Triplets Birth Day Turns from Joy to Tragedy: 52 Ancestors 2021 Prompt “Birthdays”

An Amazing Birth Day Ends in Grief

Elaine Trosdahl: April 11, 1929-April 11, 1929
Orrin Reeves Trosdahl: April 11, 1929-April 11, 1929
Mary Trosdahl: April 11, 1929-April 11, 1929

 

My preliminary research on my first cousin once removed, Nels Alford Trosdahl, and his wife Lola Conway turned up five children, all daughters, born between 1906 and 1917. I assumed the couple had no other children; later census records listed only the five daughters. However, while searching for Nels’ obituary on Newspapers.com, I turned up an amazing article that revealed Nels and Lola had, for one brief day, three more children, including their only son. This discovery is an example of how birthdays can sometimes be days of sorrow rather than celebration.

Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 13, 1929

Nels Trosdahl was the child of my greataunt Marit Peterson Joramo and her husband Johan Trosdahl. Nels was the fourth of their eleven children, and the oldest of their four sons. Nels was born February 10, 1883, in Lake Hanska Township in Brown County, Minnesota. At some point after Nels’ seventeenth birthday in 1900, the entire family moved from Lake Hanska in southern Minnesota to Otter Tail County, 200 miles to the northwest.  

Nels met a young girl from the area, Lola Conway, and on December 29, 1905, the couple married. Nels was 22 years old. Lola was a child of 14, already several months pregnant with their first child. Myrtle was born May 7, 1906, three months after Lola’s fifteenth birthday. Four more daughters followed, every two or three years, until daughter Doris’ birth in 1917.

In general, women from this time period have about a twenty year period of fertility at most. However, twenty-four years after giving birth to her first child, Lola delivered fraternal triplets, two daughters and a son. The triplets’ youngest sibling was twelve; their oldest was grown up and married.

The newspaper article noted that the triplets were the first ever born in Battle Creek. This was a time before fertility drugs, so triplets were quite rare. Of course, this was also before the advent of neonatologists and NICUs. The triplets were probably very small and possibly premature. It is doubtful a rural Minnesota hospital even had incubators for infants in 1929. The triplets really didn’t have any chance of survival.

The babies’ birth day was the sole day of their lives. A day of joy and anticipation for the parents turned into a day of mourning. Fortunately, Lola survived the birth despite the high maternal mortality rates of the era.

Little Mary, Orrin Reeves and Elaine Trosdahl were buried together at Nidaros Lutheran Cemetery, their grave marked by a single stone.

The loss of the triplets seems to have placed a strain on Nels and Lola’s marriage. Their youngest child, Doris, married young like her mother, and was only 16 when she moved out in November, 1932. Lola and Nels separated at some point following Doris’ marriage. By 1938, Lola was living on her own in Moorhead, Minnesota.

By the time of the 1940 census, Lola and Nels had lost another child—their daughter Doris. Following Doris’ early marriage to Selmer Baldwin, the couple had two children, David Sylvester, born April 15, 1936 when Doris was 19, and daughter Alphilde Marie, born September 28, 1937 when Doris was 21. Yet just two years later, Doris was dead at age 23. It is unclear if she died giving birth to a third child, or if she contracted an illness that proved fatal.

Whatever the cause of Doris’ death, Lola Trosdahl stepped up to care for her little grandchildren. She ended up moving in with Doris’ inlaws who had custody of the two motherless toddlers. The 1940 census finds her living as a “lodger” with John and Mae Baldwin, Selmer’s parents, and several of their children, as well as David and Alphilde. Lola’s occupation is listed as “caretaker” of “grandchildren”, with her job categorized as “unpaid family worker”.  Selmer is not living with the family; he appears on a WWII draft registration in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he was living alone, unemployed.

Meanwhile, Nels Trosdahl appears on an April 1942 draft card, living in Detroit Lakes on the property of a Mrs. Clara Hawkins, who he lists as his employer. I was unable to find him on the 1940 census. I have found no further records on his occupation or residence thereafter.

Lola died March 25, 1947 in Fergus Falls, Minnesota at age 55, far too young. Nels died June 12, 1958 in Mahnomen, Minnesota. He was 75.

Without my discovery of the tiny five-line story about the triplets in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, I would never have known about Mary, Orrin Reeves or Elaine and their April 11 birthday in 1929. The usual searches under their parents’ names on Ancestry and Family Search did not pull up their birth and death records. Like so many babies who died shortly after birth, their brief lives were quickly forgotten, as was the joy and sorrow their parents experienced. These lost babies’ birthdays are so much more than the day of their birth—they mark the entirety of their brief lives.