52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt "Long Line"

Ivan Macbeth and Three Generations of Descendants: A Long Line of Cat Lovers

This week’s 52 Ancestors prompt had me struggling. “Long Line”. What should I talk about? There were a lot of obvious topics—long lines of farmers, a long line of descendants from Francis Dane of Andover, Massachusetts, and the Ingalls and Chandler families as well. But none of the possibilities enthused me. I was dreading writing a boring post.

And then I ran across a lovely photo of my Grandpa Ivan Macbeth as a child, perched on the steps of his house with a cat next to him. It reminded me of photos I have of my mom, his daughter, as a child with cats, and photos of myself as a child playing with cats. And suddenly I had my post topic I could really enjoy writing about: A Long Line of Cat Lovers.

My grandfather, my mother and my brother and I all grew up on farms, and farms nearly always have cats. Farm cats are generally outdoor cats—they live in the barn and the farm outbuildings, and help keep the mouse population at bay. Often they are semi-feral, but there are always a few that become true pets, and are family favorites.

Here are photos of our long line of cat lovers. First, my maternal grandfather, Ivan Macbeth. I remember hearing stories about my grandfather Ivan with one of his pet cats. He raised dairy cattle when my mom was little. In the days before the electric milking machines, milking was done by hand, and my grandfather trained one of the cats to come alongside whatever cow he was milking and he’d squirt milk into the cat’s open mouth. Quite the trick!

Next, two photos of my mother, Ione Macbeth, as a child with cats. I love the one with the baby ducks—my mother looks like she’s having to struggle to hold onto the cat. I’m guessing it wanted to chase (and probably eat) the baby ducks! Photos from the 1930s.

Next, a 1963 photo of me on Grandpa Ivan’s farm with three of his cats. Visiting their farm cats and kittens was always a highlight of any trip to see my grandparents.

Here’s a photo of my brother Kent Peterson covered with napping kittens. These were our first “indoor” cats—Kent had found a lovely stray calico cat we named Harriet, and she became a house cat, and her kittens did as well. Harriet was an amazing cat, living to the age of twenty!

Next are photos of my children, Amanda and Greg Aird, with Boojum, one of our favorite in a long line of pet cats my husband and I have had over 38 years of marriage. Boojum grew up with the kids and had a real personality. Photos taken around 1996.

Now that our children have grown and established their own homes, they have adopted cats of their own. The long line of cat-lovers will continue to yet another generation!

Lena Funk Hoffman and Dwight Macbeth: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt "Favorite Photo"

Great-grandmother Lena Funk Hoffman and her Grandson Dwight Macbeth

Photo taken in 1935, Eagle Lake Minnesota 

           Until this past year, I had seen few photos of my maternal grandmother’s mother, Lena Funk Hoffman, and struggled to find records proving her parentage and determining whether she had siblings. I discovered my brother had taken charge of many of my grandmother’s photos at her death, and he shared them with me this spring and summer. I found several great photos of Great Grandma Lena, including this one. It depicts my great-grandmother and my uncle Dwight Macbeth, and was taken in 1935 when Dwight was just a few months old. The subject matter was exciting on its own, but the photo is rich with period details that make it even more delightful and an important piece of family history.

            So what else is special about this photo? To paraphrase the poet, “let me count the ways…”

