4/25/1891: and thus, some begatting in this way that it happened

Marriage of Alfred Peterson and Hilda Larson In Stillwater, Mn.  Thank you you freaky deaky micro fiche-ing Mormons.

I wouldn’t go so far to claim young people in pre 1900 rural farm hamlet Sweden never married for romantic love. But I wouldn’t guess it was really romantic love very often, such that I understand the prevailing anthropology. I’d guess it was more like… croft hamlet boy and girl are roughly the same age. They reach adulthood. Their families know each other. Circumstances allow for the now young man to take on a plot of farm land, which moves the young woman to accept a marriage proposal. Such that these pairings would have their own inevitability based on available suitors and family dynamics, I think it’s also right to understand in Sweden at that time a woman had leeway to decline if she didnt like a man. But then there was also an incentive to accept to get into a marriage household rather than live at her parent’s or work as a servant in someone else’s. So the women were inclined to accept, and this is the way marriages happened. Soft match making. A soft arranged marriage system.

Enter, slow rolling land crisis in rural Sweden 1850-1900. Some diseases were nipped, more children made it to adulthood, and family farms had been split so many times for hereditary handoffs that it was uniformly impossible to give a for example 20 yo man a plot big enough to sustain a living for a family.

Swedish young people went to North America to work. Do a genealogy project where you are in the deets, you will find they were overwhelmingly single, the men and the women. Re the women, that there were so many that came single and unattached is I think counterintuitive to reflexive thinking on let’s call it “individual autonomy by gender” of those times.

They’re in America now, those Swedish twenty-somethings, and single. If they didn’t go to America to farm / homestead or in anticipation of marrying a farmer, how do they do household formation? How do they pair bond? How do they do the thing?

Oh I’m sure there was a local social calendar for every ethnic immigrant type, and you didn’t miss that opportunity to mingle amongst. But also…

My great great grandparents Alfred and Hilda there…. Alfred came to Bayport in 1888 having followed his first cousins the Svendsens to work as a laborer at the Tozer Sawmill. His first cousins probably knew the guy that hired them, Charles Johnson, from home. Alfred and his cousins the Svendsens were from Troxhult and Johnson was from Binarretorp. These are villages about 5 miles apart.

Johnson had been working at the sawmill since 1873. He married and started a family, but his first wife died 1886. Siblings Amanda and Bonde Larson arrive in Bayport that year. They are from Hastmahult, merely 2 miles away from where Johnson had been from. The origin families had to know each other and the Larson’s were no doubt in Bayport for work as result of the overseas mail chain, with previous arrivals writing back “there’s laborer and domestic work here, it’s good.”

Amanda Larson ends up marrying the widow Charles Johnson in 1887. He’s 36, she’s 23.

Johnson in the late 1880’s puts up a good sized house and then also probably a boarding house right next to it (539 and 555 2nd St. N. now, still standing) a street away from the riverfront in town. Charles and Amanda (Larson) Johnson by 1888 are raising 5 kids. They invite Amanda’s sister Hilda to come from Sweden and live with them, and probably (I speculate…) be their domestic. She’s there by fall of 1889. My great great grandfather is boarding next door in the other house. Alfred is 24, Hilda is 23. They didn’t know each other before, though there were only a few miles and couple degrees of separation between their families back home.

Alfred and Hilda in 1890 may well have dated in some fashion that resembled a formal courtship. Went on walks after Sunday church, read poetry in the parlor, who knows. They all could read, yes. But they were laborers. What I’d bet is a woman in Bayport the lumber town would have got invited to have a beer around the evening fire. What provoked their marriage is, they conceived a child, who was then born in August after the April wedding. I find that so sweet, that they got to have organic electrifying romance in America as young people where that would not have happened at home on the farm(s).

After that a lotta stuff happened with a lot of people… and Alfred and Hilda didn’t get to stay together because Hilda died!…. and skip to the end, my mom and dad met. It’s a cosmically fascinating thing that you’re born to who you are born to when you are born to them.

