After completing our top-secret mission yesterday, we’ve allocated our day today to exploring the ancestral homeland. My mother was born in Gary, Minnesota in 1939, although she quickly escaped to the fjords of Washington state. My grandparents, Paul (1917-1989) and Nora (1915-1998) spent their youth in Fertile and Gary. My great-grandfather, Peter(1880-1970), and great-grandmother, Christina (1885-1974) lived here until the whole family made a great exodus West after WWII.
But it goes back further still! My great-great-grandparents, Jens (1850-1939) and Marit (1849-1933) all lived here, too! And before them, Marit’s father, Ole Solem (1821-1902) and Jens’ father, Dyre…but there the records start getting murky. All I know is that Dyre was born in Storen, Norway at some unknown date, and died in 1874.
Our plan is to visit a cemetery or two, and drop by the towns of Fertile and Gary, and there’s the Prairie Smoke Dunes Scientific and Natural Area to check out (of course we’re looking for spiders as we go). Those plans were complicated by the discovery that the Polk County Fair is going on in Fertile today…so we might have to stop in there for a bit, too.
Man, this place is flat. We’re on the old lake bed of Lake Agassiz, and I guess I’m not surprised that a bunch of old Norwegians fled this place for one with evergreen forests, mountains, and an ocean. They were probably put here to crush their intrinsic desire to build fleets of longboats and go raiding.
“They were probably put here to crush their intrinsic desire to build fleets of longboats and go raiding.”
Long-canoes, then?
Nah, the desire to go raiding got crushed centuries before.
Probably to crush their desire for lutefisk.
Your generations are pretty closely packed.. my great grandfather was only born in 1863. You had a g g grandfather not much older.
NB
If you want to reconnect to your ancestral homeland, you can look at the Northern Lights that are expexted to be visible from the Northern USA during the ‘solar storm’ on Thursday .
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‘Ancestral homeland’ gives me associations to that old site mentioned in a Lovecraft story where some ancestor had been doing shady stuff together with some outcast indians…
OT
As you relax from your journeys, here is a lot of ambient and relaxing Resident Evil music
https://youtu.be/h8JtF4VfUQU
My scandinavian ancestors relocated to beautiful farms that had been ethnically cleansed of Lakotah. I did not ask Caine about that before she died, but I knew what she thought.
Dang. Here it is
https://youtu.be/h8JtF4VfUQY
Next I will try find “blood rave” from Blade, för those with extreme insomnia.
https://youtu.be/gHBhKbF2xMA
Sweet dreams
Pining for the fjords of the Salish Sea are we?
You are always welcome here.
My great-greats had to have lived through the 1862 Dakota War, although it may not have touched them directly this far North. They were definitely a bunch of colonizers.
At least they did not move to the Pampas. That was a genocides’ genocide.
@5 Marcus
My Scandinavian ancestors did the same thing. Where I am now it’s not quite my ancestral homelands, but at least I’m living in a place that was never inhabited prior to being settled.
Ada Christine- “…but at least I’m living in a place that was never inhabited prior to being settled.
Would that be Antarctica?