Julius and Magda Jakub

Alumni Type: Immigrant
Country of Origin : Czechoslovakia

In December of 1948, fifteen-year-old Magda Sinar and her mother Mary immigrated to Canada from the small village of Petrove in Eastern Slovakia. They arrived by ship and travelled through Pier 21 to reunite with her father George who was working in Montreal. Geography and World War II had meant that Magda had not seen her father for a decade. The Slovak community of urban Montreal was her home for the rest of her teenage years. At roughly the same time in 1948, a twenty-year-old Julius Jakub was coming to Canada by plane. Julius came from the village of Vrbovec near Michalovce in Eastern Slovakia. While their homes in Slovakia were only separated by about 10 kilometers, they never met in Slovakia, but they did meet in Montreal in the early fifties. On November 15th, 1952 they were married in Montreal and they would be together for more than 63 years of marriage.

In 1954, their first son Milan was born in Montreal. Looking for opportunities, Julius started working in the mines of Sudbury.

Julius had family in Southern Ontario who worked in tobacco so eventually they found their way to the sandy soil and tobacco farms of Scotland and Simcoe, Ontario. In the early sixties they were share growing tobacco on a farm south of Simcoe when their second son, Edward was born in 1962.

In 1967, the Jakub family made their way to Brantford, Ontario and what would become their permanent home for the next fifty years. Julius found work as a machine tender in a paper mill. They worked tirelessly to provide stability for their two sons, a feeling that was strikingly absent from Magda and Julius' youth.

In their later years they enjoyed being involved grandparents (“Baba” and “Dedo”) to their three grandchildren Anastasia, Nikolai and Lisa.

Their life journey started in Slovakia with the challenges of the Great Depression and World War II but they embarked on a new path in Canada with little money or knowledge of the language and culture. Canada gave them a place to prosper and raise a family. They sacrificed, worked hard and demonstrated incredible resiliency to build a life that set their descendants up for success. Magda died in 2016 at the age of 82. Julius would live to be 91 and died in 2019.

We will always be grateful for the values that we learned through their actions. We will continue to honour their memory by passing on their values to future generations of Jakubs.