Another Old Picture From an Album

Lars Bjorn Larson and Anna Karine Faa Larson

Yesterday I showed you a picture of one of my maternal great grandfathers, Ingvald Andreas Fischer, who was born in Norway.

Now a little about his wife.

Ingvald A. Fischer married Emma Larson who was born in 1875 in Minnesota, and died in 1960 (aged 84–85). She is buried in the Halstad Lutheran South Cemetery in Halstad, Norman County, Minnesota.

Emma Larson's parents (my great, great grandparents) were Lars Bjorn Larson (1846 - 1921), who was born January 18, 1846 in Rogaland Norway, and Anna Karine Faa Larson (1852 - 1909), who was born in LaSalle County, Illinois on May 12, 1852.

Anna Karine Faa Lason died in 1909 at age 56 in Halstad, Norman County, Minnesota, and she is buried in the Halstad Lutheran South Cemetery in Norman County, Minnesota.

Lars B. Larson remarried to Betsey Blom Larson in 1909. Betsey Blom Larons was born May 22, 1858 in Illinois and she died July 10, 1915 at aged 57 and she is buried in the Halstad Lutheran South Cemetery in Norman County, Minnesota.

The family of Lars Larson and Anna Karine Faa Larson (my great, great grandparents) can be seen below.

Lars B. Larson died on July 2, 1921 at age 75 in Halstad, Norman County, Minnesota, and he is buried in the Halstad Lutheran South Cemetery in Halstad, Norman County, Minnesota.

Both Ingvald Andreas Fischer and Emma Larson Fischer are buried in the Halstad Lutheran South Cemetery in Halstad, Norman County, Minnesota.

Haltad, Minnesota was founded in 1884 by a Norwegian immigrant by the name of Ole Halstad, with a station on the Great Northern Railway. Today Halstad has a population of about 620 people, and its motto is "The way rural America is supposed to be."

What's amazing to me is how this small town in Minnesota -- Halstad -- was created by a Norwegian immigrant to attract more Norwegian immigrants and how, once settled, a lot of folks did not stray very far.

Esther Fischer, my grandmother, was one of those to break out. She came south to Augusta, Kansas to work as a lab technician following a newspaper advertisement for the job. There she met my grandfather, who was born on a farm in Longton, Kansas (population 564) in 1900, and who moved to Augusta, Kansas to be a "still operator" at the Mobile Oil refinery which was opened after they began pumping crude oil in Butler County in 1915.  Working at that same small town Kansas refinery, and living only 6 and a half  blocks away from my mother, was Barack Obama's grandfather and mother.

My mother met my father at the University of Kansas where he had somehow migrated after graduating from Princeton.

My father did not get to Princeton from a finishing school. In fact, my father was born in the poorest town in America, Pineville, Kentucky, the son of a drunk who abandoned his family.  His mother had serious curvature of the spine and she made what little money that came in as a book keeper at a bakery.  My father ran away from home at 14, eventually made his way to Washington, D.C. and joined the Air Force where he got his GED.  He applied to the 10 best universities in the world, and they all turned him down except for Princeton which took him in, I suppose, as an Appalachian affirmative action case. After graduating from Princeton my dad got a Fulbright scholarship to Lille, France.  By the time he got his act together at the end of that year, all the best schools had already filled their teaching assistant slots except the University of Kansas where he went, met my mother, and waited to hear from the U.S. Foreign Service to which he had he applied.  He was eventually accepted, he proposed to my mother, and the rest is history.

The day after my folks were married, the small town girl from Augusta, Kansas (population 5,000) and the high school dropout from Pineville, Kentucky (population 1,700) went to Syria to live, and from thereafter they moved to, and lived in, Iran, Lebanon, Zimbabwe, Mali, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria.  They went everywhere, from Sweden to Bulawayo, from Machu Pichu to Petra, from Alaska to the Amazon, from Maine to Japan, from the Sahara Desert to the rainforests of South America.

But that, as they say, is another tale....