Bayport is my people’s town…

…apparently…

….Bitches… My town, bitches.

Annnnnnd there’s another Gullabo kid gone to Bayport to work at the sawmill.

Kid from that hamlet that was my peoples’ hamlet. My gr gr grandfathers first cousin, less than 2 years younger than he.

Boy I thought I was good at this before. Meh, I was on the high end of amateur. I’m seeing the matrix on this now with the tools. I think I’m on the low end of pro skilz now.

IDK, whatevs. Lotta people came to Bayport. My anthropology conclusion that one could write a graduate paper on is, Bayport is Swedish whereas Stillwater was Yankee, and there was a Gullabo pipeline running to Bayport for sawmill labor.

Observation supported: been going through the Mormon’s electronic copy of the Bayport Swedish church book… all kinds of people from Gullabo in it.

Family implications: If Peter Swanson is in Bayport in 1911, my 19 yo gr grandfather has some uncle-ish support such that he needs it when he moves back to the states as an adult in 1911.

An illegal immigrant story

I was chatting with one of my 2nd or 3rd uncles on the FB. He’s 69, I’m 55. He lives in Thunder Bay. Back in the day, set of brothers from Sweden, one went to North Hudson, and 3 went to Thunder Bay (with one staying forever in TB).

Uncle Ken: “You had a great uncle Oskar. He ran his own farm raising horses till he was in his 80s [In Sweden]. He had immigrated to Canada a couple of years [In the late twenties] before my dad, but had failed to fill out his landed immigrant papers. 20 years later the Canadian government caught up to him and said if you don’t fill out the papers we will deport back to Sweden. He said “I get a free trip home?” And back he went.”

I met Oskar in 1992 on my Euro semester. I was at his place for just a few hours. He was 78 then, 5 tenish like me, and had I tellya these Schwarzenegger-esq biceps. Just gonzo balloons sticking out of a work shirt. Guy was deeeeeelighted to see me, it just tickled him.

He was an eccentric Swedish bachelor farmer and kept a dirty house. He pulled out a bottle of Canadian Club and some dirty old high ball glasses, and we drank!

I hadn’t seen any horses in those hours, and I would have guessed he was farming rocks. Low rock walls everywhere around small fields that I couldn’t see as growing anything. That explains the horses, which I hadn’t seen.

By the way, I have had a few conversations with Thunder Bay people the last few days, and they invariably say, “you know, the old Ft. William.”  They made that name change in 1970.

Answer to the question, what happened to the Tozer Lumber business

Got rolled up into Weyerhaeuser, 1906.

Geneology (is gonna…) pay out:

I’ll be doing genealogy the rest of my life, just as my existential thing.

But… Over this last 3 months it enables cosmic multi generational reach around (!) and “we’ll come back for that” for which there’s going to (probably) be a financial benefit.

Thanksgiving time, I re-upped my Ancestry dot com at their holiday promotion. IDK, I think it’s $100-ish for six months at the sale rate. I feel like Ancestry at the full price, $200 for 6 months or whatever, is very spendy. That’s got a feel of spendy $ to me. $100 seems about right, not all that spendy. I hit it in the winter, cuz summer I spend all my free time outdoors.

Ancestry dot com is a powerful tool, as commercial as it is. It’s sullied with grubby hedge fund ownership now, but the Mormons built it, so… genealogy is their thing and it’s great. Well the Mormon tool still out there that’s non-commercial, non hedge fund sullied… Family Search… is a must when doing genealogy. FS’s object model where the person ancestor is a record their system is always trying to make unique and free from duplication from tree to tree is a thing that works some magic in rolling up comprehensive details on unique person records I’d say. You really want to make some progress such that you were stymied on something, you use them both. Those are the two. FS and Ancestry dot com.

And I was stymied, a little, on some things I wanted to know, as I say, existentially.

