The WARKENTIN and DRAPER families came from neighbouring areas in western Europe and arrived in North America centuries apart and by vastly different routes. 

The DRAPER family was originally from the Netherlands. John  le Drapour and his brothers, William and Henry were cloth weavers by trade.  They moved to England six hundred years ago and established their weaving business in Yorkshire.

Three Hundred years later, in the late17th century, Samuel Draper ran away from the home of his father, Thomas Draper, an English Clergyman. He became a Pirate, who sailed the "Seven Seas", eventually settling his family near Boston, Massachusetts.  Boston Draper, Samuel's son married Tryphena Brown the great great grand daughter of Thomas and Bridget Brown, who settled in the New England Colonies about 1638, near Concord and Sudbury Massachusetts.

The WARKENTIN family were of the Mennonite faith. They moved from the Netherlands in the 16th century to western Prussia where Johann was born in the Vistula delta village of Blumenort in 1760. 

In 1782 Catherine the Great, of Russia, invited the Mennonite people to settle on land that was being opened up in the southern Ukraine. The first group left for the Ukraine in 1788. In 1804 while Napoleon's Armies were rampaging across Europe, Johann and his family started the long trek to their new home in the Ukraine.

Just seventy one years later, in 1875, Jacob Warkentin, Johann's great grandson, along his foster parents, and thousands of other Mennonites, emigrated to North America. The Mennonite families settled in Manitoba,  Minnesota,  Kansas,  Nebraska.  Jacob settled in Altona, Manitoba. The migration saved thousands of families from the horrors of the Russian revolution, forty two years later, that were inflicted on their kinsmen who stayed behind.