The Svante & Anna Kajsa Lind Family
The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a goodly heritage. — Psalm 16:6

The Lind Family Arrives in America

I am grateful that I was able to know great-grandmother Anna Kajsa a little bit and to hear secondhand stories about Svante. I think of Anna Kajsa in her little cottage across the road from our home. I remember her as being a stern mannered person but she never forgot to give my bother Vincent and me some “Polke Grisor” when we came to visit. Her cottage had two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen-living room. She was bedfast for a time before she died in 1918 at the age of 86.

I remember the day of her funeral in March of 1918. The funeral procession was a mixture of horse-drawn vehicles and cars. The most impressive part was the length of the group and the great cloud of dust it raised. I was a four year old at the time, so simple things were impressive.

Svante died in 1906 before I was born, so I have only bits of information about him that my mother and Uncle Vic told me. I have the impression from their stories that he was a friendly man and had a kindly disposition. Physically he was not a large man but one who was willing to try doing different things.

They told of one time when he was 60 to 65 years old and had gone out to bring in the cows. He thought it was too far to walk so he jumped on the back of one cow for a ride. He got more than he expected as the cow ran madly for home. He made it safely but got a strong scolding from his family who had seen the ride. I guess he still thought it was better that walking.

—Eugene Abrahamson, by permission

South Dakota Trip

Grandpa Thure bought land in western South Dakota in 1920 and he, Ellen and Vic, as well as Joe, Lep and Dave and their wives moved there. We visited the South Dakota ranch in 1925. The whole family was loaded up in our Model T and we took off for a 425 mile trip that took two and a half days on what is now Highway 10.

Travel through the sand hills was very slow; the road was only two tracks with no road signs. When we arrived at a fork, either a ranch would be visible at the end of one road or there would be a cow skull sitting in the middle of the road, indicating that this was the road to be taken. The first day was very slow; we only made 50 miles. We had to push the Model T up the sandy slopes. A massive thunderstorm came up toward dark. We turned into the first ranch place that we came to and parked in the protection of their barn. The owned turned out to be a school classmate of Mom’s from Axtell and we were invited in for dinner and given places to sleep.

We arrived in Pierre with no place to sleep. We met a man who suggested that we sleep at a movie theatre. It wasn’t too comfortable on the chairs but we managed.

—Eugene Abrahamson, by permission

Taken from;
THE WAY IT WAS
Memories & Stories of My Family
In the Early Nebraska Years

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Ella Abrahamson’s Memories

As kids we couldn’t speak English. Most of our neighbors were Swedish so any social event we went to was Swedish and only Swedish was spoken at the Fridhem Lutheran church which we attended. But at school we had to learn English. My grandparents always did speak Swedish.

Farming was still a lot by hand. And my Dad expected us kids to have all the chores done when he got in from the fields. I remember feeding the hogs and the chickens- there were always lots of chickens. We lived where there were lots of trees so we had wood to burn, but I still picked up my share of cow chips.

Most everything was made by hand. You couldn’t buy a dress ready-made. We cut our own patterns from newspapers. Clothes were patched and made over. We bought our shoes but they weren’t very comfortable so we were happy to go barefoot as soon as we could every spring.

I wore my hair in a long braid, but when everyone else around was getting theirs cut, my sister and I had ours cut too. My, but our family thought that was awful!

I remember butchering time. How we fried and canned and put it up! I also remember soap making. We didn’t have a thermometer to test it so we used our finger to tell if it had cooked long enough.

— from Suzanne Arnold, by permission

note: Ella Lind (Abrahamson) was the daughter of Thure, and granddaughter of Anna Kajsa and Svante

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 Chickens and Rats

After my Grandmother Jennie died in 1948, my parents and I moved in with my Grandpa Emil.  The two-story white frame house was just one block south of Fridhem Church in Funk.  It is from those three years, until Emil died in 1951, that I have many fond memories of Grandpa.

Behind the house, to the east, were a double garage, a barn, a coal shed, a chicken house, and, of course, an outhouse.  Grandpa seemed to me to be quite vital then, and always seemed to have work to do.  When we first moved in, there was a horse in the barn, and a large flock of chickens populated the chicken house.  The chickens, of course, required attention several times a day, and I almost always would accompany Grandpa out to feed them, pick eggs, and do the necessary cleaning.  I tried not to get in his way, because work was important, and he could be an impatient Swede at times.

The chicken house also had another group of inhabitants—a good supply of rats that Grandpa never seemed able to exterminate.  He had fashioned a homemade spear, of sorts, a hoe handle with a bayonet-type blade on the end of it, and this is how he would use it:  he knew every crawl way and rat hole in the walls of the chicken house, and I watched with fascination as he patiently waited with spear poised at the hole.  When a rat appeared, with lightening speed he would plunge the blade through the writhing and squealing rodent, pull the bleeding animal out of the hole, and quickly dispatch it.  He was a fearless protector of his flock of chickens, and this direct method seemed to keep the rat population in check. 

One winter day, late in the afternoon, however, he let his guard down, and I watched as he reached down to remove the animal from the blade.  It was still alive, of course, and it quickly turned on him and inflicted a severe bite to his hand.  Blood was everywhere, but he put the animal out of its misery, and then we began to deal with his wound.  We found a rag, he wrapped it over his hand, and we headed for the house.  My mother was inside, and after expressing her dismay over the red bandage and her father’s foolishness, the two of them cleaned his hand and put on a fresh dressing.

Grandpa refused to see a doctor after this incident, and his hand apparently healed without an infection or anything more serious.  

— Orval Oleson

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Torsten's Travels

The following two memoirs were written by Natalie Lund—two brief, but interesting stories about her father, Torsten Lund (Ida branch, grandson of Svante and Anna Kajsa).  Torsten was a member of the faculty of the University of California, and in 1955 was returning home from Florida.

Torsten knew the poet/biographer Carl Sandburg, and corresponded with him. (There is a specific mention of Torsten as well as his brother Carl J., and the rest of the Lund family in Sandburg's book, Always The Young Strangers.) He also visited Carl and Mrs. Sandburg one time, when driving back home with his wife Eleanor, after teaching summer school in Coral Gables, Florida. When they arrived they found Carl sitting in a rocker on the porch of his house in North Carolina, eating fried potatoes out of an iron skillet. While Torsten and the famous writer conversed, Eleanor and daughter Ingrid were introduced to the large number of goats that Mrs. Sandburg kept there. One goat tried to make a meal out of Ingrid's dress! (Ingrid was not pleased, she later related.)

Long before that, Torsten was traveling from Knoxville, Tennessee to New Orleans, by train, for a teacher's conference. While the train was stopped at a station, he was standing and smoking a cigarette when his attention was drawn to a crowd of blacks who had surrounded someone outside another car. (This was in the days when the Deep South was a hugely segregated society. On a train, no blacks were allowed in a white car except for the porter. And no whites ever went to a black car.) He asked, and was told that the man attracting all the attention was W.C. Handy, the jazz musician (considered to be the Father of the Blues). My father already knew about this famous man, and asked his porter if he could possibly go to that car and meet him.

I don't know how it was accomplished, but the introduction was made, and so Torsten spent a couple of hours with Mr. Handy, and was given an original autographed piece of sheet music (The Memphis Blues, I believe), which has been passed on to his granddaughter, Martha Burns Wojno.

— Natalie Lund, by permission