Now here’s a thing. My Peterson family’s relationship to the Swedes in Sweden was actually intact, 4 generations or so after. It was intact with Alfred Peterson’s (1865-1953) kids, grand kids, and great grand-kids. Say, once a decade correspondence from North Hudson to Sweden was maintained in the first half of the 20th century. After that with some people dying it probably petered out a little I’d guess but they still knew where to find us and us them. And actually, one of the original brothers died an old bachelor farmer in the late 80’s, and Swedish probate settled his affairs and sent low 4 figure inheritances to about 8 nephews and nieces over here (my dad, his siblings, and aunts). And then the next bachelor farmer great uncle died in 1995 and it happened a second time. And I got to spend a weekend with the Swedes there in 1992.

So we had the relationship. You’re nimble in family generational details and you’ve got college undergrad anthropology / history skills, yeah you basically know why your ancestors were emigrants. The Emigrants is there to read and be taught, it’s the last word on the topic. But such that we had this relationship, in which I got to actually talk to my great great grandfather’s youngest child and my great grandfather’s brother… the Swedish family didn’t really have a great idea “why Stillwater” and North Hudson in 1888, and didn’t know what Alfred was doing here for work.

And…existentially… this thing where Alfred Peterson has American descendants and Swedish descendants is a function of him kinda having planted a stray kid in the US, such that he had a first wife that he fathered a child with before she tragically died. That woman was Hilda Larsdotter, born same year and 4 miles away from Alfred In Sweden, but that he didn’t know and travel here with. My Swedish relatives have no explanation for who Hilda was, such that he remarried and they have a different gr grandmother.

I wanted to know that. Who was gr gr grandma Hilda. Existential itch.

The research techniques end up being obviopiphany stuff once you embrace it. You know when Hilda was born and when she left but you don’t know who she was? You can look at all the families on the Swedish examination books. Family Search is the best portal for that. You look at her brothers and sisters and think about the immigration patterns at the time, particularly chain sibling migration. I looked at Hilda’s. Like 8 kids who made it into robust young adulthood. They were all heading to the US by 1889, with multiples gone to Stillwater.

The one standing out, the one I wanted to know about most was Amanda. Malmo papers said she left for Stillwater in 1886. Hilda went in 1889. These sisters aspired to North America together, and Hilda was younger and went second with Amanda there to help her at the destination. OBVIOUS. But… no actual trace of “Amanda Larson” in late 1880s Stillwater / Bayport. Duh, marriage mystery right. Family Search cracked that with its searchability and access to American Lutheran records. That’s a little more manual a reading process than you’d think in this era, but that’s where the goods were.

Amanda married Charles Johnson. These people, the Johnsons, you could find Amanda with them in the Bayport census. What was Charles doing, Charles Johnson, also of Gullabo, Sweden, and an 1873 immigrant to Stillwater? He was sup-ing the Tozer Sawmill. Which was a big deal, I’ll get back to that.

Dramatic bmm-bmm-bmm sound effect. There’s yer cosmic why in this case. Charles Johnson of Gullabo ends up in Bayport and can hire and fire at the Tozer Sawmill, and his letters home to family and friends over 15 years attracts some number in the mid dozens from the near countryside to go to the same place. My gr gr grandfather goes to Bayport in 1888 to get a sawmill laborer job, my gr gr grandmother goes to Bayport in 1889 to live in her sisters house…. NEXT DOOR. They didn’t actually know each other in Sweden, but they meet here as a function of their shared relationship with these other people.

In America you got 2 unmarried 24 year olds on the make, relieved from stultifying peasant farm work and culture, introduced to each other as matter of proximity, what do they do? Have a romance and conceive a child prompting a marriage. I approve of this as household formation yo. It’s fine as anything. Anthropological lesson here is in contradiction to The Emigrants though, which depicts family migration as the rule. That wasn’t the rule. It was single Swedish twenty-somethings experiencing land crisis delayed opportunities for work and romance that went to the US. Where they found it.

