Itcush (nee Donisen) and Dioneace Itcush, in a doctors’ clinic just outside Viceroy, in rural southwestern Saskatchewan.

The Itcush family lived on a farm. Youngest of three girls born a year and a half apart, Amelia joined eldest sister Elaine, and middle child Diane; Amelia was referred to as “Baby” until she was five.

Both sides of her family immigrated to North America from a shtetl in Radauti, a largely Jewish region of northern Romania close to the Ukrainian border.

Her paternal side, the Itcushes, had arrived at Ellis Island in 1896 and survived awful poverty in New York City, then travelled westward and up through the Dakotas to southern Saskatchewan farm country. The Donisens, her maternal family, left Romania slightly later, in the early 1900s, settling northeast of Regina in Zaner, then moving down to farm in Avonlea.

When Amelia was a year and a half old, her family moved to Regina. 

The Itcush family visited two farms in summer: the Itcush farm in Reidlyn, and the Donisen farm near Avonlea. The farms were all-purpose, primarily wheat, cattle, horses. There was a big garden, not far from hill country, with a slough the kids played in.