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.

Cemetery Photos - Mound Cemetery, LeSueur, MN

My Family's Roots

This is the part of the blog where I can tell stories and hope that everyone will read how important these stories are to my family history research as a whole.

 

My family came from Germany - the Baden area.

• Nordweil
• Blechheim

 

Book Review: Advanced Genealogy Research Techniques - Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter

Book Review: Advanced Genealogy Research Techniques - Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter