Where Have All the Wee Brothers Gone? Gone to Canada Every One?
Nels or Nils Wee: 1882-1938 (Paternal Second Cousin 1x
Removed)
Henry Theodore Wee: 1884-1944 (Paternal
Second Cousin 1x Removed)
Karl Jorgen “George” Wee: 1888- ? (Paternal Second Cousin 1x Removed)
Brick walls in genealogy either come down painfully slowly,
brick by precious brick as information is pieced together, or they collapse all
at once with a fortuitous discovery. I made one of those lucky discoveries
recently.
I had previously posted about the Wee or Vee brothers who
emigrated from Norway and settled near their aunt, my great-grandmother
Ragnhild Olsdatter Ve Syverson and her husband Ove in Brown County Minnesota.
One of those immigrant brothers, Anders Olsson Wee (or Vee), had ten children
who were raised near Hanska, Minnesota. I easily found records for most of
those ten children, but three of them, sons Henry Theodore, Ingvald Julius, and
Karl Jorgen, seemed to have simply disappeared from records. A fourth brother,
Nels, disappeared for years before reappearing in Hanska burial records. The
Wee brothers were one of my brick walls. This winter I returned to researching
the family in the hopes that I would find some clue to the fate of the missing
Wees. And amazingly I did, by looking further north to Alberta, Canada.
Nels, Henry, Ingvald and Jorgen were the second, third,
fourth and fifth of Anders and Sigrid Wee’s ten children. Ole, the eldest son,
was the natural choice for helping Anders with the farm and his youngest
siblings, with the idea that he would take over the farm when Anders needed to
step back. Anders and Sigrid’s daughters would marry and leave the farm, but
what were the other sons to do? Anders’ farm wasn’t large enough to divide it among
them. In 1890s Brown County, most men farmed or plied a trade like
blacksmithing or cabinetry. Other options were professions like the ministry,
medicine or law, but training for those professions required money for college,
something immigrants like the Wees did not have. The Wee sons knew how to farm,
but all the homesteads in southern Minnesota were already claimed, so farmland
was no longer cheap to acquire: you needed a lot of money. If the four brothers
wanted to farm, they were going to have to move. But where?
Ingvald had a fairly unique name, so I began searching for
him first. He was born in January 1886, and appeared in the 1900 census as a
fourteen-year-old. But by the 1910 census, he was gone. I found him on a census
record from an area called Battle River in Alberta, Canada. Could this be the
same man? The census record stated that he was born in 1886 in the United
States, that he immigrated to Canada in 1908 and was naturalized in 1919. He
was a farmer and stated that he was Norwegian and a Lutheran. The evidence
suggests this is the correct man.
I found his homestead records from January 1908. He was only
22 when he applied for his homestead. The opportunity to acquire farmland
without having to buy it was obviously the draw to Alberta. He was still on the
same plot of land in 1916, and in 1931 as well, so he obviously proved up his
homestead.
However, it must have been a lonely life. He never married;
not surprising as there were few women in the area, and none who were single. He
seems to be the only Norwegian on the census page, and the only one to
immigrate from the United States. Did he speak English well enough to
communicate with his neighbors? The photos of the area’s early years show a
rather barren, treeless and flat land, and the community he lived closest to, Acadia,
was very small. The census records say he lived in a wood house and had no
radio. The house was valued at $4000, which was about the median value for the
area. Was Ingvald happy there? Did he ever travel back to Minnesota to visit
his family? Hanska was over one thousand miles from his Alberta farm.
Acadia, Alberta in early 1900s when Ingvald arrived
Ingvald died August 21, 1961 at the age of 75 in Edmonton,
Alberta. Edmonton was far from his farm—about 430 kilometers. Did he move there
when his health failed? Did he have the financial means to support himself when
he could no longer farm? And what happened to his land after he moved and died?
I still have so many questions about his life.
Once I had located Ingvald in Canada, I looked for his brothers there as well. I found Henry on the 1931 census living in the region of Innisfail, Alberta, about 325 kilometers from the Acadia area where Ingvald lived.
I believe Henry also homesteaded, although I have been unable to find
his paperwork. There is a homestead application for a Henry Andrew Vee, but the
birth dates are wrong, although that Henry was also born in the United States. Innisfail
appears to have been a more prosperous town than Battle River/Acadia, so
perhaps that is why Henry chose to homestead so far from Ingvald.
 |
| Innisfail, Alberta in 1909, one year after Henry Wee's arrival |
I was able to confirm my 1931 Henry T. Vee was the Wee
brother I was searching for when I discovered a 1923 border crossing document
for Nels Wee, Henry’s older brother. Nels, then age 42, was on his way back to
the United States from Alberta. He listed his last address as “Lomless,
Alberta”, which I believe is some sort of misspelling. His next of kin was
listed as his brother Henry, living in Disbury (near Innisfail), Alberta, and
he states he was born in “Henskert, Minnesota”, a misspelling of Hanska by the
U. S. Border Agent in Idaho where Nels was entering the country. Obviously,
Henry and Nels were the sons of Anders Wee. Interestingly, Nels stated he was
headed for Spokane, Washington. I wonder what motivated him to go there.
