Minnesota Genealogical Support Services - MGSS MFN

08/21/2025

At another church later on I became friends with Bob Johnson. He is the sculptor who made the cow heads that are now at the Minnesota State Fair on a billboard on the grounds.
These cowl heads are made of fiberglass and are actually hollow and quite light compared to solid wood or other media.
The cow heads originally were created for Ewald Bros Dairy in north Minneapolis. Bob and his partner were asked by someone else to create a similar fiberglass sculpture of dog heads, but they refused believing that it would typecast them as only animal sculptors.
At our church there is a Last Supper 3D wall hanging. I used to be the custodian there and periodically we would have to move it to clean behind it. It was surprisingly very light and easy to carry between two persons as it was a rather long piece.
I offered to catalog all of Bob's work for him after visiting his home in Robbinsdale but he declined, bit in th eprocess I learned of other of his works. He said he has some things at the Wall Drug in South Dakota, which are probably more standard materials than the fiberglass ones. He also mentioned that he did an INdian but I don't recall where he told me it was located. It's not the one in Wabasha by the Eagle Center. I've never been able to trace down the location. If you find out something, please let me know.

08/20/2025

Here's a strange tale for the books.

I started going back to my childhood church when I was 27. I had left the church at age 18 when I graduated from high school and started attending college. I met this man who had the last name of Eastman. I didn't know at the time (1979) about the early Minneapolis history that includes several Eastman's.

This man told me his wife had a dream where he was milking a cow. For some reason or other he interpreted this to mean that he was going to be a leader in the church and he also seemed to think this was something he should share with me. I filed the info away in my memory and in my diary without having any special reason for doing so. It was on October 9th.

As it turned out, he and his wife were divorced and his wife became a very key volunteer for the deaf because she herself suffered from that challenge. I don't recall ever having met her.

Her name was Merrilee Knoll and you can find info on her on the internet. I'll see if I can find some files on my computer. She is deceased now and I think it would be ok to share bios about her service to others.

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08/20/2025

I'm always considered myself a writer. My mother was an avid reader and I was greatly blessed by having her in my life. My grandmother would have me read in front of my uncles and aunts and their families. I got all the Nancy Drew mysteries and other books like Ginny Gordon stories from my grandmother who passed them on after her kids were done reading them. The Drew books always had big words and my mother always was able to explain to me the meaning of them. By the time I got into second grade I was reading classics like Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. It gave me a big head start in school.

Luck of the draw!

08/19/2025

Jane Pejsa is a Minnesota author who wrote a biography of Gratia Countryman who built a branch system for the Minneapolis Public Library bringing the library to people in hospitals, factories and schools, influencing libraries locally and nationally.

Jane's mother was Irene Melgaard Hauser whom my mother met at the beauty shop where she worked as a cosmotologist. Irene gave her two illustrated children's books (A Child's Garden of Verses and The Real Mother Goose) to give to me, and her married name is inscribed inside the covers. I was able to track down Mrs. Walter Hauser, and from there it was one step further to finding her daughter Jane was born one day later than my mother on August 12th, 1929.

Irene was a librarian downtown at the Public Library and thus the connection with Gratia Countryman.

People touch us in many ways in our lives.

Unless you do the research these influences upon our lives are unknown.

08/19/2025

How did you get supplies if no train went through your town?

New Ulm was the market town that you would need to travel to in Minnesota.

Sykeston, North Dakota had a lake and so lots were sold with the expectation of a train coming through main street to deliver goods, but the railroad decided to build elsewhere and people had to travel a distance to get to the railroad line. My grandmother's family (HAMMES) operated a food cart for people to have something to eat while they waited for the train to arrive at a stop.

Nowadays we have all these food trucks taking up space on the streets. It's not a new idea! It seems like people could prepare their own food to bring to the stop, but laziness seems to be a human trait.

I'm wondering what kind of food and drink they served.

08/19/2025

The Minnesota Historical Society has a series of books as resources for Minnesota history and genealogy called Collections.

An essential volume is Volume 14 of Minnesota biographies 1655-1912. It purports to list every mention from periodicals and newspapers of early Minnesota history. That would be hard to do in the modern age with millions of names to deal with, but for the earlier history it is a pretty good source or starting place to do a search.

If you can find a copy online it might have optical scanning errors. It is always better to have a hard copy on hand, which I happen to have. If you need a lookup, let me know.

People who post things online rarely check it for errors to make the necessary corrections. The print back in 1912 was very small and it would be hard for optical scanning to get everything correct. But if you would like to view a copy online, check out this link:

08/18/2025

Today is a great day to discover your roots.

Roots are where you come from.

Take for example my heritage. Norwegian on my dad's side. My last name is actually the name of a town in Norway in Lesja called Lokken. Everyone from that town has the same last name, but I'm not related to everyone in Lokken.

My grandfather's name was Haaken (doesn't rhyme with Lukken pronunciation as I once believed it did). So my dad's last name could have been haakenson or hokenson. But Haaken's dad was Thord, so he could have been Thorson. But those would be more like your middle name. Haaken Thorson Lokken would be my grandfather's full name. But contemplate this mystery. My father was not given a middle name. Sort of blows the whole schematic, doesn't it? Rules were made to be broken.

You can have fun discovering things, but they don't always match up with your preconceived notions. Everybody is a result of choices made by our guardians and carried on by their offspring. No man is an island entire on to himself. (John Donne)

Customs are great until you move to a different country and the customs are no longer practiced. You don't need to be tied to the past, but you can still appreciate the places you came from.

In Norway you have your given name, your father's name, and your town name all in the same breath. That's a lot of information in a single name.

Where do you come from? How do you know?

08/18/2025

The heat is simmering down and it's a perfect time to get out and do work on genealogical studies. If I can help just let me know!

I've had great success in my own studies and I am sure you can have the same results if you make a concerted effort.

I discovered that my mother's side (HAMMES) came from Trier, Germany when their son (my GGF) was nearing draft age into the Prussian Army, ending up in Clara City, Minnesota where the family became charter members of the Catholic church called St. Clara's. From there they went to Sykeston, North Dakota. When the mother died (originally from Luxembourg) everyone came to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where my mother was born in 1929 and I came along at St. Mary's on Feb. 1, 1952. I attended Bremer, Jordan and North High school from which I graduated in 1970, all excelled courses. I then studied humanities and math at the University of Minnesota.

Trier is the oldest city in Germany, dating back to the time of the Assyrians. It also served later as the second capitol for the Roman Emperors who had summer homes there. There is also a city on the eastern side of Minnesota that is named New Trier.

I seem to recall that Joseph, the father of Jesus, is the patron saint of Trier.

What have you discovered about your family roots?

08/18/2025

If you don't post no one will interact with you. Share your insights and your failures. Maybe someone else can shed some light on your searches.

08/18/2025

All my genealogical books are now holding up my bed mattress. That's the advantage of scanning the pages. The past holds us up, even in our slumberings!