Other thing… a ton of overseas mail marriage proposals back in the day. That Amanda Larson’s to Charles Johnson’s was that. He was a widow, he wrote home, and this turned up Amanda as an enthusiastic marriage traveler to America. Hilda died of typhoid in Bayport months after having my gr grandfather in Bayport. Alfred wrote home, and a marriage candidate traveled to the US to meet him, and they married. Alfred / Ida and fam eventually moved back to Sweden, and my gr grandfather went back to the US at 19 as a citizen in 1911… So we have our country split after the first generation of immigrants here by virtue of some family details.

Now, Tozer… Stillwater is a Yankee lumber town, a little different from a lot of Mn places. Lots of vestigial remnants of old Yankee lumber enterprise, if you can discern that sort of thing. When I grew up there, I couldn’t discern that as a yute, no. The old Pony High that I went to had the “Tozer Pool” I’m (now) sure named because of the foundation grant to build it. There was also the Tozer college scholarship, which I didn’t have credible grades to apply for.

Well, here’s that deal. Yeah, David Tozer, he did good. Ran his sawmill for two generations. If I read the chronology right and read between the lines, he finally closed it in 1914 and sold the site to nascent Anderson Windows. Then lived another 30 years and died with, IDK, a low 7 figure fortune in that era’s $ to endow a college scholarship fund with.

I hadn’t thought about the Tozer Scholarship since the last time I contemplated not being academically strong enough to apply for it. Which was in 1987. Imagine my surprise when I’m googling shit and find it’s still in operation and a very healthy 8 figure thing, and it’s domiciled AT MY BANK (Lake Elmo). And that my kids are academically strong enough as college students to be applicants.

This is meaningful, that we’ll be able to do this as a matter of circumnavigating to the scholarships from genealogy. Yes, in the application we are going to lay on them the 5th generation removed from Tozer Sawmill employee factoid. Cuz its a damndest thing, existentially.

Car Shop employee panoramas

It wasn’t just James J. Hill’s Great Northern railroad that was a big deal railroad in Minnesota in olden days. There was the Northern Pacific and a buncha others. If I was a true railfan I could write that last sentence more granularly. But there were lots. The Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha RR was a big, very important one. Very large enterprise deal in St. Paul and running track through 5 states. West end of St. Paul was a CStpM&O employee neighborhood, they had a yard and shops on West 7th and Randolph. CStpM&O was owned by the Chicago Northwestern for 3/4 of a century but run separately, and then finally folded into it. What do we have now in this age, 2 big railroads? Warren Buffet’s BNSF and then the UP? CNW was bought by the UP in 1995.

On Hill there… There’s the oft recited “making of Minnesota” historical detail about how he drew a lot of immigrants over to lay track for the Great Northern. For our fam it was the CStpM&O. My sister and I have 5 great grandpas who were immigrants or 1st gen American that worked for the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Omaha RR.

Ambrose Paul – St. Paul car shops, approx 1895 – 1930
Alfred Rogers – St. Paul car shops, approx 1912 – 1960
Alfred Peterson – North Hudson car shops, 1892 – 1903
George Bauer – North Hudson car shops, 1911 – 1916
William Peterson – North Hudson car shops, 1911 – 1954

Ambrose and Alfred R. were FIL / SIL, as were George and William. That’s how they mingled in the day.

North Hudson: I didn’t intentionally aspire to living nearby, but I do. It just happened. Have since 2000. Then it’s a feature of entering the dad zone, IDK when, 15 years ago, that I start driving through great grandparents old neighborhood on a regular basis, if that’s only even once every 3 months.

The old neighborhood has some houses and the North Hudson car shops for the CStpM&O. The shops are still standing, they thrive as leasable light industrial space. There’s also a bar with end of prohibition origins. Late 2018 comes along and it actually looked like something was going on in the bar, and me and my friend stopped in. Some young people had bought the bar and were reviving it, spiffing the place up.

