Margaret Etiennette Lilje

Margaret was born the 2nd of November, 1927, in Morinville, Alberta, to Rosie née Francoeur and Leopold Froment. She was the eighth of fifteen children, and life was sometimes hard. In 1939, she left home and worked as a farm labourer in St. Albert, Alberta. She stayed a few years then returned home. These were the wartime years and she was needed to work on the family farm.

At seventeen, she found work at G.W.G. in Edmonton, Alberta and became a seamstress. She stayed for a few years then moved to B.C., where her family built a business on Kingsway Avenue and a home on Mary Hill Road in Port Coquitlam. Margaret met Lloyd Lilje at a dance hall in Vancouver, where their love of ballroom dancing blossomed into a relationship. They married in 1949 in Coquitlam, B.C.

Margaret and Lloyd raised their 3 children in Coquitlam, and shared their lives and home to many friends and relatives, and to those in need. Both were known as hard working and were respected in social and recreational activities. Though Margaret became blind and deaf in her later years, nothing stopped her. Even the toll her cancer took on her did not limit her until the last few weeks. Her wishes were not to have a service. Margaret's surviving siblings are Valerien Froment, Keremeos, BC, and Yvonne Fries, Victoria, BC. She spoke of them often and fondly and we will all miss her.

Love, her family.