Interesting family history

Yesterday, received a CD-ROM from my uncle who has been doing a lot of family history/family tree stuff. All about the Norwegian side of the family: my paternal grandmother, and her parents and sibs and forebearers. Word processing documents with family trees, medical histories, how my great-grandparents individually left Norway in their young twenties, then met each other in Minnesota, moved to Montana to homestead [photo to left], then to Everett, Washington. Lots and lots of photos, both ancient and recent.

Was reminded that my cousin's (Guitar Cousin's younger brother) birthday is two days before mine; somehow I'd forgotten that.

Photo of my grandma and her sibs, when my grandma was around twelve. [Photo at left.]I can **totally** tell it's my grandma, by her facial expression.

Learned that my great-grandmother had eight kids -- basically having a kid every 1.5 to 2.5 years, from when she was 22 to when she was 40. And that the youngest daughter died of pneumonia when she was six -- when my Grandma was fourteen. I wonder how that affected her. She's always had a streak of being worried that something bad had happened to someone, if (for example) they were running late for a family gathering. Since my younger sister died, I've had the same sort of thing: a sense of everyone's mortality. So, maybe that's where my grandma got it.




Saw a photo [pictured] of my great-grandmother, taken the year before she died. Totally looks familiar, like she ''should'' look (I was five or six when she died, and as the oldest among my siblings and cousins, I'm the only one that has any sort of direct memory of her). By an interesting coincidence, the photo was printed a year ago, on my birthday.

Saw a photo of an ancient ancestor, 1798-1892; lived 94 years -- not bad! (Esp. prior to modern medicine.)










And, saw this photo, of my great-grandfather, taken in 1923. I like it because it parallels my life so much: in this photo, he's about 36 years old (I'm 37), and he's holding his four year old daughter (mine's two-and-a-half). Apparently, he was a really nice guy. And he was a finishing carpenter, which I find particularly neat, since I've been getting in to woodworking and traditional woodworking tools over the last few years. Unfortunately, the bulk of his carpenter's tools went down a branch of the family that didn't take good care of things, so they're long gone. My dad and grandpa have a few odds and ends, though; and IIRC, my brother got his jointer plane.

Anyhow: good stuff.


--GG