Alice Maria Bååv Kemp was born in Göteborg in January 1888 and died in Chicago in July of 1970. She had lived in the United States since the spring of 1913, for 57 years.
Alice’s name appears alongside her husband’s on documents between their 1915 wedding and her husband’s death in 1939. After 1939 her son, Walden, born in 1916, is listed as the head of household. Alice is listed as a widow.
I don’t know if Alice ever worked outside the home after she married. The notes for her on the censuses say ‘housework’, or ‘at home’. Before she married she worked at an institution the for developmentally disabled in upstate New York. I have wondered what her time there was like.
Alice was my grandfather Kratz’s first cousin, and she’s one of my closest immigrant relatives. Her life is a mystery. There is very little information.
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.
Miss Anna E. GROVE was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. G. GROVE, and was born in Jefferson county, near Lockridge, Ia., February 4, 1877. Here she grew to womanhood and here too she spent practically all of her life in an unselfish service and in caring for others. She gave at least twenty-five years in an unstinting way for the care of those whom she loved. First, she cared for her mother, and then upon death of her oldest sister, Mrs. Olive GROVE TROMMER, she cared for her five motherless children, the youngest of whom was but three weeks old at the time of the mother’s death.
Three years ago she left Iowa and moved to Colome, S. D. where she resided until a few months ago when because of ill health she gave up her home and continued to live with her sister in the same village. Here she died on Friday afternoon at five o’clock, December 4, 1931, aged 54 years and ten months.
She was a life-long member of the Lutheran church, the church of her parents, having been confirmed in the Lutheran faith at the age of 14.
She was preceded in death by her parents, one sister Mrs. Olive GROVE TROMMER, two brothers, Charles and Joe GROVE.
The following sisters and brothers remain to mourn her death: Mrs. Hannah DAVIS, of Colorado Springs, Colo., Mrs. Esther BRESLEY, Colome, S. D., William Axel, Ellmer and Ray of Fairfield, and Dr. E. G. GROVE, of Boone, Ia.
Interment was December 7th, in Evergreen cemetery, at Fairfield.
Anna was my grandfather’s first cousin. Her parents and older siblings had emigrated from Skaraborg, Sweden in 1870.
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.
Sven Johan Hedberg, born in 1839 in Dala, Skaraborg, Sweden. Master blacksmith in Falköping. Older brother to Johanna Hedberg, my grandfather’s mother.
Old Nelson (I’m guessing his given names had been Nils Johan) was my first cousin, three times removed. We’re related through Johanna Hedberg’s father. (Putting that in there as a note to myself.)
Dutch Ed, the northern Montana pioneer, seems not to have recovered from his wife Olive’s death. The five children were raised by Olive’s parents and siblings in Iowa, and didn’t have much contact with their father. Ed took to gambling and drinking.
There are claims that the house he built for Olive became haunted. Footsteps were heard from upstairs, doors blew open, and sheepherders were said the have disappeared.
Dutch Ed’s second wife left him. He died in 1945.
Olive and Ed’s second daughter, Helen, lived until 1999. She died in Santa Ana, Calif. and was buried alongside her younger brother Jack who died there in 1995.
Fairfield (IA) Ledger, Page 3, Column 8: Trommer-Grove. Married, at the residence of the bride’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Grove, six miles east of this city, Monday evening, August 29th, by Rev. Wm. J. Funkey of Fairfield Lutheran church, Mr. John E Trommer, of Chester, Montana, and Miss Zana Olive Grove. The nuptial tie that made of twain one, was made at 8 p.m., in the presence of thirty-five or forty friends. After the ceremony and abundant and delicious [meal] was served, and several hours were spent in a pleasant, social good time. A little after 12 o’clock, the bride and groom started for Fairfield, escorted by a large number of the guest, to take the train at 2 a.m. for the west. They expect to spend a day in Minneapolis and reach their home in Chester, Montana Friday or Saturday. The bride is well and favorably know in and around Fairfield. She has been serving very acceptably as teacher in the Willow Creek Boarding school of Blackfeet Agency for the last six years. The groom evidently is a genial gentleman and successful business man. For several years past he has been engaged in stock raising and and owns a large ranch near Chester, Mon. The many friends here of the bride and her excellent family will join in hearty congratulations, wishing them a long and happy life together. Besides several friends from Fairfield, there were present from abroad Miss Emella Bredline, Chicago, Miss Mary Nelson, Lockridge, Mr. and Mrs. Tall, Rome, and Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Grove, Stockport.
Sandra Olivia was born on November 4th, 1868, in Marka, Skaraborg, Sweden. She was the fourth child and the first daughter of Anders and Maja Christina Grov. When she was about a year and a half, in the summer of 1870, her family emigrated to Jefferson County, Iowa.
In the 1890s, when Zanna Olive Groves 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 Montana she met John Edward “Dutch Ed” Trommer, a German immigrant who had come west working on the Northern Pacific Railroad. Olive and Ed married on August 29, 1898, and filed claims for land close to Chester, Montana. They became sheep ranchers and quite successful.
In the fall of 1905 Olive was visiting her parents in Iowa, giving birth to her fifth child. From the Fort Benton River Press, Nov. 29, 1905:
From the Fairfield Daily Journal, Nov. 25, 1905: “…. This community was shocked Monday evening to hear that Mrs. Ollie Trammer was dead. She had come from her home in Montana with her husband and children two months ago to visit her parents, Mr. and Mrs. A. G. GROVE. The husband had gone back and Mrs. TRAMMER and children remained. A little babe was born three weeks ago and the mother was apparently on the road to recovery. Monday she was bright and hopeful all day, planning when she would be able to return to her Montana home, but about six o’clock she was stricken with heart failure and in half an hour she had gone to her Heavenly home. Messages were sent to the husband and to a brother and sister in Colorado. The deepest sympathy of the entire community goes out to the bereaved husband and parents and to those who cared for her so faithfully and to the five little ones who so much need a mother’s care.”
