Norwegian Family - Part I

"My Mother Lillian's Side"

In 1943 Lillian Gravseth, a pretty, petite Norwegian toe-head, met a tall, handsome young man with black hair named Robert Hammond. It was a match made in heaven that would last over twenty-five years and give birth to my brother Bob, my sister Diana, and me. As I scan the families that came before them, and as I look back on the day they first met in Tacoma, WA, I marvel that they ever met at all. 

Robert (Bob) and Lillian (Gravseth) Hammond

Lillian's ancestral roots go back to the Vikna region of Norway, which is a group of islands to the north on the west coast of Norway. Lillian's brother Arthur Gravseth claims the region was so cold when families started coming to America in the mid-1800s, that some actually froze to death trying to reach the ships. Carl Gravseth (Lillian's father) was the first and only member of the family to immigrate to America, leaving behind his parents, four brothers, and a girlfriend he hoped would one day follow. Leaving Norway on the vessel, Ivernia, he arrived in Ellis Island, New York in 1906 with barely twenty dollars in his pocket. He was 22.

Arthur's and Lillian's first cousin on their father's side, Oddmund Gravseth, helped Arthur trace the family line in Norway far back to 1721 to Nils Matsen and his wife Kirsten Paulsdatter. The names of Nils' parents are also known (Hats Hermansen and Maren Ingebrigtsdatter), who most likely were born sometime in the late 1600s. They are part of the Larsen lineage, going back eight generations from me on my grandmother's side (Marie Gravseth). That's a lot of great-great-greats! 

The family treasures the stories passed down. Here is one about Carl living on his own in Egeland, North Dakota, where he worked for Norwegian friends on a farm:

From Oddmund Gravseth in Norway: in an early letter received from Carl, he wrote about his difficult life in North Dakota, describing a dangerous encounter with a bull in which he found himself eyeball to eyeball with the angry beast, pinned tight. Carl wrote that he gazed into what seemed to be a cannon. It took him eight months to recover from the injuries that resulted. 

Carl also wrote of one miserable morning in the winter of 1910 when he attempted to make pancakes. There was an old, broken-down oven in the cottage, and after a long struggle, he finally managed to get the thing warm. For a while, everything went well, but suddenly the fire went out, and by the time he got it to burn again, both the pancakes and the batter had frozen as hard as stones."

Source: 

Carl Gravseth, letters to Norway, 1906-1910, described by Oddmund Gravseth, Norway.

Arthur Gravseth of Tacoma, WA, phone interview by author, 11 September 1999, Moscow, ID.

 

Old footage of immigrants arriving - Ellis Island in 1906

"More than 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954—with a whopping 1,004,756 entering the United States in 1907 alone." (source - History Channel)

[Source: https://www.history.com/news/immigrants-ellis-island-short-processing-time]

 

Ellis Island in 1905. Public Domain - courtesy Wikimedia