Germaine Baril

It is with a heavy heart that we announce that Germaine Muriel Baril, PhD, French professor, world traveler, and beloved mother and grandmother, passed away on August 2nd , 2022. Born July 21st , 1937, in the Duclos Hospital at Bonnyville, Alberta, Canada. She lived a wonderful life over her 85 years. She grew up in Northern Alberta on the prairie and spent summers in a lumber camp where her father worked. Dodging bears, listening to the wolves howl in the night, and taking care of her five siblings (Margurite, Bernice, Diane, David, and Janet) as she was the eldest, she remembered her early childhood fondly at the lumber camp before moving to Edmonton in 1943. In 1951, her 9 th grade year, she earned the Governor General of Canada Medal for academic excellence. After high school, she spent two years in southern France teaching English to French students. She loved the French Rivera especially the warmth of the Mediterranean after the cold of the northern Alberta prairie. She finished her bachelor’s degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta. There she married Henk van Oene and bore two sons, Marc and Ian; the family immigrated to the United States in 1967. While living in Detroit she completed her master’s degree and PhD in French at the University of Michigan in 1978. After her divorce from Henk, she moved back to Canada for a year teaching French at the University of South Western Ontario. A year later, she moved to Kentucky becoming an associate Professor of French at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. She finished her teaching career in 2000 as an associate professor at the University of the Frazier Valley in Abbotsford, British Columbia. She lived in Vancouver, British Columbia for 25 years in a nice apartment, that she loved dearly, overlooking English Bay. This gave her great joy to have such beautiful views and living in a beautiful city near her mother and sisters. She loved to ski, travel, and read, her three big hobbies. She traveled all over the world: France, Italy, China, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Germany, Spain, Chile, Peru, Mexico and throughout the United States and Canada. She had many dear friends who shared her passions and who kept in touch with her for her whole life. She loved her two boys and spent the last 10 years of her life living with them. She is survived by her sisters, Diane Klose and Bernice Baril, her sons Marc van Oene (married to Carla) and Ian van Oene (married to Stacy) her seven grandchildren, Alexander, Nicholas, Robert, and Rebecca van Oene, Muriel, Aaron, and Martha van Oene, and three great grandchildren, Jackson, Odin and Cameron van Oene. Her ashes are interred at Kaysville Cemetery, Kaysville, Utah.

Germaine Baril

July 21, 1937 - August 2, 2022