📍Timmins, Ontario, Canada
1967 – 1983“Shania Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, in 1965, and grew up in Timmins, a gold-mining town in the forests of northern Ontario, where the winters are long and fiercely cold. Her mother, Sharon, married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwe man from the nearby Mattagami First Nation, who adopted her and her sisters and gave them his surname. She grew up immersed in his family's Ojibwe culture, and she has said that his community welcomed her as one of their own. The family was very poor. There were weeks without groceries, when the children had little more than bread, and she has spoken about the violence and hardship in the home. Music was her escape. From the age of eight, her mother took her to sing in local bars and hotels late at night to earn a little money for the family, and she later described those smoky rooms as her performing-arts school. She also worked alongside her stepfather in the bush on his reforestation crews, planting trees and writing songs in her head as she worked. Country singers like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, and pop from the radio, were her teachers. When she was twenty-two, her mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident, and she took on the care of her younger siblings, singing at a resort in Muskoka to support them. In the 1990s she became the best-selling female country artist of all time with albums like Come On Over. Timmins later opened a museum dedicated to her life, and she has often credited the town, and the Ojibwe family who raised her, with giving her her strength.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today