Life was hard then… (finding Lewis Johnson)

Anyone who has read the Little House on the Prairie books knows that things were much harder for Laura and the Ingalls family than the television show ever let on. The Long Winter alone is a terrible story of a time when it was uncertain that all of them – or any of them, for that matter – would live to see the spring. In her finished books, there’s always a sense of determination and hope that if they just hold on a little longer, things will have to change for the better. It’s only in the book The First Four Years, which really was only the beginnings to the next book she had planned, that one starts to get a sense that there were some very, very bad times and in the thick of it, one doesn’t always see the light at the other end.

I got interested in genealogy when I was nine, but I didn’t do much with it until my oldest was born, and I had a lot of time where I was just sitting and holding her because she screamed and fussed a lot when she got put down. The Chicago Public Library already had some nice resources that could be accessed from home, and as those things go, I was hooked.

It’s not like I’ve had a lot of time to devote to genealogy on a regular basis – five kids now keep me extremely busy without “frivolous” pastimes. I had always wondered about my Norwegian ancestors, though. My great-grandma Louise was the only one of my great-grandmothers who didn’t live to see me, and even her son – my grandfather – died before I was born, so I lost on that account as well. Years ago, I found my great-grandmother’s death certificate, and her father was listed on it. Score! His name was Lewis Johnson. Lewis Johnson who came from Norway, who came to the US to settle in Minnesota. Considering how many Johnsons there are in Minnesota, for many years, I figured that I had run into a brick wall, and this was the end of it.

Every now and again, I’d do a little genealogy work, and sometimes I would work on my grandfather’s family again. Eventually, it became apparent that there were siblings – six of them! Again, looking for “Charles Johnson” was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but I can be extremely tenacious with these things, and it was something that I could pick up, work on, and put down for awhile.

I knew my grandfather was born in and grew up in Turtle Lake, North Dakota. However, neither of his parents were from North Dakota, and since they were from different states (Iowa and Minnesota) I wondered how they ended up out there. I assumed that they met beforehand somehow, and moved out to homestead shortly afterward…

In any case, over the last decade, an incredible amount of information has become available online. Certainly Ancestry.com wants your money, but there are plenty of other really good sites out there, and many of them are free. FamilySearch.org is one of them, and a couple of months ago, I started playing around with their “world family tree” feature. More than that FamilySearch has thousands upon thousands of genealogical books scanned in, and a lot of them are available to look at for free. Furthermore, the Library of Congress has a free newspaper search engine which can be found here: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ . Many state and local historical societies have resources such as newspapers available online as well.

Now, before this turns into a blog post about how to get started doing family research, the point of mentioning this is that through the Chronicling America archive, I found the newspaper report of my great-grandparents’ wedding in Turtle Lake back in 1906, which told me that they didn’t travel out there together. Furthermore, while I knew an aunt of hers also ended up in Turtle Lake, the newspaper article mentioned that two of her siblings were at the wedding, and it made it sound like they weren’t just visitors. These were all little things, but every bit helped.

I knew that they were from Delavan, Minnesota, and, in searching Find-a-Grave, I found a Lewis Johnson who died in 1889, who looked like he very possibly could be the “right” Lewis Johnson. I found an account for an anniversary book of that sister who had been out there (through FamilySearch) and found out that it was the right Lewis Johnson, but that after their mother died not even two years later, the seven kids – aged from 8 to 24 – banded together to keep going. Teaching was an occupation a woman in those days could support herself with, so my great-grandmother became a teacher and followed her brother and sister “out west” to teach… There she met my great-grandfather, who was homesteading, and the rest was history… kind of.

Again, searching for Lewis Johnson in Minnesota is no easy task. But now knowing when he died and an area where he lived, I started to poke around the newspaper archives to see what I could find. Wouldn’t you know it, but there was something about his death that made the papers…

Several days ago, Lewis Johnson, in charge of John Paul’s lumber yards in Delavan, Minn., mysteriously disappeared from home. His body was found by some boys fishing in the Blue Earth river in the vicinity of Payne’s Mill, near Winnebago City. The body had lain several days in the water, and the head and neck had been considerably eaten by fish. Financial trouble is said to be the cause of the suicide. He had been dabbling somewhat in the machinery business, and is said to have been embarrassed by money matters.

The Record and Union, Rochester, Minnesota, Friday June 7, 1889

Wow. The man was 48 years old, came from Norway as a child, married, had seven children, was gainfully employed. In some sense he was living the American dream, or so it would seem from the outside.

However, what goes on inside someone’s head is a different matter. The money troubles are one thing. Being father to seven children carries with it stress and responsibility. I hadn’t thought of it before, but his brother-in-law was a Union soldier in the Civil War, and there’s a good chance he was too. (The picture of his brother-in-law is haunting.) Who knows? Life was hard then. It wasn’t all wrapped up in a happy ending at the end of the episode. One didn’t even have the option of getting back “on the grid” when something needs urgent attention, such as emergency medical care. I don’t know the whole story, and I doubt I ever will, but even well over a century later, it’s very, very sad.

He left behind a wife with seven kids, who were between six and 22. Whether his wife was already sick, or if she died of stress or something else entirely, we’ll never know, but those seven children were total orphans by January of 1891. They stuck it out and stuck together, and though some would endure their own tragedy, this was more of the resilience that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about in the books about her life. I’m sure that when it came to my great-grandmother, having endured the death of her father as a 9-year-old and all the struggles in the ensuing years, it put her on a path where she wasn’t too afraid to go out West. She became stronger and resilient and lived to be 89 years old. Sure, there were plenty more sorrows to come, but had she given up like her father, she would have missed out on an awful lot of joy as well.

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