Tag: Reiner
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Notes from the heartland (Part 4: Nebraska)
Starting out from Fort Worth yesterday, my canine companion and I traced the Chisholm Trail up to where it peters out near Salina, Kansas. From there we headed due north on a lonely stretch of US 81 into the endless plains of southern Nebraska. Between the Platte and Elkhorn rivers, the terrain changes to gently…
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Notes from the heartland (Part 3: Texas)
Happy Rudesgiving! I can’t remember when Rudesgiving originated, but with such a geographically dispersed family — and with each of my brothers having their own families and in-laws — we needed to come up with our own convenient time to gather. So, for several years we’ve been finding an off-peak weekend to meet up. This…
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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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The cup that launched a ship
The year is 1850, and in a small village perched at the end of a fjord in Western Norway, a young servant hurries through her tasks. Malene has no education and very little savings, but for the first time in her life she is hopeful. Earlier that year a young man named Ole had come…
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O Christmas Tree
Christmas trees look even more out of place in Costa Rica than I do. Michael and I don’t have one at the AirBnB that we’ve rented, and it’s probably for the best. Christmas itself seems slightly out of place here. Back in our Minnesota living room, our own Christmas tree is undoubtedly bone dry by…
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How William Wells of Worcester ended up in Virginia’s bloody soil
This is a reconstruction of my 3x great-grandfather’s brief and tragic Civil War experience, based on first-hand accounts of Wisconsin’s 37th Infantry written shortly after the war.
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Gene Smith on the eve of World War II
Think of World War II and, if you’re like me, you probably imagine it a bit like a movie. And thanks to compelling movies like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk, we might picture men doing heroic deeds in the face of uncertain odds. Don’t get me wrong – this kind of heroism did occur and ought to be…
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The Torblå farm
(This post is a continuation from yesterday’s post about Anders Andersen Torblaa and Anna Nilsdatter Skeie of Ulvik) The Torblå farm (also spelled Torblao or Torblaa) is – like many Norwegian farms – actually a collection of several farmsteads rather than a single entity. The breaking up of farms into smaller and smaller parcels occurred…
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Trading fjords for prairies: the Torblå-Skeie family of Ulvik
My great-grandma Jessie Johnson Reiner’s mother was Julia Torbleau Johnson (1855-1940). Like her husband Albert Jens Johnson (1853-1934), Julia was born soon after her parents arrived in Wisconsin from Norway. Julia (who was called Guri in Norwegian) was the third of seven children born to Anna Nilsdatter Skeie (1824-1891) and Anders Andersen Torblaa (1826-1902). It’s…
Deep Roots 