Arvid Renström was born on June 22, 1897 in Kristdala, Kalmar län, Sweden. In 1942 he was a fireman living in Brooklyn, New York. Earlier he had been a seaman sailing between Sweden and North American ports.
On Nov. 12, 1942 Arvid enlisted in the US army. He enlisted as a private, and on the line for race someone defined him as “White, not yet a citizen (White)”.
He was 5′ 8″, and 157 pounds.
Arvid became a US citizen a year later, on Nov. 18, 1943. At that point he was living at 566 Baltic St. in Brooklyn.
Arvid must have moved back to Sweden sometime during the 1960s, because according to the US Social Security Death Index Arvid died in Europe in August of 1970. He was not living in Sweden in 1960.
The fact that the word ‘white’ appears twice on the line for race in his enlistment record is, for lack of a better word, interesting.
In the 1890s, when Zanna Olive Grove (Sanda Olivia Grof) was in her 20s, she worked for a few years at the Willow Creek Boarding School on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation west of Browning in northern Montana. In the wedding announcement that was printed in the newspaper in Fairfield, Iowa, where she grew up, she is said to have been a teacher. That seems not to have been exactly true. According to Annual report of the Department of the Interior she was a laundress in 1895. In the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1896 she’s an assistant matron. She was paid $480 a year as a laundress and $500 as an assistant matron. There are also records that show that Olive claimed land under her married name, Olive Trommer, close to the Blackfeet reservation.
Supposedly (we can’t be certain, I found the photo online) a 1898 photo of Old Willow Creek Indian School, west of Browning, Montana. Students and teacher in classroom.
“Indian” boarding schools aimed to assimilate Native American children into mainstream American culture. There were many such schools across the country. The image below is from the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
The students of the Carlisle Indian School are amassed on the grounds of the school in March of 1892. (Photo by John N. Choate/Provided by Cumberland County Historical Society Photo Archives)
The remains of about 180 children are buried on the grounds of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School in central Pennsylvania — which was created to assimilate native children into white culture.
Some of those bodies are now being reclaimed by families, and given proper burials.
/…/ from 1879 to 1918, [Carlisle] was home to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship of a fleet of federally funded, off-reservation boarding schools. It immersed native children in the dominant white culture, seeking to cleanse their “savage nature” by erasing their names, language, dress, customs, religions, and family ties.
The Carlisle goal: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
Tom Torlino, who was Navajo, as he entered the school in 1882 (left), and how he appeared three years later. (From the Philadelphia Inquirer story.)
The European whiteness, and the European Christianity, that my family members brought with them from 1800s Sweden had no problem uprooting children, scrub or beat their culture out of them, and make them white.
I knew it, but I wasn’t prepared for it to hit so close to home. Which is, of course, just another consequence of the white privilege I enjoy.
I was looking for Elna Georgina Nilsson Kratz, my grandfather’s younger half-sister, for a long time. She’s the girl who changed her last name to Nilsson for reasons we will never know.
Elna emigrated from Sweden to the United States, by herself, in the summer of 1896. I was able to trace her until she stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, but after that, nothing. I searched the records endlessly, until I found a marriage record where half the information was inaccurate. But, Elna Georgina are exceptionally unusual given names, and I was sure I had found the right young woman.
It turned out that Elna married Hugo Larsson from Hammarby, Sweden, in Manhattan in 1898. They had three boys: Hugo in 1899, Eric in 1902, and Henry in 1904. Elna’s husband passed away or abandoned the family sometime before 1916. I haven’t been able to determine how, or when, but in the 1916 New York City phonebook Elna is listed as Elma, widow of Hugo. ‘Widow’ may not be true, but it was more socially acceptable than ‘divorced.’
In 1900, after they were married, Elna and her husband Hugo lived on 135th street in the Bronx among immigrants from Sweden, Ireland, Italy, and Germany. In 1905 they lived on 246 East 125th street in Harlem on a block with immigrants from northern and eastern Europe, Finland, Norway, Russia, Germany. Hugo is listed as a carpenter, and their neighbors are housewives, laborers, dock builders, seamen, and book keepers. One woman is listed as having a profession, a dressmaker. Later the Larsons moved to #305 on the same street.
New York State Census, 1905.
Elna’s oldest son Hugo stayed with her until his early 30s, when he married. Anna, his wife, and Hugo never had children of their own, but they took in their niece Frances when Henry’s wife, also named Frances, died in the late 1930s.
Eric married Alice Youngson, and had two children, George and Alice, born in 1927 and 1929.
182 East 122nd street in Manhattan on Google street view.
In 1940 Elna lived by herself on 182 East 122nd street. Everyone on her block was white. Many were born in the United States, but there were also many European immigrants. Among her closest neighbors were people from Germany, Finland, and Canada.
In 1940 Elna was 65 years old, and listed as a laundress. It seems she started working, at least officially, when her oldest son Hugo got married in 1933.
Elna lived her whole life, as a wife, widow, and mother, on East 122nd and 125th streets in East Harlem. 125th street is now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The buildings where Elna lived on that street are not there anymore.
Sigrid Lovisa “Minnie” Lif Lonn (1878-1971) (oldest daughter of Nils Peter Lif and Lovisa Johansdotter) gets married in Holdrege, Phelps, Nebraska in 1905. Minnie was my 4th cousin twice removed.
When I posted this photo on Facebook one of my former students asked, Should I put you in contact with the tribal folks they displaced?. That’s a good question. When I told her I wasn’t ready, she gave me snarky response. I can understand that.
