Sever O. Severson: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Bachelor Uncle"

52 Ancestors, 52 Weeks Prompt: Bachelor Uncle

Sever Severson: January 21, 1882-April 7, 1953?

           I have many questions about my great-uncle Sever Severson. Exactly when and where did he die? Which of the multiple spellings of his name on various documents is the correct one? Why did he become an itinerant laborer rather than work the family farm? And why did he never marry?
            Sever, or Siver, or Syver, was born on January 21, 1882, to Ragnhild and Ove Syverson. He was their eighth child, and the second child named Sever. The first baby Sever was born in 1869 and died in 1876. Another baby, Ole, born in 1872, died in infancy. Ragnhild and Ove re-used that name as well; the second Ole was born in 1873, right after his brother of that name had died. The family lived in Linden Township in Brown County, Minnesota. His parents were immigrants from Norway who had settled in a pocket of fellow Norwegians outside a tiny community called Hanska.
            A mere five months after the second Sever’s birth, the family suffered another tragic death. Sever’s father Ove was killed in a freak farming accident on June 28, 1882; according to family lore, he was crushed to death by a horse. Ove was only 42, and left his 34 year old wife with a 160 acre homestead, an infant, and five other young children to raise. Ragnhild must have been a true force of nature, for she somehow managed to run the farm, keep her children fed, and her new baby alive, all while dealing with incredible grief and loss. I am sure the children had to pitch in and help with the farm work from very young ages onward to help and support their mother. I doubt Sever ever had a childhood in the way we think is normal now, with free time to play with friends and his siblings.

At some point during Sever’s childhood, his older brother Ole became the head of the household, farming in partnership with his mother. Three of Sever’s sisters married and moved away, and the youngest, Anna Sirine, died suddenly at age 19 when Sever was just 14.

Ole married in 1899 when Sever was 17. By the 1900 census, Sever was out of the house, living with his sister Jorgine and her husband Hans and working as Hans’ farm hand. In the state census of 1905, Sever was back home with his mother and his brother Ole and Ole’s wife Inger. Sever was listed as a farm laborer, presumably working for his mother and brother.

            Why had the farm been disposed of this way, given to only one brother with apparently nothing for the younger brother? This wasn’t necessarily typical for the place and time; other younger sons were often full partners on their family’s farm.
            By the 1910 census, the family had suffered another string of tragedies. Sever’s sister Jorgine had died in 1908, and Ole’s wife Inger and their young son Oscar both died, Oscar in 1904, and Inger shortly after the 1905 census. Sever was still living with Ole and their mother on the family farm at this point, but he told the census taker he “worked out” as a laborer, so was employed somewhere else. He was 28 by this point, and still unmarried.
            Sever’s WWI draft card, dated September 12, 1918, is a fascinating document. He had moved hundreds of miles northwest to the tiny community of Winger, Minnesota in Polk County near the North Dakota border. He was working as a farm laborer for a man named Emil Uhler. I can find no familial connections between the Uhlers and the Seversons, so I am baffled as to why he moved there. The record once again shows conflicts in the spelling of his name: the draft board listed him as “Siver O Siverson” but he signed his name “Sever O. Severson”. Since he chose this spelling when signing his name, I chose to use it as well. He is described as being a medium build and height 36-year-old, with grey eyes and dark brown hair.
            Just two years later, there is no sign of Sever when the 1920 census was taken. I can’t find any Sever Seversons of any spelling that seem to match my great uncle. There is no record of the Uhlers in Polk County either, and no sign of Sever among relatives in Brown County, Minnesota.  
            Sever’s next appearance is at age 48 in the 1930 census. He is a lodger in the home of the Schmiesing family in Lake Hanska Township, not far from my grandparents’ farm. Sever is still working as a farm laborer. Sever’s mother and brother Ole had sold the farm and moved to Hanska, where Ole reported on the 1930 census that he did odd jobs to support himself. Perhaps this explains why Sever was never part of the operation and management of the family farm; perhaps the farm simply wasn’t profitable enough to support many people. Both Ole and Ragnhild died in 1933; Ole was only 59 at the time of his death.

