Dina Woodward

Dina Woodward was born in Schiedam, Holland on February 15, 1925, the second-to-last of eight children. World War II blighted her teenage years and she worked at a number of menial jobs to help bring in money and food stamps for her family.

In 1945, a street dance was organized to welcome Canadian soldiers to Schiedam and any musicians and pretty Dutch girls were more than welcome. David Woodward, a recent Welsh immigrant to Canada, asked Dina to dance and after three months of courtship, an engagement ring bought with 500 cigarettes, and two years of writing back and forth with English-Dutch dictionaries, Dina boarded the S.S. Waterman bound for Montreal. They married in Fort St. John on July 3, 1947.

David and Dina homesteaded in B.C.’s Peace River country, raising a big garden, and fields of wheat, oats, alfalfa and brome grass as well as cattle, horses, pigs and chickens. Dina was asked to sing the Dutch national anthem at the first Women’s Institute meeting she attended. Her outgoing nature and adventurous spirit meant that she enjoyed meeting and making friends all her long life. Four children came along as well: Caroline, Marion, David and Shani. All attended the two-room school in Cecil Lake and joined the 4-H club. Farm chores and hundreds of acres to explore kept the family busy all four seasons of the year. Often David would work away from home in the winter, at logging camps or in construction, and Dina and the children would keep the farm going, with wood heat, no indoor plumbing, and for many years, no electricity or telephone either.

Dina, like so many Dutch immigrants, was a very hard worker and managed to bake several batches of bread in the wood fired-oven weekly and all their meals on the stove top. She also helped saw all the wood that went into the stove and the heater in her farm house, from logs brought home on a sleigh by David and the two oldest daughters and the team of horses.

After twenty-seven years on the farm, the Woodward family moved to the town of Fort St. John and worked together as an office cleaning company which Dina continued on her own when David was hired by the Department of Agriculture and later still by the experimental seed company, Oseko Seeds. They travelled to Holland, Wales and England to visit their relatives and also welcomed them as visitors to Canada. When David died suddenly in 1984, Dina’s strength of character did not desert her. She learned to drive, joined the B.C. Senior’s swimming team, earning a number of medals for the Peace River North contingent, thanks to learning a decent racing dive and amused her grandchildren by zooming down a waterslide at the age of sixty-five. She travelled to Hawaii with good friends to escape the harsh northern winters a good number of times and truly enjoyed those excursions.

Dina moved south in the early 90’s and lived in Nanaimo and then Penticton before returning to live at Nanaimo Seniors’ Village in 2018. She passed away on February 29, 2020, only two weeks after celebrating her 95th birthday with a pedicure party with her daughters, lots of flowers, chocolates and a lovely seafood dinner with a glass of bubbly. She was predeceased by her son David and daughter Shani and survived by daughters Caroline and Marion, her grandchildren Cristal Folka, Russell Wark, Randy Wark and Trevor Wark, Nicole Woodward, Tiffany Woodward and D.J. Woodward, and Seamus Woodward-George and their partners and families. Dina is survived as well by her remaining sibling in Holland, her beloved youngest sister, Sjaan Van Der Linden, and all the next generations there, and by the far-flung Woodward tribe in Canada, Wales, England, the U.S.A. and Australia. Dina is also missed by many friends, including her best friends Riek in Penticton and Johanna at Nanaimo Seniors Village. The family would especially like to thank the many kind staff at Nanaimo Seniors Village and the compassionate medical team at Nanaimo Regional Hospital.

A scattering of ashes and a return to the Peace River country will happen at a later date. Funeral arrangements courtesy of Yates Memorial Service in Parksville, BC.