52 Ancestors: #9 The Importance of Keeping Family Treasures

How sad it is when family members want to clean out their desks, closets, or attics, and then they quickly throw away memories such as letters, receipts, pictures, etc. without knowing that others think of them as treasures. These pieces of family history may never be seen again. It is very important that you let other family members know of your interest in these items so that they will not be thrown away.

I remember my mother told me about the time when her family was cleaning out her own maternal grandmother’s home after she died. They came across a phonograph player that was in the attic. My mother said that her mother didn’t see the importance of keeping such an ornate machine as the phonograph because it wouldn’t be needed anymore. My mother said that they just threw it out with the rest of the unwanted items and pieces of furniture. She said that she wished now they had not thrown it away because that machine would be priceless today in regard to our family history.
 

The phonograph was probably played quite a bit out on the South Dakota prairie because my grandmother, Teckla Esterberg Swanson, liked to play the piano, especially for church socials and dances. There was no electricity, so kerosene lamps were hung on the walls of the church where couples danced by the light’s amber glow. My mom not only remembered her mother playing uplifting ragtime tunes on their upright piano, but also mom closed her eyes and envisioned her mom’s wavy curls bouncing up and down, in time to the beat. I close my eyes and I can see that vision in my own mind’s eye and I can almost hear the music!

52 Ancestors: #8 Everything is Relative

You’ve heard the statement that “Everything is Relative.” Well, that is correct as far as searching for family history is concerned.

I compare family history as when you go into a restaurant and sit down for a meal. As you sit there and wait for service, customers will start to get up and leave the restaurant after paying their bill. You then notice that when everything is set up again for the next group of people, they sit down and wait their turn in the process of being served. And again, when they are done, they leave and the next group comes to sit down.

I look at this at the same way as life itself. You are born, wait to be served by your parents, get schooled by teachers, learn all there is about what life has to offer, and then you “eat of the ‘fruit of life’ ” and learn from it. You also enjoy what you have in life just as you would a superb meal on the table.

Along the way, people you know will “visit your table” and enjoy your company. You marry and have children, and then grandchildren. In the end, after everyone is gone from your table, you are ready to “pay back” what you have received. You pay “what you owe” and for what you have received as if what you get has a high value. You will pay anything to show that you appreciate the “service” given by God and His greatness for this wonderful life that you are living.

In a sense, though, you will have to leave this world behind and assess your life. You will “get up from the table” and start to leave, but not without thinking of how nice it was when you were there.

After you are gone, others will remember you in a kind way for what you have done and get ready for the next group of family that is born. The next group of people will sit down and enjoy what you have enjoyed and think about their lives just as you did and enjoy their circle of friends and family.

As you can see, “everything IS relative” and comes around to complete the circle of life.

52 Ancestors: #7 David Emanuel Nylen

David Emanuel Nylen was a very interesting man. He was my step-grandfather who was married to my father's mother, Martha Hansen Welte, who had been widowed in December of 1929 when she was 41 years old. She married Dave in 1937. From what I heard, at one time he was the manager of King Lumber in Bigfork, Minnesota. He was also quite a violinist who played at the fun events such as parties at local churches and halls. Before they were married to their spouses, Dave and Martha would entertain with his fiddle playing and her singing like the Jenny Lind of her day. I heard that they were very good.

As they had known one another before they married, when they each had lost their own spouse within the space of a few days in December of 1929, it seemed inevitable that they should get together and marry. Dave's wife was Annie S. Larson. They had two children who may have been twins from the birth and death information I found in the online Minnesota Historical Society website, and it appears that they died in infancy. I heard that the children were buried on the family farm, surrounded by a small white picket fence. I know that Annie Larson is buried in the Bigfork Cemetery near where the Rice and Bigfork Rivers come together. He died in October of 1970 and he is buried next to Martha, his second wife.

When I visited them at the house in town near the old Bigfork High School, he would show me around his woodworking shop. He was very good at working with all kinds of wood. I even have several of the pieces that he created.

He also had an old-fashioned toaster which opened up on each side. While he was taking out the toast, he would talk about the Kennedy family and how they made their money running moonshine! He did not like them very much. I would also watch him as he tipped his hot cup of coffee into his saucer beneath the cup. I learned later that this was so that the coffee would cool off as he drank from the saucer.