They had a car shop employee panoramic photo from 1924. That stayed up, is there presently.

Golly, I felt like I’d been aware of this artifact all my life. I suppose it’s possible my dad took me into that bar for a soda in the 70s and I cataloged it in my brain. I don’t remember a day with that event, but it’s something that could have happened, is healthily within potentiality.

I knew my great grandfather was in that pic. It’s also true I just love sepia tone googads, I love the aesthetic. … I basically knew I needed one of my own.

Ya know 2018 wasn’t peak Facebook. That’s happened since. And it’s terrible, but there’s a few good things, and I have learned a lot of things from the good conversations. Like… The Hudson museum had the 1924 car shop pano.

I made contact. They welcomed me in to photo it.

Got eem. It’s a helluva thing.

The genuine article is like 3 1/2 feet by 1 ft. They had a consumer grade scanner. That wouldn’t work. I photographed it in sections and stitched it together in MS Paint at home. Diligently filled in some aspect distortions at the edges of each shot with some fine copy and pasting. Now to find a commercial photo guy to print it.

Boy they had all the stuff. I wanted to grab it all and knock down old lady volunteers getting away.

“Amerika date”

4/28/1911

The Swedes (as a function of their Lutheran parishes) wrote everything down, in detail, and it all survived WWII. This is why all these academicians and statisticians go through Swedish records. I’ve had reason to comment on that here before re some generational economic studies that go on.

Household examination book up there for Kvilla, which is a farm enclave off Torsas, which is a town 40 miles away from Kalmar. Great grandpa had been born in America, but taken back to Sweden when he was 11 after his dad stacked enough American wage cash to swing a farm deal back home. Here great grandpa is 19 and going back to North Hudson. His dad and (step) mom there had 11 or 12 kids. 2 ended up in North America. The other NA line is in Thunder Bay.

So great grandpa has a mother that was from Sweden and went to the US right. I was looking at her parents’ household examination book page. 7 or 8 kids, which is to say “all of them”, with cross outs and “Amerika dates” about 1890.

Poignant yo. If I’m doing the movie we start at a European village in the 19th century like in A Serious Man, and the census taker is there, and the mom is going “Gone to America. Gone to America. Gone to America.” End scene, then open scene to modern America.

Yer upshot. Maybe you open to this scene. Labor day was hot and wife and I took a pack of seltzers down to “the beach” down in Lake St. Croix Beach, 2 blocks from where she grew up. For 5 – 10 years this has been an extremely popular spot with Mexicans and other southern central Americans. It’s always like 60% them, 40% white people down there. IDK, it’s like it’s not bougie enough for white people these days, sitting on the beach. Washco white people do boats ya know.

Vibe was pleasant as all get out.

Zingy, the existentialist

I’m probably using that word wrong as a matter of the study of philosophy. I’m trying to put words to a thing, an existential, anthropological thing. Cuz, THATS THE BLOG yo.

What I am mentally riveted on at the moment, is my great great grandfather:

• was born in Sweden in 1865
• expected to be a farmer, because that’s what he was qualified to do as a rural poor person
• re above, couldn’t just get a farm, was almost certainly stuck on the circumstances of the 19th century Swedish population boom and resulting lack of land visavis inheritances
• went to America to work to get the money for farm in Sweden
• went back, acquired said farm, and ‘they’ still have it 120 years later
• nonetheless he planted 1 stray child here, who’s now got multi dozens of gr gr grandchildren. And I’m here as one of them.

Very interesting and also completely mundane anthropologically. A jillian people here share the basic story. The ‘go back home’ [and leave a stray child!] at the next rung up the class ladder having worked has some modern parallels re Central America and India.

Other thing: You read the canon of Scandinavian immigration, the anthropologists always talk about how literate and bilingual they were to do the thing where they are crossing and crossing back and doing remittances and scoping out the best places to live in the US. Even so, they might be short changing that. We’re talking about people who were in the late 19th century, going to what, age 14 on schooling and living in sod / lumber shacks in the sticks? Mine were, I think.

