Preface

T his is a family history about members of a minority community that has enjoyed remarkable success despite weathering decades of social and legal discrimination.It has taken fifty years and several contributors to bring this book to its present form.And it would not exist had the second generation -the children of immigrant parents -not realized that they had a story to tell and worked to preserve it.The primary locales are British Columbia and Punjab, places of dramatic contrast in climate, topography, flora, fauna, culture, tradition, and history, and yet linked in the lives of immigrants and the relatives they left behind.The family's background is Sikh, which means that it has belonged to a distinctive and visible minority both in India and in Canada.Its story is about change, challenge, trauma, foresight, confidence, and achievement in two countries that are half a world apart.This is not a typical Sikh family -if such a thing exists -but it is a family whose lives and actions reflected and affected what happened in their expatriate world as well as their ancestral home.The surname, as it appears in print, tells us something.When writing in English the family spells it as Siddoo, although the common English version is Sidhu.Kapoor Singh Siddoo, the family's first immigrant to Canada, changed the spelling at the beginning of the First World War after he had been in North America for nearly eight years.He did so because he reasoned that it would help English speakers to get the pronunciation right; and he was being pragmatic in a way that was entirely consistent with his approach to life.

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