Tag: immigration
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Notes from the heartland (Part 2: Kansas and Missouri)
It’s our second day on the road to Fort Worth, and Spence and I are traveling through the rolling hills of the Kansas and Missouri borderlands. Yesterday I told you a little about my 3x great-grandmother’s brothers, John and George Hitz, and how they settled in Iowa with their mother Maria Tontz Hitz after the…
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Notes from the heartland (Part 1: Iowa)
I’m on a kind of pilgrimage through America’s heartland with my trusty companion, my six-year-old Golden Doodle, Spence. This isn’t your average road trip; we’ll be traveling through time as well as space. We have a destination — my brother’s home in Fort Worth, Texas for our family’s off-schedule Thanksgiving (what we call Rudesgiving) —…
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Norway’s scattered children (part 2)
One-third of Norway’s population left the country between 1825 and 1925 — nearly a million people. As a citizen of a country that has more often been the recipient of migrants, I can scarcely imagine the impact those departures would have had, both for individual families and for the nation as a whole. In a…
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Norway’s scattered children (part 1)
Two hundred years ago this year, a small ship set sail from Stavanger, Norway bound for New York City with 52 passengers and crew. This was Norway’s “Mayflower moment”.* Who could have guessed that over the coming century the number of migrants from Norway to the United States would reach nearly a million? The Norwegian…
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The Wells family of Worcester
My grandmother’s grandmother Fannie Wells was born just north of Madison, Wisconsin in 1854, a few years after her parents Maria and William Wells had emigrated from Worcester, England. Fannie died in 1931, but she is remembered in my great-aunt Helen’s genealogy as a deeply spiritual person and “an immaculate housekeeper, [who] always placed a…
Deep Roots 