•         The baby carriage or perambulator. This incredible, enormous piece used to sit in the upstairs bedroom at my Grandma Nora’s house. It was constructed of a rich brown wicker, and I think the wheels, handle and frame were a pale tan or cream. My grandmother used to store extra bedding in the pram, and when her house was sold, I believe my cousin took the carriage. Just seeing the pram takes me back to my grandmother’s house and that bedroom. I imagine looking out the east-facing window at the farm’s windmill and down the hill to the barn. In my memory, the sun is always shining through the two large windows, bringing out the rich brown color of the carriage and providing plenty of light for me to pull a book from the bookcase and curl up on the floor to read.
•          My uncle in motion. I think this photo was taken with my grandfather Ivan Macbeth’s Brownie camera. He was using natural light from the living room’s bow windows (out of the frame on the right) to light the photo. As a result, the shutter speed was slow enough that when the baby moved a little, he became an adorable blur. Some people would see this as a flaw in the photo and would toss it, but to me, it makes the photo more real and more alive.
•         My grandmother’s outfit: the tiny black hat with the satin ribbon around the crown, the round, dark frames of her eyeglasses, and that amazing white collar on her dress. She was probably quite fashionable for 1935. I love her erect posture and serious expression. My Grandma Nora looked a lot like Great Grandma Lena when she reached a similar age. Great-Grandma Lena would have been about 66 when the photo was taken. Nine years later, she was dead.
•          The room: I believe they are in my grandparents’ house, but it looks far different than what I remember from my childhood in the 1960s. The woodwork and doors are so darkly finished. The walls that were pale green plaster when I was young are covered with elaborately patterned wallpaper. The door behind Great-grandma Lena was rarely used. It led to the “front porch” which faced the road. However, everyone used the “back door” off the driveway to enter and exit the house, so this door was often blocked by furniture. In this case, a small wood-framed sofa is placed there—it has a real Prairie Style vibe—I don’t remember this piece, and I’m sorry my grandparents got rid of it. It has a real presence, although it doesn’t look particularly comfortable!
•           My grandparents’ wedding picture is on the wall behind Great-grandma Lena’s head, along with a lovely old-fashioned thermometer.
•          The fern at the right side of the photo. My grandmother Nora loved plants, and ferns were extremely popular in the 1920s and 30s. It appears to be on a small round table.
•          My favorite item in the photo: a small pinafore style dress hanging on the doorknob of the door leading to the kitchen. The dress would have belonged to my mother, Ione. My Grandma Nora sewed many of my mother’s clothes—I wonder if this was one of her creations.
•       Lastly, my grandmother's handwriting at the top of the photo. I love seeing her handwriting, and am delighted that she called her mother "Ma". 

It’s wonderful to realize how much I can learn and remember from examining a single, charming family photo.

Orlo Jerome Dane: 52 Ancestors 2020 Prompt “Fresh Start”

Orlo Jerome Dane: 1868-1940

Fresh Country, Fresh Start

                Orlo Jerome Dane is my second great uncle, the only son of my second great-grandfather Jerome Dane, for whom he was named, and my second great-grandmother Mary Jane Mills. Orlo was born August 27, 1868 in Minnesota, probably near Janesville in Waseca County, although I have been unable to find a birth record. The family soon relocated to a farm in Leray Township in Blue Earth County, where Orlo met Eva Preston, the daughter of Benjamin H Preston and Jane Irish Preston. The couple married on December 5, 1888.

                Orlo and Eva moved a few years after marrying, settling in Crow Wing County in northern Minnesota. Orlo filed paperwork to make a homestead claim near Brainerd in 1899, and was farming the land in the 1900 census. However, he didn’t stay long enough to prove up his claim. By 1903, the family had moved into a house in Brainerd, and Orlo was employed by the FE Kenney Land Company. I have been unable to determine what the company did, although I found reference to the FE Kenney family moving out of Brainerd to Garrison, Minnesota, located on the enormous Mille Lacs Lake, so probably the company was selling lots for development in that area.

                Orlo must have been dissatisfied with life in Crow Wing County. He and Eva had lost two of their daughters by this time. Their oldest child, Hazel May, died of “brain fever” in 1898 at the age of six, and their daughter Bertha May died in 1901 at age four from pneumonia. They may have longed for a change of scene—their home in the photo below looks small and primitive. Orlo settled on a fairly dramatic change, seeking a fresh start in a completely different country.

Sometime in early 1904, the family emigrated to Canada, settling far north of Regina, Saskatchewan, near a small community called Shellbrook. I wondered why they chose to go there—how had they even heard of such a small, remote place?

 According to my research, the Canadian government was advertising quite heavily in the upper Midwest farming regions for would-be farmers who didn’t have the money to buy their own land and were renting. The government wanted settlers for their prairie provinces, and were puzzled as to why immigrants were pouring into Minnesota and the Dakotas, but were ignoring similar land opportunities to the north. According to a paper written by historian Randy William Widdis, the Canadian Minister of the Interior Clifford Sifton, “aimed his aggressive promotion of western settlement toward farmers in the United States and Europe. He deemed the United States the greatest source of "first class" settlers because American immigrants had capital, goods, and experience in prairie farming and because Ottawa considered them ‘ethnically desirable.’” Sifton’s office opened land offices in the United States, ran newspaper advertisements, and sent representatives to Midwest farm gatherings to speak about Canadian homestead opportunities. Below are some of the types of advertisements Orlo might have seen in Brainerd.

