Shock to See Cousins Still in Touch: 52 Ancestors 2021 Prompt “Shock”

Paul Peterson’s Children Still in Touch with Marit Peterson Trosdahl’s Children in the 1960s: How Did My Generation Lose Touch?

Joseph M Trosdahl: 1886-1968
Minnie Paulson Trosdahl: 1891-1961
Randy Peterson: 1899-1965
Thelma Peterson Hansen: 1915-1965

 

Most of my generation of Paul Peterson’s descendants aren’t even aware that Paul had two sisters, both of whom had large families. Marit Peterson Joramo Trosdahl and her family moved to northern Minnesota some time before 1910. Julia Peterson Joramo Severson moved to South Dakota with her husband and children a good decade earlier. Both families mostly fell out of touch with Paul’s side, until their very existence was no longer part of the oral family history. Many of my cousins think that Paul had only one sibling, a brother, Jacob Joramo.

After I discovered the existence of Marit and her descendants a couple years ago, I had assumed that Marit and Paul’s families had lost touch soon after Marit and her husband Johan Trosdahl moved to Nidaros Township in Otter Tail County. Paul Peterson and brother Jacob Joramo had stayed in southern Minnesota, farming in Lake Hanska Township in Brown County about 200 miles from the Trosdahls. However, this assumption was shattered when I ran across an obituary from 1961.

Marit and Johan Trosdahl had ten children. The sixth of their children was son Joseph Mangnus Trosdahl, born October 4, 1886 in Linden Township, just a couple miles from Paul Peterson’s farm. Joseph was in his teens when the family relocated to northern Minnesota. He took up farming, and married a local girl named Minnie Paulson.

Minnie died December 31, 1960, and her funeral was held at the Nidaros Lutheran Church on January 5, 1961. The Fergus Fall Daily Journal had a nice funeral write up, with more detail than typical. It included a list of family and friends who had traveled a long distance to the funeral. Among this list were two very familiar names, Randy Peterson and Mrs. Leo Hanson of Minneapolis. Randine and Thelma were my dad’s older sisters. They had driven 172 miles in the middle of a harsh Minnesota winter to attend the funeral of their first cousin’s wife—an extraordinary effort in that time considering the quality of cars and the condition of the roads. They must have felt close to Joseph and his siblings, people my dad didn’t even remember (probably because they moved away about 15 years before he was born).

Nidaros Lutheran Church

Sadly, Thelma and Randine both died just four years later in 1965, and Joseph Trosdahl died in 1968. Trosdahls still live in Nidaros Township, as can be seen on the plat map below--they are likely cousins.

While it was a shock to realize that the two families maintained communication and connection for many years longer than I had originally assumed, it was also very comforting. I’m glad family ties survived the miles through at least one generation. Perhaps a new generation can re-establish the connection. 

Family Vintage Toys: 52 Ancestors 2021 Prompt “Fun and Games”

 Toys That Survived Two Generations of Play

 

When my brother and I were youngsters in the 1960s, we had some favorite toys that had belonged to our parents when they were children in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of these toys were at the farmhouse where my dad was raised, and others were kept at my grandparents’ house near Eagle Lake, Minnesota. Our family often drove there on Sunday to visit my grandparents, and my brother and I would drag out a box of toys kept on the ledge along the basement stairs to amuse ourselves, or we would head upstairs to my uncle Dwight’s old bedroom where a set of shelves held a few more toys and games plus a collection of Big Little Books, whose fat, chunky shape—about four inches square—pleased me in some odd way.

Here are a few of my favorites from the vintage toys we played with:

The Brownie Kick-In Top game:

My brother and I never quite figured out how to play this old game of my dad’s. We knew it involved marbles, which would fit neatly into the numbered holes. But I don’t know if we ever realized that the lovely, red wooden top we would set spinning on the hardwood floors of our house was part of the game, and was meant to collide with the marbles and send them into the holes. I still own the metal game board and random vintage cats-eye marbles, but I am missing the spinning top and the original wooden marbles that were part of the set.

Hard Rubber Farm Animals:

My grandparents had a set of farm animals made out of a heavy substance that I once thought was Bakelite, but now realize was a hard rubber. The animals had their legs planted on platforms so they stood up very well, unlike the 1960s plastic farm animals we had at home, whose legs would end up splayed or broken, and the animals would stand drunkenly if at all. I remember my grandparents’ rubber cows were mostly painted black and white, with one or two all-brown ones. 

There were some rather moth-eaten looking sheep—the white paint was rubbing off. There were two black lambs as well, and several pigs. We would line these creatures up on grandma’s rag rugs, which we imagined were fields and pastures. There was also an old metal tractor and a few other odd bits—I seem to remember wooden milk cans painted a watery silver. The photo below shows similar hard rubber animals but the Macbeth ones were painted differently.

Pix Pix Pick Up Sticks:

This lovely old game feature thin wooden skewers painted in a variety of primary colors. The game involved holding the skewers upright, then letting them splay outward on a hard surface. The object of the game was to try to extract as many of your color skewer without moving any other skewers. We especially enjoyed flicking one stick into the air with the point of another.

Big Little Books

While not toys per se, these fat little books brought hours of fun. I can no longer remember the titles—I believe there were a couple that featured cartoon characters like Goofy or Donald Duck, and a Little Orphan Annie one. Most were nearly an inch thick, and had thick, coarse pages that felt a little like cheap, thin construction paper. The paper was prone to growing brittle as years passed, so most of the books had pages with little triangles of corners missing, broken off as we turned the pages. The books were just the perfect size for small hands, and fat like adult books, so we felt a little more grown-up reading them.

All the toys and books at my grandparents’ house were sold or thrown away when her property was auctioned off in the early 1980s. She could no longer live alone at the farm, so moved in with my Uncle Dwight and his wife Rosie. The farm and house were sold. My family kept a few things, but now that my brother and I are older and more aware of what is valuable—both monetarily and emotionally—we wish that we had kept more things back from the auction, especially some of the toys that held such sentimental value for us. What I wouldn’t give for a chunky, rubber cow or sheep to set on a shelf, or to hear the soft clatter of a shower of pick-up sticks!