 

He never talked about his family who lived in Sweden and I never asked. I do know from his death certificate that his father's name was John Nylen and his mother's name was Mary Setterquist. He was born 5 Dec 1885 in Cokato, Wright County, Minnesota. 

 

52 Ancestors: #6 Citing Important Events and Serendipity

It is very important that as you find more names and dates in records, you need to reference where you found them. Not only do you want credibility and proof attached to each find, but you also want the next person to pick up where you left off and be able to find the same thing you did. As I pore through old parish registers from various parishes in Norway, the Norwegian words get to look familiar so I can put the Norwegian-English dictionary down for a bit.

There are many resources online that make it a lot easier to find what you are looking for. However, if you don’t cite where you found them, they will be lost forever. When others want to know more about certain details, it is easier if you can show valid evidence of where you found your facts. You will be more accurate with your continued research and have less conflicting data.

When I was going through the Norwegian “bygdeboks” (farm books) about 38 years ago, I spent a week going through every page, every day, but it was a wealth of information for each region of Norway. For those of us who have Norwegian ancestors, these books not only give us a flavor of the life back then with listings of occupations included next to each name, but it also showed lines going back, it seemed into oblivion, for each family. They were all written in Norwegian, but I was so happy to have found these books that I didn’t care.

I didn’t even know these books existed until I went to Norway and had the privilege of sitting down with my dad’s 2^nd cousin, Arvid, which would make him my 2^nd cousin 1x removed, and he pulled a book out from one of his cabinets in the living room. He sat down next to me and explained that our ancestors’ names, occupations, and other local area history of the Aust-Agder and Holt regions, where our ancestors lived and died, were in this farm book. He told me that I probably could get the same book in local historical societies or university libraries in the United States.

In this book, there were also pictures of area industries and large farms and estates. He showed me a picture of a large estate of the Aall family who owned the Nes Verk iron works. Then he motioned with his arm toward the window, pointing in the direction of the road, and he said that the estate was not too far away, and that one of our ancestors had worked there as a taxidermist. He tried to explain, in his broken English, who that person was and he pointed to his name in the book. He was Peder Hansen, who is my 2^nd great grandfather on my dad’s side, and I could just feel that I was close to really discovering who my ancestors were and what they did in Norway. I remembered when my dad came off the plane, walking down the steps from the airplane door, he looked over at me and said, “We’re home!” and I can still see his smiling face in the afternoon sunshine as he went inside the airport. I was lucky enough to be able to travel with my parents to Norway on that July day in 1983.

I do remember that I had written each detail of our trip to Norway because I knew that my memory would fade over time, and that it would come in handy one day. In my many boxes of papers, books, and pictures, I just came across a 6-year period of notes 40 years ago that I had written down, but had forgotten about, detail by detail, of important events happening at the time. I also found lists of notes for pictures that I had taken back then, over almost the same period of time. We didn’t have Facebook to share pictures, or Flickr or Picasa, to have immediate sharing of memories with others.

52 Ancestors: #5 Anton Hansen and His Daughter, Martha Antoinette Hansen

Anton Hansen

 

 

Martha Antoinette Hansen

Like father, like daughter. There is quite a resemblance between them, and I think they were both beautiful people who are a part of my family history. They are of Norwegian heritage and I can see that she looks a lot like him, but that she probably took after her mother around the eyebrows. It’s too bad that she did not know much about him because he died when she was about 3 ½ months old. His name was Anton Hansen.

Family legend was that he played violin in the Norway Symphony Orchestra. Then as the years went by, that story became quite diluted. After many years of research, the story was that he played piano. Little did I know, in reality, he worked in a factory and he probably contracted tuberculosis from his occupation which was listed on Martha’s baptism certificate as a “tredreier” meaning “wood turner” or lathe operator. He died young at 26 years of age.

According to Norwegian parish registers covering travel between cities in Norway, in August of 1888, he and his family relocated from Holt in the Aust-Agder area to Grønland Parish, Oslo. His family consisted of his wife, Anna, and twin daughters, Tordis and Petra, who had just turned 2 years old. His wife was about 7 months pregnant with my grandmother, Martha, who was born 3 Oct 1888, and she was baptized in Grønland Parish.