Meanwhile, in the United States, land was filling up and becoming more expensive, making it harder for new farmers to enter into the business. Orlo faced this difficulty, although he had abandoned his opportunity to homestead near Brainerd. Perhaps he was more susceptible to the Canadian land advertisements due to his work for the Kenney land development company. He may have been more comfortable taking chances on land after seeing the Kenneys make money speculating on it. In 1903 and 1904, nearly 80,000 American citizens moved to Canada. Nearly 5000 of them headed to the prairie regions of Saskatchewan and Alberta to homestead land, including Orlo and Eva Dane.

Orlo filed his Saskatchewan Homestead Grant Application on February 9, 1905, as seen below. By the 1906 Canadian census the family was settled and was farming. According to the census, they owned 15 cattle and 5 hogs, but oddly had no horses. How he expected to grow grain with no horses to pull a plow or other farm implements is beyond me, unless his “cattle” included an oxen team.

The family remained in their new country only four years. The photo below was taken in 1908 shortly before they moved back to the United States. I was fascinated by the cluster of photos behind Eva and Jeannie’s heads—probably sent by family members back in the United States. I am guessing the Danes were homesick. However, they chose to move to the Chelan area of Washington state instead of returning to Minnesota where their family still lived.

Orlo never got over his roaming ways—he continued to search for a ”fresh start” every few years. According to a story posted by another descendant, on their 50^th wedding anniversary, Eva guessed they’d probably lived in 50 places during those 50 years. I admire her pluck and strength. It couldn’t have been easy to follow him time after time.

Sources:

Saskatchewan Bound: Migration to a New Canadian Frontier by Randy William Widdis, Univ of Regina.  Published in Great Plains Quarterly 12:4 (Fall 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/649/

Canadian Museum of History, “Advertising in the United States, 1900-1920s.” https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/hist/advertis/ads6-01e.html

https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=8827

https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=9209

https://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=1075

Ovedia Peterson Nelson: 52 Ancestors Prompt “Tradition”

Ovedia Peterson Nelson and Her Famous Christmas Lefse

No Norwegian Christmas would be complete without lefse on the table. In our small town of Hanska, Minnesota, my Aunt Ovedia was probably the queen of lefse bakers. Every year she made enormous amounts of lefse which she sold and gave as gifts to families in the area.

Ovedia Peterson was my father's sister, the daughter of Paul and Regina Peterson. She was born June 4, 1904. She married Joseph Nelson on August 24, 1928, and they had five children. She died May 19, 1993.

Ovedia is still remembered with love in Hanska, and her delicious lefse is remembered fondly as well. I have never made lefse myself, and never had the opportunity to watch my aunt at work. Luckily for me, a book recounting the history of the town and township was published a few years ago, which my brother shared with me. To my delight, there was an article on my Aunt Ovedia and her lefse. It described her baking process, and even included her recipe!

Until I read the article, I never knew she made an amazing 1000 pounds of lefse every year, selling it to several grocery stores. When I was young, I had no idea that my sweet aunt was in reality a hardworking businesswoman, earning a sizable part of the family’s annual income with her lefse baking.

I still remember eating Ovedia’s lefse. It was so thin, with lovely brown markings from the heat of the stove, and it had the most amazing smell. My brother sent me a package of lefse a year ago (baked by someone else since my aunt died years ago), and when I opened the wrapping, the smell transported me back to my childhood. I felt like I was back on our farm at the kitchen table, spreading butter on Ovedia’s warm lefse. What a wonderful memory of a family tradition!

                                  Ovedia's recipe from the Vaer Sa God church cookbook

Looking Back at 52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors: "You"

52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors Prompt: You

            I am so grateful to Amy Johnson Crow for setting up the 52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors program. It challenged me to start writing about the fascinating stories I was uncovering as I worked on my family tree. Oh sure, I’d gush about some weird little discovery to my husband, or to my son and daughter on the phone, and they’d be pleased for me but probably found it hard to really feel interested, especially when it was difficult for me to even explain how these people were related to me, and to them.

           I also discovered that I tended to forget last week’s fun discovery when I unearthed a new one. I would remember the gist of the story—the guy who dropped dead on the sidewalk out west somewhere, the baby left on the doorstep, the guy who married two sisters and their cousin—but as the months passed, I no longer remember which branch of the family tree they were located on, much less the name of the ancestor. I was forgetting all the fun stuff—it was buried under the minutiae of research.

