Friesen, Helen Dyck (1883-1969)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 1969 Apr 24 p. 11

Birth date: 1883 Oct 10

text of obituary:

MRS. HELEN DYCK FRIESEN

Helen Dyck Friesen was born in Elbing, Prussia on Oct. 10, 1883 to Cornelius and Katherina Koop Dyck. Her parents had grown up in Prussia but had moved into Russia for a time. Father Dyck then moved back to Elbing, Prussia and there took over his father's farm.

Guided by the unseen hand of God, at the age of nine she came to America with her parents and began the new life on the frontier of America in Harvey County, Kansas in 1892. She tells how her mother had baked a sack full of Zwiebach and these they toasted and ate on the ship. The ship was an old one but made the dangerous three-week journey across the sea. It is said that the ship sank on the next trip.

A vital part of this exciting and hard life of the frontier was her baptism in the Hoffnungsau Church in 1901. It was also in this church that she was married to Henry Friesen on March 18, 1903, and as a bride of 19 she became the mother to her husband's four orphaned children. To this marriage were born two boys and five daughters.

In 1914 the family moved to Dubois, Idaho and there helped settle a small Mennonite community. They became members of the Bethel Mennonite Church at that place. The country proved to be too dry for their kind of farming and the community dissolved and the Friesens moved back to their farm in Harvey County.

In 1943 they retired from the farm and moved to 800 E. 7th Street in Hutchinson. Mrs. Friesen kept this as her home until her passing. ' A part of her life was the experience of death in the family. Helen, a daughter, died in 1929. Her husband passed away in 1944. After this she had to bear the grief of two children alone. Elizabeth died in 1955 and son Barney in 1957.

A family of eight children — Mrs. George Baergen, Mrs. Hulda Miller, Mrs. Nick Wiens, Mrs. A. M. Weber, Mrs. J. S. Unruh, Mrs. Selma Wiebe, Milton and Henry Friesen — plus 28 grandchildren remain to remember a mother and grandmother.

This in brief is the story of one of God's children, a life that spanned some 85 years. Blessed are they that live in the Lord, for even in death, they praise his holy name.