A Promise for Oxendal

Kathi in her Scandanavian rainboots at the front of the beautiful church in Oksendal. The altar, carvings and other decorations were used in the previous church which dated back to the 1700s.













Back view of the Evangelical Lutheran Church at Øksendal


The boathouse once used by Jon Husby. When the tide
came in, it was easy to get boats down the ramp.

While searching for her Norwegian roots in the village of Øksendal, Norway, stepdaughter Kathi discovered the farm where her great grandfather, Jon Andersson (Sjølseth) Husby, had lived and worked. Although the house was not the original, several original structures, including the boat house at the edge of the fjord, remained on the property. She felt overwhelmed to stand where her ancestors once lived and commented, “I still don’t quite know what to do with my feelings of being connected to something much larger than myself.”

As she inquired after local Husbys in a little store, one customer introduced himself. He was Børd Bøye, pastor or preste of the local Evangelical Lutheran state church. She attended church the following day, thinking that she would have a better chance of meeting family there.

The present church building had been constructed in 1890, so the family members that Great-grandfather Jon left behind when he went to America would have worshipped in that location. The altar and decorative pieces inside were from the original church built in the 1700s and would have been familiar to him.

Only a few adults attended the service, apparently for their children’s benefit since it was a special Thanksgiving service. Kathi had discovered that most adults in Øksendal seem to believe that religion is a root cause of the world’s problems, (a common theme, in Kathi’s opinion, when people become prosperous and self-reliant.) Although the entire service was in Norwegian, she tried to follow along with the singing. Afterwards, everyone had hot dogs at the back of the church to celebrate Thanksgiving and then left.

Pastor Bøye offered to show Kathi the bell tower. They climbed up a dark, steep stairway that gave way to a ladder, then scaffolding, then foot-and-hand holds. He opened a panel in the wall so she could see out and take photographs. All of the old furniture was stored in the attic. She felt awed to see the very seats her ancestors had used when they worshipped.

After they climbed down from the bell tower, Kathi sat with Pastor Bøye on the steps of the church and talked. His story broke her heart. He had been at the church for eleven years and had made no discernible difference to the adults at all. He shared his dream that the people of Øksendal would become a blessing to others and themselves and that they might grow in their relationship to God and to each other. He longs to see every home a praying home.

As I heard this, I remembered Kathi’s great-grandfather, who brought his vital faith with him to America, and all the other Norwegian pioneers whose faith gave them the strength and courage to build new lives in a new land.

Kathi prayed with Pastor Bøye before she left. She promised to share his dream with us in America and to ask us and our churches to pray for him and this community, which seems to have forgotten God.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the readers of this blog would, through their prayers, help to ignite a spiritual reawakening among the descendants of those the stalwart immigrants left behind in Norway?

A Norwegian in America

The Jon Andersson Husby family, c. 1915
l. to r., Ingebord, Ingwald, Anna, Hendrick Sr. (Hank's father), Ida, Jon Husby

In the 1880s, many young men left Norway to seek better prospects in America. They brought strong muscles, their skills at logging, fishing, or farming, their faith...and not much else. Jon (John) Andersson Husby was one of them. When he arrived in Michigan in 1882, he was 19 or 20. He went to work on a farm, as he’d done in the old country, but summer’s heat was more than he could stand. Decades later, his eyes twinkled as he told his grandson—my husband Hank—that Michigan was so hot he could hear the corn popping in the fields at night. The farmhands were served salt pork three times a day. It jiggled unappetizingly on the plate.

John soon took passage for the Pacific Northwest via sailing ship around the Horn–the southernmost tip of South America. He loved the Puget Sound, which reminded him of Norway’s fjords. The Northwest’s damp climate reminded him of Norway, too.