It must have been a very sad and trying time with young children, including a newborn, when Anton died in January of 1889. I can just imagine the stress that Anna was going through when this happened.

Two of her brothers had already immigrated to Escanaba, Michigan, so she decided to come and live with them. She traveled with her one remaining twin daughter, Tordis, and my grandmother, Martha, and they came through Ellis Island in August of 1892. Martha was almost 4 years old, so she didn’t have much memory of that life-changing trip. While she was alive, I never asked about any remembrances that her mother talked about, or her own, of that day.

52 Ancestors: #4 Teckla Carolyn Esterberg

I don’t remember much about my grandmother, my mom's mother, as she died when I was a young girl. Her name was Teckla Carolyn Esterberg, and she was born in 1886, in Huron, Dakota Territory, the daughter of Swedish parents who had immigrated to America in the late 1800s.

According to my mom, my grandmother was very regimented and stern. She was 38 years old in 1925 when she had my mom, but as she was the fourth girl, they had hoped for a boy. She always felt out of place as she felt she wasn't really wanted. Two years later, however, her parents were very happy when they finally got their boy, Wendell, in 1927.

My mom and Wendell were inseparable and went through a lot growing up in South Dakota and Minnesota. They were times that my mom would grow angry about and shake her head and say how such a bad time it was. Her dad would try to drown his problems with drink to help get him through the rough times, and my mom said that there were many of those! She was afraid of her dad when he had too much to drink and would sit on his lap and say how much she loved him. She did not want to get on the bad side of him because he would go off the deep end and talk about how angry and unlucky he was, and then he would take out his frustrations on her mom and her brother, Wendell.

In the spring of 1954, Teckla became very sick because of a series of strokes that affected her brain. My mother felt sad when she visited her mother in the hospital, because her mother didn't know who she was when she saw her.

I remember when my grandmother died in March of 1955, we went to Minneapolis for the funeral. I was, however, too young to actually attend the funeral so I stayed with other relatives. I remember many of those who came for the funeral were talking softly among themselves, reminiscing about fond memories, and then they would often use a tissue to wipe away tears. I was standing behind a wingback chair and I didn't know exactly why everyone was doing that, but I knew it was a very sad time and I was very happy not to be a part of it.

When we went past the cemetery on our way home, mom started to tear up and put a tissue up to her nose. I know she was having a rough time, knowing that her mom had just died. I believe that we were in our 1951 Mercury at the time and I remember my dad turning to her and telling her to calm down a little, not be so emotional, and that everything would be alright.



Teckla with Wendell, Johnny (her grandson), and Beryl (my mother)

 

52 Ancestors: #3 Walter Alfred Esterberg

My great uncle, Walter Alfred Esterberg, was born on 27 Oct 1890, in Huron, South Dakota. His parents, born in Sweden, immigrated in the middle to late 1800s and settled in what was known as Dakota Territory. He was the second and last child, born four years after his sister Teckla.

He never married or had children, but he enjoyed his four nieces and one nephew. In South Dakota, he lived with his mother, Anna, after his dad died in 1913. After she died in 1933, Walter inherited the farm.

He really loved to travel which consisted of a series of train trips. During one train trip, his brother-in-law, George Swanson, helped with the farm which had cows, chickens, geese, and pigs. Another of his train trips was to the World’s Fair in 1933, where he had a gold pin fashioned with my mother’s name, Beryl, and gave it to her.

Walter wrote a letter in 1941, where he talked about the weather and his farm responsibilities, but he was having a difficult time with pain in his stomach, and he wrote that he was going to get it checked out. Months later, his sister, Teckla, my maternal grandmother, had to help take care of him because he was too ill. After only three months, he died in a Huron hospital on 10 June 1941, from carcinoma (cancer) of the stomach. Three days later he was laid to rest in Riverside Cemetery, located on the east side of Huron, with graveside Odd Fellows services.

Picture shows Walter Esterberg, with his nieces, Maxine and Georgia Swanson - about 1913, on the farm outside Huron, South Dakota.