The year Mr. Wenzel obtained title to his land, Henderson ’5 Directory gives the population of the Brokenhead settlement as 300. It soon began to decline rapidly as the result of a series of wet years which turned cultivated fields back into swamps. Dozens of families left, all of the Wenzels among them. After living in Winnipeg for some time, Mr. and Mrs. Wenzel went, in 1893, to Moose Jaw in Assiniboia, the home of their youngest daughter, Mrs. Kern, to whom they sold their homestead in May 1899 for the sum of $450. In 1905 they celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in Moose Jaw and there both passed away; Mr. Wenzel on 22 April 1907 at the age of 80 and Mrs. Wenzel on 8 May 1909 at the age of 78. Both were laid to rest in the old Moose Jaw cemetery.

The homesteads of the younger generation of the Wenzel family were close to their father’s land; Hermann took up the quarter directly to the south of his father and August the one directly to the west. In October 1893, Mr. Bachmann, formerly one of the closest neighbours of the Wenzels, reported the arrival of the eldest Wenzel daughter, Bertha and her husband, Mr. Hermann Kopf, in the district. They lived for some time on an abandoned homestead adjacent to Mr. Kopf’s father.

Friedrich Wenzel, Jr. moved from Brokenhead to the Moose Jaw district as did the third son, Ludwig and the youngest, August. Ludwig died at Moose law at the age of 46 on 2 June 1909, less than a month after his mother. August Wenzel’s son, George Wenzel, still lives in Moose Jaw and farms at Briercrest southeast of that city. The Kopfs (and of course the Kerns as already mentioned) also lived at Moose Jaw. Mrs. Kopf died there on 14 October 1930 and was laid to rest in the same cemetery as her parents and her brother Ludwig.

Hermann Wenzel was the only member of the family to remain in Manitoba. After leaving Brokenhead he moved to Winnipeg and around 1900 bought a farm southeast of Birds Hill along what was then known as “Kildonan Road”. What remains of this property (it was badly cut up by the building of No. 59 Highway) is still farmed by the two youngest sons of the Hermann Wenael family, Rudy and Charlie, both of whom live in Winnipeg. Just a half mile to the west of the junction of the McGregor Farm Road and Highway 59 is Wenzei Street, named after the Hermann Wenzel family.

Mrs. Hermann Wenzel’s maiden name was Arnis Schaeffer. (She was a sister to Mr. W.R. Schaeffer who figures so prominently in the history of Trinity congregation in Winnipeg and who later married the widow of Mr. Friedrich Buth of Greenwald.) The first two children of Mr. and Mrs. Hermann Wenzel were born at Brokenhead: Hermann Emil on 27 Dec. 1889 and Edmund Reinhold on 23 Oct. 1891. Both were baptized on 27 Dec. 1891 in Trinity, Winnipeg by Pastor Ludwig Streich. Hermann Emil was killed in a hydro accident in 1943 when he was 55 years old, but Edmund R. Wenzel celebrated his 90th birthday in good health in October 1981 and still enjoyed driving his car. His remarkable good health is perhaps due to his outdoor life; he spent more than forty years prospecting throughout northern Manitoba. In those four decades he likely walked and canoed farther than most of us have driven. His home is

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on the McGregor farm road less than half a mile from his parents’ former home.

The youngest member of the Friedrich Carl Wenzel family was Wilhelmine. In October 1885 she married Mr. Johann Heinrich Kern of Winnipeg, the birthplace of the Ti oldest of their five sons and two daughters. The second of these daughters was Wilhelmine Katherine Marie born in '1' the fall of 1888. On the third Sunday in Advent, 16 December, this daughter was one of the two infants ‘1 baptized by Pastor Friedrich Veit during the first service conducted in Winnipeg by a German Lutheran pastor. Wilhelmine Kern later became Mrs. John Gordon Ross and the mother of four children: John, Barbara, Jane and Mary Ross. Mrs. Ross attained the age of 93 years and passed away in July 1981 in Edmonton. Her second youngest brother, Lewis Kern, the last surviving member of the Kern family, died in April 1982.

Car! and Martha Kern with sons Edward and Herman.

Although the Wenzel family have not lived in }} Brokenhead for 90 years, Grandfather Wenzel’s j

homestead is still known as “Wenzeluka” - Ukrainian 1-: for “Wenzel’s Flace”. In June 1874 the Dominion ‘

government surveyors had found the quarter covered. with a dense stand of large poplars (some of them killed : by a fire some years previously). Sixty years later, when . Mr. Paul Kindcfora purchased the property, that bush _ was still there - and, if anything, more dense and the trees even bigger. Virtually the onlyr clearing was a few acres __ along the northwest side where traces of the old farmyard were still visible. The buildings themselves had already ’ disappeared by the turn of the century, and since the Wenzels left, no one else has ever lived on this quarter. I. The northeast corner of “Wenzeluka” is a high gravel ; ridge running to the north. It was along this ridge that the Kochs put up the buildings of their homestead; the north and south quarters of the west half of Section 12-5-7. j The elder Mr. Koch took up the northwest quarter as his :7 homestead and his son, Adolf H. Julius Koch, the 3 southWest quarter. The elder Mr. Koch did not move; onto his property until 6 March 1886 when he spent 10 , days there cutting a roadway into it and making :- preparations to build a house. On 26 June he returned to ;_ make hay and to finish the house. He was unable to break