He acquired a stump ranch at Parker’s Landing on the Columbia River, halfway between the future towns of Washougal and Camas. He built a rough board shack to live in. There were no bridges across the Columbia, but steamboats stopped at the landing to take on loads of milk and produce bound for Portland on the Oregon side of the river. Rafts of logs floated down the river, as well as barges of grain from eastern Washington. In the summers, John and his friend Ole Reinseth hired out to logging companies to cut virgin timber. Family stories relate how they walked many miles north to the Puget Sound country for lumber camp jobs. When not logging, John worked to dig out the stumps dotting his property (hence the name stump ranch). He cleared enough space to pasture a cow and raise a garden.

In 1890, he sent for Ingeborg Reinseth, the sister of his partner Ole, who had found work as a chambermaid in England. We know nothing about their courtship, but Ingeborg came to America and married John. Their four children were born in the house John had built. By now he worked at logging sites closer to home. He also planted a prune orchard. Dried prunes were in great demand in Germany in the early 1900s. They could be shipped long distances without refrigeration and could be baked into breads and cakes as well as eaten dried or stewed. Washougal and Camas became known for their numerous prune orchards, as well as peach, pear, and apple orchards, although World War II spelled the doom of the German prune market.

In about 1890, Ole Reinseth donated land for a Lutheran Church near the Washougal River, and he and John Husby helped to build it.

The pulp mill at Camas became the largest employer in Clark County, and John’s sons and a son-in-law, as well as his grandsons, made their living at the mill.

Hank loved his Grandpa John Andersson Husby and shares his traits of humor, hard work, and strong faith. The last time Hank saw his grandfather was in 1956, shortly before he died. A visiting pastor came into his nursing home room and asked John about his relationship with Christ. John’s weak voice suddenly steadied. The words rang out as he recited the Apostle’s Creed:

“I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord...”

A half-century later, tears still run down Hank’s cheeks as he recalls the firm testimony of faith that had guided Jon Andersson Husby to leave his homeland and launch out into an uncertain future.

Norwegian Names

Photo by Kathi Ferguson

This cemetery in Norway dates
back to the 1200s: a geneologist's paradise.

To make better sense of this blog, please read the preceeding story, Finding Norwegian Roots.

Our globe-trotting daughter Kathi continues to send us updates as she searches for her Norwegian relatives. Her search is complicated by the Norwegian system of naming people. The system has changed throughout history, and there are regional differences as well.

A child was given its “real” name, its first name, at christening. Almost every person took his or her father’s name as well. Kathi’s great-grandfather, Jon, took his father Anders’ name. He became Jon Andersson. His sister, Manghild, would have been Manghild Anderssdatter (the daughter of Anders.) Previous to around 1900, the women used their father’s name all their lives, married or not.

In some places, the father’s name (patronymic) was the only last name used. But in others, one other name was added. Commonly, it was the name of the farm (or address) where the family lived. If Jon Andersson was born or settled on a farm called Sjølseth, he would be called Jon Andersson Sjølseth. If he moved to another farm, then his last name would change to Husby, or whatever the farm was called.

Some families had a hereditary last name, sometimes of foreign origin and often very old. These names were often found in the cities or among high officials.

Complicating all this, in the late 1800's, new naming patterns emerged. In one of them, a married woman could take her husband’s patronymic.

In another, children took their father’s last name (i.e., Husby) instead of a real patronymic.

The transition period lasted until 1923, so that researchers can find both old and new patterns even within a family. In that year, a new law ordered that each family should have a hereditary last name; only one. So some families took the name of their father, others a farm name, and some kept the hereditary names. The women lost their last names. But today, Norwegian women, as a rule, keep their last names after marriage.

For further information on the Norwegian naming system, go to this link:

http://www.nndata.no/home/jborgos/names.htm

Finding Norwegian Roots

Part of the village of Øksendal in the municipality of Sunndalsøra, where Kathi found her roots.

In this nation of immigrants, most of us can trace our ancestry back to pioneers of one kind or other. My adventurous stepdaughter, Kathi, lives in Naples, Italy, and takes the opportunity to travel in many European countries. Most recently she set out for Norway to find Sunndal, the community her great-grandfather, Jon Anderssen Husby, left in 1882, when he emigrated to the Pacific Northwest at the age of 19.