           My local genealogy society chapter had given a talk recommending starting a genealogy blog as a way to connect with others who were researching your ancestors and as a way to share your discoveries with other family members. It sounded like a good idea, but I just never got around to doing it. That is, until 52 Weeks, 52 Ancestors came along.

            I set up my blog on Blogger, and started writing short essays in response to the prompts. The first few posts were just text. But I started looking at what other 52 Weeks participants were doing, and loved how most of them illustrated their posts with photos or maps or images of census forms and marriage certificates. The photos brought the stories to life. I’m a visual person, and I realized my posts could be way more interesting if I included visuals.

            So my posts got better. I started planning ahead more—when I found something “blogworthy” in my research, I made a note of it, and made it fit one of the prompts down the road. 

           But most significantly, I started to make a photo book on Shutterfly of my best blog posts. It wasn’t easy, and I wasn’t sure how it would turn out—would the text font be too small? Would the font color show up against that background? Were the photos and document jpegs I was uploading look good or would they be too fuzzy? Yes, I made some mistakes. But I completed a book telling and illustrating stories about over 30 of my ancestors—a book I shared with my son and his wife over the holidays, and that I will share with my daughter in a few months.

                                              My photo book

            So thank you, Amy Johnson Crow! Thank you for motivating me to bring my research to life and create something that can be shared with family in years to come! I’m taking the challenge again in 2020. I may not get a post done every week (I confess I’ve missed a couple this year, but only a couple), but I will still be creating something way more significant than a family tree on Ancestry—I’ll be telling my ancestor’s stories and honoring their contributions to their families and communities.

Nora Hoffman Macbeth: 52 Ancestors Prompt "Craft"

Nora Hoffman Macbeth: November 17, 1899-April 7, 1994

Combining Beauty and Practicality Through the Craft of Sewing

My maternal grandmother, Nora Hoffman Macbeth, was a talented craftswoman with the needle. She married in 1926, and had my mother in 1928, just a year before the stock market crash that plunged the country into the Great Depression. She and my grandfather, Ivan Macbeth, like nearly everyone in their area, struggled to hold onto their farm and earn enough to survive. Nothing was wasted—everything was put to multiple uses. My grandmother was very practical, but she also had an eye for beauty and tried to make her surroundings pretty.

She and her sisters would buy plain cotton pillowcases, and use their embroidery skills to make the hems bloom with violets, roses and apple blossoms. Flour came in big fabric bags, and Nora would make dresses for my mother from the flour sacks. She would use scraps to sew clothes for my mom’s dolls as well. 

                                  Pillowcase embroidered and edged by my Grandma Nora


Clothes that were worn out were never thrown away—they found a new home in the “rag bag”, a burlap sack hung in the basement. Buttons would be cut off first for re-use, and saved in the “Button Box”, which I loved to dig through as a child, sifting the different colors and shapes, loving the big, heavy coat buttons the most.

The rag bag clothes would be cut up, either to be re-sewn into clothes for my mother and uncle when they were young, or cut into pieces for a quilt. Grandma made some lovely quilts—I remember a Double Wedding Ring one, as well as Tumbling Blocks and a Crazy Quilt. She would point to the fabric shapes and tell you whose clothing it had been—“That was a summer dress I had—it was lovely with short puffed sleeves. And that was a shirt Ivan wore for years...” 

I still have a lovely little doll quilt she sewed, featuring charming applique tulips made from fabric scraps and sewn on a creamy white background.

Doll quilt about 18x28 inches

I also have a larger baby quilt featuring applique animals that I believe she originally sewed for my mother, Ione, but was also used in my crib when I was young. The animals are charming, with some embroidered details, like the chicken below.

                       


When I was a child, my grandmother had a sewing machine in a charming sewing table that once held a Singer treadle machine before my grandfather adapted it to hold a modern electric machine. The table had four tiny drawers stuffed with spools of brightly colored thread, tiny scissors, pins and needles. I loved to watch her sew, bathed in the sunlight from the narrow window at the top of the stairwell where the machine sat. She sat on an old round swivel piano stool painted a glossy white to match the sewing table. I wish when they sold her house furnishings at auction that I’d taken that table and stool—so many regrets!


                 These vintage items are similar to my grandmother's--she painted hers white.

At least I still have a few examples of her needlework to save for my children and to help me remember that she was a bit of an artist with needle, thread, and fabric.

                               Last sample of Grandma Nora's embroidery--flannel baby blanket