Shania Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, daughter of Clarence and Sharon Edwards. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother then moved to Timmins,Ontario with Eilleen and her sisters Jill and Carrie Ann. Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa, and they had two more children, Mark and Darryl. Jerry adopted the girls, legally changing their last name to Twain. Because of her connection to her stepfather, in the past, people had presumed Twain’s ancestry was Ojibwa, but she stated in an interview that her biological father was part Cree. As well, though her mother she is a descendant of Zacharie Cloutier. Her maternal grandmother, Eileen Pearce, emigrated from Newbridge, Kildare, Ireland.
Eilleen Twain had a hard childhood in Timmins. Her parents earned little and there was often a shortage of food in the household. Eilleen did not confide her situation to school authorities, fearing they might break up the family. In the remote, rugged community, she learned to hunt and to chop wood. At one point, while Jerry was at work, her mother drove the rest of the family 425 miles (684 km) south to a Toronto homeless shelter for assistance. Back in Timmins, Twain started singing at bars at the age of eight to try to make ends meet, often earning twenty dollars between midnight and one in the morning performing for remaining customers after the bar had finished serving. Although she expressed a dislike for singing in those bars, Twain believes that this was her own kind of performing arts school on the road. She has said of the ordeal, “My deepest passion was music and it helped. There were moments when I thought ‘I hate this’. I hated going into bars and being with drunks. But I loved the music and so I survived”.[9] Twain wrote her first songs at the age of ten, Is Love a Rose and Just Like the Storybooks which were fairy tales in rhyme.[10] She states that the art of creating, of actually writing songs, “was very different from performing them.
Shania Twain was born Eilleen Regina Edwards in Windsor, Ontario, daughter of Clarence and Sharon Edwards. Her parents divorced when she was two and her mother then moved to Timmins,Ontario with Eilleen and her sisters Jill and Carrie Ann. Sharon married Jerry Twain, an Ojibwa, and they had two more children, Mark and Darryl. Jerry adopted the girls, legally changing their last name to Twain. Because of her connection to her stepfather, in the past, people had presumed Twain’s ancestry was Ojibwa, but she stated in an interview that her biological father was part Cree. As well, though her mother she is a descendant of Zacharie Cloutier. Her maternal grandmother, Eileen Pearce, emigrated from Newbridge, Kildare, Ireland.
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