With information provided by Don Reinseth, a distant cousin in Washington State, and armed with a great deal of pioneering boldness, she found where Jon was born, the house where he was raised, and the farm where he worked before emigrating. She also found a number of relatives she didn’t know she had.

Due to the modern electronic miracles of e-mail and Facebook, she was able to share her research, her adventures as they happened, and pictures as well.

The sun breaks through on the Øksendal pier, at the tip of the Sunndalsøra fjord.

In her Sunndalsøra hotel, Kathi met a girl who Googled the Norway phone pages in both Sunndalsøra and nearby Øksendal for Husbys and gave her directions to the nursing home. Along the way Kathi took dozens of photos of Husby grave markers, in cemeteries that dated back to the 1200s.

Five patients in the nursing home were named Husby, but all were too sick to talk to her. An assistant and a guest there looked at her telephone list and recommended that she talk to a man named Per Steiner Husby. With help from the clerk at the Øksendal store (also named Husby), she found the Per Steiner Husby farm. Per and his wife had already received two calls telling them that an American was looking for them.

They pulled out volumes of family history that have been compiled back to before the 1700s but couldn’t seem to find Jon (pronounced Yone) Andersson Husby. So they called another cousin, Helge Husby, who turned out to be one of the contacts Kathi had been given by Don Reinseth in America. It was Helge’s opinion that Jon Andersson Husby was actually born Jon Andersson (Anderssen) Sjølset (Sjølseth). Because the birth dates and American emigration dates match, he believes that they were the same person.

Per’s wife took Kathi to see the place where Jon lived as a young man. The house was not the original, but some of the other structures, including the boathouse, were present when Jon lived there.

Later, Marie Husby, the clerk from the little store, took her to see another family. They poured over a volume of family histories from Øksendal, excitedly turning pages and making phone calls. Then they took her to a farm called the Sjølseth/Sjølseth farm. They had also deduced that Jon Anderssen Husby was born to Anders Larsen from the Sjølseth farm and that, indeed, Jon actually was born Jon Anderssen Sjølseth. (People often took the place names of where they lived as their surnames.) Jon had evidently changed his name to Husby at some later date. Perhaps the immigration officials in America could neither pronounce or spell Sjølseth, so he gave them a name they could handle.

However it happened, Kathi found herself standing on the ground in Norway where both her great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had lived, surrounded by newly found relatives.
She still has unanswered questions. Why did Jon leave the beautiful fjords and farms of Norway to become a logger in Western Washington? Why did his descendants on both sides of the Atlantic lose track of each other? Why is so little known of his story?

It’s up to pioneering modern-day researchers like Kathi to fill in the blanks of the past.

This is the farm where both Jon and his father worked. Kathy can't officially determine that it was a Husby farm. If Jon's father was not an oldest son, then he would not have had his own farm. In that case, they would probably have worked for someone else. If that someone else had been a Husby, that might explain why Jon took that last name. Husby is also the name for "house by a city" or for a group of houses. So Jon could have taken the name for a neighborhood. The original farmhouse is on the left. All photos by Kathi Ferguson

Snohomish County's Favorite Hike...The Big 4 Ice Caves

Early visitors at the ice caves.
Photo courtesty of Granite Falls Historical Museum

Hot Weather Weakens Ice Caves. This recent headline told a familiar story. The ice caves at Big Four Mountain are a favorite hiking destination for people in our part of Washington State and have been ever since Big Four Resort was built in 1921 at the foot of its namesake mountain.

Every spring, snow avalanches fall from Big Four’s sheer cliffs and pack to glacier hardness. Cascading waterfalls burrow under the ice, forming caves that tempt the ignorant or foolhardy to enter. Almost every year, in spite of warning signs at the trailhead, someone is hurt. A few people have died under collapsing ice. The newspaper story in question was triggered by another such incident. Someone, probably climbing on the glaciers or the cliffs above, had slipped and fallen. Rescuers passed through one of the caves to help him, and got out just as chunks of ice came crashing down behind them.