I’m saying, the schooling must have been good.

Muckenhirn

I got to go and have a chat with my 95 yo great aunt today at a nursing home in Hudson. She was the youngest in that family, my grandfather was the oldest by ten years. He died a long time ago, but the superager gene may nonetheless be present in that line. Her mom was alive well, well into my life, died in 96 at 98.

Auntie was pretty darn lucid and kind of wry! Though I take sometimes she is not. You age a lot in your 90’s even as a superager I’m sure (or, not “I’m sure”, but “duh”).

There was an agenda. Foremost among a few things:

1. Wanted to know if the guy my mother picked out in the 1924 car shops photo among the 200 or so dudes was great grandpa. “yes, that’s dad” Auntie said. Truly BFD to have identified which person is yours in a 100 yo artifact like that.

2. Wanted to know if Grandma Marx was illegitimate, as my review of the docs on Ancestry suggested. “yes, that’s what we always heard”. Upshot, you don’t have a paternal branch there to navigate at that birth before 1878 …unless you want to do a review of your DNA matches vs the Aurora IL township census sheet for 1880…needle in haystack. BUT DOABLE, if Henry Louis Gates’ show is any indicator for potential success.

3. Question I asked was, “how did your parents meet?” This would have been 1915 probably. She said, “oh I’m sure it was through the Muckenhirn’s, their friends…”

Bullseye. See, I had gone to the Hudson history library last fall and spotted that relationship as extremely consequential, having found the late 20’s shop blacksmith seniority list in a stack and read it for like ten seconds. It had hit me like I had a remote review on the past, like I was a psychic seer. Twas like, I knew instantly that’s why great grandpa moved back to N Hudson from a half a world away, that’s how that happened.

https://zingyskywaylunch.wordpress.com/2022/09/29/cosmic-why-omaha-car-shops-n-hudson/

So you’re sitting there with Auntie and you ask her the question and she gives you this linchpin answer that you didn’t really expect at that moment but you knew was the linchpin answer because you did all the work, you feel like you’re Alex Haley sitting with the griot there on the Gambia River in 1969 or whatever and the griot says, “and then this next guy was Kunta Kinte…”

SORT OF… RIGHT?

Ha. I mean, I ain’t Alex Haley (and ahem there are doubts Haley had that conversation in the way he said…) but that’s the power of that vibe, what that vibe is in composition.

203 Wisconsin, North Hudson

This was my great great grandparents house, and it’s for sale.

George Bauer and Mary Marx got married in 1892. 2nd gen Americans to German parents both. George was 22, Mary was 14(!) They grew up in clannish, agrarian Aurora and Streator, IL of that time.

Sooooo, child bride to probably a somewhat hardscrabble guy. The historical paperwork nonetheless shows it as a generation of family progress and ascendancy. He was servicing locomotives in Streator through 1905. They moved up into NW Wisconsin to try farming for a few years. Then 1912, the Omaha rr car shops in North Hudson were developing some vitality, and they move there, get into this house.

Direct on the left going up, that’s modern mini storage. The car shops are still there, brick clay buildings on the top (it’s a north view). Little spot of the St. Croix you can see on the left also.

George Bauer died untimely in 1916, age 46. Ma Bauer had the house. Daughter Mabel Bauer married Carl Peterson. Carl was a blacksmith at the car shops. House was in the family until 1980 or so, when Mabel moved out as about an 82 yo widow.

I was there as a child and live close now, so I know the place very well. BOY WAS IT A SHACK, you’d say. Perhaps not “company housing” but a shack, a minimal early 20th century house. Didn’t have a bathroom until the 1960’s. I wonder if it even took $1k to get it in 1912.

They are asking $300k for it now, and it’s been built out quite nice and tidy since my gg grandmother was living in it.