Their deaths left only two of the original eight siblings alive, my grandmother Regina Severson Peterson, and Sever. By the 1940 census, Sever seems to have been living in Minneapolis at the Standard Hotel, which was apparently a residential hotel for poor day laborers. The census form lists that Sever’s birthplace as Iowa, and the birth year is off by two years, but I can find no other census record that matches him as well. He lists his occupation as farm laborer, which matches my great-uncle.
            I was surprised to discover that Sever’s 1942 WWII draft card stated he was living with my grandmother, his sister, Regina Peterson. My grandfather had died just months earlier, so I suspect Regina asked Sever to move in. My father inherited the family farm and had been running it for some years as his father grew sicker, but perhaps Regina thought he needed Sever’s help. Curiously, my father never mentioned Sever living with them; I am not sure how long the arrangement lasted. I can’t remember my father ever speaking of his uncle Sever, although he had plenty of stories about his paternal uncle Jacob.
            My grandmother Regina died in 1952, and her obituary states she was survived by her brother Sever of Minneapolis. That is the only indication I have that Sever was alive into the 1950s. I found a possible death date in the Minnesota Death Record Index, but there are no details of the sort found on a death certificate that would confirm this was the correct Sever. I will have to purchase a copy of the certificate to find out if my hypothesis is correct. Wherever he died, he seems to have died alone. He is not buried in either of the cemeteries where his other family members were interred, so I have no idea what happened to his body, or if any of his nieces and nephews even cared. My bachelor uncle seems to have been a sad and lonely man.

Julia Peterson Severson: 52 Ancestors Week 8 Prompt "Family Photo"

Julia Peterson Severson

February 6, 1857-September 21, 1939

My grandfather, Paul Peterson, had two sisters who nearly disappeared from the collective family memory. The first, Marit, did not accompany the family when they left Norway in 1870 or 1871. We aren’t sure if she got married, died, or had some other reason to stay behind while her family sailed away. Paul’s other sister, Julia, accompanied her parents and two brothers to America. The family moved around several times after they arrived in the Midwest, and somewhere along the way Julia met Sever Severson. They were married in Madelia, Minnesota on February 9, 1877 when she was twenty years old, and shortly afterward the young couple moved to Brookings, South Dakota, where they became one of the original families to settle in the town. They ran a restaurant, among other ventures, and had seven children. Sever died in 1897. Julia eventually married again in 1912 to Iver Grudem, when all but her youngest child were grown up.


 

Paul and his brother Jacob seem to have had minimal contact with their sister and her family over the years. Travel was difficult for farmers, so I doubt they ever traveled to Brookings, and I have no evidence Julia visited their farms in Minnesota. Paul talked so little about her to his children—my father and my aunts and uncles-- that they never spoke of her to their children. So by the time my generation, Paul’s grandchildren, became the oldest members of the southern Minnesota side of the family, no one even remembered that Paul and Jacob had any siblings.

Only my brother, who had found a written statement listing all of the family members, knew about her. The document was dictated by Paul and Julia’s father, Peter, as part of the family’s  emigration paperwork. It was written in Norwegian script, making it impossible for a non-Norwegian to decipher anything beyond Julia’s name and birth date. My brother also found a clipping of a charming interview she gave the Brookings, SD newspaper sometime before her death in the 1939, where she talks about her life there in the late 1800s and early years of the twentieth century.

I had always been curious about Julia since my father, Juhl Peterson, was named in her honor. I was sorry that we had no identifiable photos of her, or of any of her children. But that changed this year.

I was contacted by a gentleman through Ancestry in January, asking if I was related to Julia. He was a descendant of her second husband and said he had a family photo that he believed might show her with her seven children. He hoped I could verify it was them.

I was so excited. The sexes and approximate ages of the children in the photo matched with the records for them I had found on Ancestry. The potential Julia also had a similar facial shape to my grandfather Paul. I sent the photo to my brother, the keeper of the family photo albums inherited from Paul and his wife Regina. Regrettably, my grandparents didn’t believe in writing on photos, so most of the photos contained in the albums are a mystery to our generation. My brother agreed with me that the mother in the photo looked a bit like Paul, and he said she looked even more like the one photo of Paul and Julia’s mother, Anna, that he has found. He also thought the photo itself looked familiar—he thinks it may be among the dozens of mystery photos in the antique albums, although he hasn’t had time to verify this yet. 

We may never be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the photo shows Julia Peterson Severson and her seven children, but we are convinced that we finally have a photo of our long-lost great aunt. We are delighted to add the photo to our family records.