But for those who use good sense, the ice caves make a spectacular outing. The trail is smooth and mostly level for a good part of its one-mile length, making it handicapped-accessible to and even past the newly installed bridge over the Stillaguamish. It begins as a plank walkway over wetlands, where you can lean over a railing to watch small trout schooling in the shallow water. Walkers have a choice of turning off on a trail which loops back to the trailhead via the roadbed of the old Everett to Monte Cristo Railroad or continuing on through some old growth trees to the river and up to the foot of the mountain.

Steve and Lenora Anderson on the new metal bridge

Beyond the bridge, the stream from the glaciers enters the river and the trail begins a moderate climb. Along the way, hikers see all stages in the life of the forest, from seedlings growing on nurse logs to decaying snags that house bugs and birds. Once we were lucky enough to see one of these snags topple to the ground without warning. We were also fortunate to be far enough away that the many-ton behemoth missed us!

Yes, if a tree falls in the forest, it does make a noise.

The last part of the trail is the most difficult. A recent winter’s avalanches, adding to the devastation of previous slides, snapped trees in half or completely uprooted them. One of the avalanches took out part of the trail, necessitating a detour. But the new gaps in the forest afford one a sneak preview of what awaits around the last corner. The massive wall of rock, with snowfields sloping upward from the base, is breathtaking.

Below: Avalanche passed this way



















Up close, wildflowers springing from newly uncovered ground bloom madly to finish their cycles before snow comes again.

Tiger lilies and budding fireweed

In fact, in whichever direction you turn, the scene is breathtaking, even with a summer’s worth of dirt begriming the glaciers. Just remember, if you go, obey the signs warning against too close an inspection!














Snowfields at the base of Big Four












Don't climb on this cave's roof !













Cooling off in the rush of chill air from the caves

















Feeling close to creation and its Creator

In Defense of Big Families

Delbert Rawlins and his five offspring, in the doorway of our "new" house.

Today, big families are the stuff of TV reality shows.
In my grandparents’ generation, they were simply reality. Grandmother Rawlins raised seven children. Grandma Schmidt gave birth to eleven, eight of whom lived to adulthood.

Those fifteen children raised smaller families, but still, having four or more babies wasn’t unusual. In the next generation, the size of the families dwindled to two or three children. And now our children are raising children...maybe. Of the five siblings in my immediate family, several of their offspring have no children. Four of the offspring have one child apiece. Only one had as many as four babies.

There are lots of reasons for this. Almost every mother is expected to work outside the home today. Children are not needed to help with the family workload like they were in their grandparent’s day. Young people expect to have a career and to make a good living before they even think about having families, and some wait until their biological clocks are on their last ticks.

Years ago I asked my dad why, when making enough money to live on was so difficult, he and Mom had had so many children, so closely spaced. He looked nonplused. “They just came,” he said.

I had barely turned six when brother David, the last of us, was born. Five children in six years and one month! Poor Mom scarcely had time to recover from the last birth before becoming pregnant again. She said she cried when she realized another baby was on the way. An aunt who prided herself at having stopped at two well-spaced siblings criticized our parents for having “all those children” so close together. “How do you expect to care for them when times are so hard?”

We children were blissfully unaware of all that. We didn’t even know that a new brother was joining the family until the evening Daddy picked us up from various neighbors who’d been caring for us for nearly ten days. He drove us to the hospital in Everett.

Daddy left us in the car with an admonition to be good. “I’ll be right back with a surprise,” he said. In minutes the doors of the hospital swung open. Light flooded out, and we saw a white-uniformed nurse pushing a wheelchair toward our old car. Mama sat in the wheelchair, holding a bundle on her lap.

Daddy stowed her suitcase in the trunk, then took the bundle while the nurse helped Mama into the car. He placed the bundle in Mama’s arms as we children crowded close to the back of the bench seat to hug and greet her. She turned around with smiles and a few tears at seeing us again. Of that moment, she later said, “I’ll never forget all those little round faces peering like moons over the seat back.”

