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.
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