Knowing that Nels had been in Alberta, I started searching
for him on the census records, locating him in Battle River, Alberta not far
from Ingvald, in the 1916 census. Like his brothers, he immigrated in 1908 and
was naturalized a few years later. He must have homesteaded as well; he was
farming. And, like his brothers, he was living alone.
 |
| Nels Wee census record 1916 |
I have found no records of Nels in the Spokane area after the
1923 border crossing. It appears he was moving back to the United States, so I guess
that something must have gone wrong with his homestead plan. Did he get a poor
piece of land that simply couldn’t be farmed profitably? Was he a poor farmer
and went bankrupt?
The only other record I found for Nels was his burial
record. He died October 27, 1938 at the age of fifty-seven and was buried at
the Lake Hanska Cemetery. This would indicate he returned home to Hanska at
some point between his leaving Canada in 1923 and his death in 1938.
As for Henry, I found a voters record for him dated 1940,
and his death record just four years later. He died March 17, 1944 at the age
of sixty. He was buried in Innisfail Cemetery.
The final brother, Karl Jorgen or George Wee, took a slightly
different path than his older brothers. He remained in Minnesota when they all
moved to Canada in 1908. He appears on the 1910 US census at age 22 living with
his widowed mother, brother Ole, who was running the farm, and three sisters
and two little brothers. He was still using Jorgen as his name that year, and
was working as a farm laborer, presumably for his brother Ole.
 |
| George Wee at far left of photo. His younger brothers Willie and Gilbert are in the front seat. Photo approximately 1914. |
He is still living at home at the time of the 1920 census,
although he is now going by the anglicized first name of George. His sisters
are all married and out of the house, so the Wee farm residents include only
widowed Sigrid, Ole, still running the farm, and George’s two younger brothers
Willie and Gilbert, now in their twenties. It must have been an awkward
existence for George—no wife and no land of his own as he entered his thirties.
That may have prompted him to finally join his older brothers in Alberta. He
appears on the 1921 Canada census as a farm laborer living with his employer, Clayton
Wallace, in the Coronation area of Battle Creek, Alberta, not far from Ingvald
and Nels. This must have been frustrating for George—once again he was working
for someone else rather than farming his own land, and this time his boss was
two years his junior.
 |
| George Wee working in Alberta in 1921 |
After that 1921 census, George simply disappears. I have
found a 1930 census record for a George Wee who was an inmate at the state
mental hospital in St. Peter, Minnesota. The patient was born in Minnesota in approximately
1890, and his parents were both Norwegian. The age is two years off from George’s,
who was born January 26, 1888, but it is close enough to be a possibility. Inmate
George Wee died August 18, 1946 in the state hospital. Is that the explanation
for George’s disappearance?
Thanks to a chance discovery of Ingvald Julius Wee’s Canadian
census record, the brick wall that blocked my finding the lost Wee brothers
came crashing down. I had made a rookie genealogy mistake: I had kept searching
where I thought the brothers should be, Minnesota, not expanding my
search further afield. If I had thought about what those young men would have
wanted, land of their own to farm, perhaps I would have thought to look towards
Canada, where determined, hardy settlers could still get free land through the
Canada homestead program. While I still have questions about Nels and George, I
have so much more information about their lives than I did just a month ago.
Sources:
1916 Canada Census of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Ancestry.Com.
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1556/records/761056689?tid=46986934&pid=322350819542&ssrc=pt
Alberta, Canada, Homestead Records, 1870-1930. Ancestry.com.
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/60865/records/120180?tid=46986934&pid=322350819542&ssrc=pt
Alberta, Canada Deaths Index, 1870-1970. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/61561/records/294572?tid=46986934&pid=322350819540&ssrc=pt
Henry Theodore Wee Findagrave Entry. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/122467897/henry-theodore-wee?
U.S., Border Crossings from Canada to U.S., 1895-1960,
Eastport, Idaho. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1075
United States Census Records. 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930.
Accessed on Ancestry.com.
Prairie Towns website. Historical photos of Alberta towns. http://www.prairie-towns.com/innisfail-images.html
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