Then the bundle squirmed and made odd little noises. Mama folded back the blanket to show us little-round-face number five, twisting itself into an outraged wail. We had a new baby, and with five children in the family, we would never lack for someone to fight with or have fun with.

Children are precious and should be treasured. There’s a lot to be said for big families.

Baby Grace Mooring makes new friends at a family reunion.

Wildfire!

A glance at the clock this morning told me it was time to get up. But something was amiss. The bright sunshine which has greeted us most mornings this summer had taken temporary vacation. Gray light filtered through the blinds. Overcast skies threatened rain...needed, of course, but not particularly appreciated. We’ve been spoiled!

On the other hand, most of us like variety. Daughter Lenora in Tucson, Arizona, called yesterday to say that it was cool enough to leave the house and sit on her patio. For her, that was cause to celebrate!

Here in western Washington, we comment when the wind kicks up. Evenings we stand at the window to enjoy the interplay of setting sun, clouds, and salt water. We love storms, too. At dusk recently, we walked down the street, marveling at the light show going on in dark clouds over the Cascade foothills. The sky above us was clear, the thunder too far away to hear, but the show was better than fireworks...and just as dangerous in our dry forests.

(One of many lightning-caused fires smolders in the western foothills. This one is too small for serious concern but officials keep an eye on it.)

On the east side of the Cascades, wildfire is a constant hazard. This summer a number of lightning-caused fires sent firefighters from all over the state to try to save property. Friend Carolyn and her husband recently moved to Omak in the northern part of central Washington. They love it there, but in two years they’ve watched two fires from their home.

Here’s what she wrote about the most recent conflagration:

"We saw it begin this afternoon. Three little tan wisps of smoke curled slowly into the sky behind the hills in the west. They didn't look like much, just a bit of smoke that would soon disappear.

"A couple of hours later, the sky began to take on a grayish cast. Joe tuned into the sheriff's radio frequency. Bits and pieces of conversation crackled. Fire units called to Buzzard Lake. Evacuations likely. Old Highway 97 closed.

"We looked to the west again. A burnished orange glow backlit the hills, with smudgy brown clouds billowing above. A brisk north wind blew the ugly clouds toward the south. By supper time the orange glow became a neon light on the hilltop. The entire sky turned brown and gray and white. Dusk deepened as the orange glow pulsed, turning red, back to orange, then fading only to reappear and begin again, all the while moving behind the hills to the south. Monotone voices on the radio droned about road closures and shifting firefighter units. They gave directions for citizens seeking evacuations.

"Since we worried that some of our property might be in the fire's path, we hopped into the truck and headed south on Highway 97,parallel to what we thought was a fading fire. Out beyond the town, the sky turned black. Then the acrid smell of smoke began stinging our lungs,and cinders and bits of blackened foliage floated down in front of the truck. About 6 miles south, we couldn’t believe our eyes. A jagged line of red orange flame exploded out of the night and burned angrily down a steep hillside toward an access road. Looking above the fire to the top of the hill, we could see a second line of fire streaming down the other side. Black smoke billowed above flames which looked like molten lava.

Credit: Al Camp/The Omak-Okanogan County Chronicle

"Enough. We turned around and headed home. We are grateful for professional firefighters who have gotten all residents safely out of harm's way, for family and friends who have taken them in, who are monitoring the flames and doing all they can to protect livestock and property. Nothing else can be done till morning.”

Several days later, Carolyn wrote:

“By Saturday morning, the flames on this side of the hills had been extinguished. A layer of smoke like cotton batting lay over Malott (a nearby town) and wrapped around the hills. The fire now had a name--the Oden Road fire. Two residences and a vacation home were destroyed."

By Tuesday, Carolyn said, the fire was mostly out, with only a smoky haze still drifting up and down the valley.

East-siders and “coasties” alike, we’re much aware of the hazards of wildfire. As we watch the current destructive fires overrunning hills and residences in southern California, we are grateful for the sacrifices of firefighters and others whose work keeps us safe.