When I was a kid, my dad fed me stories and I ate them up. Actually, I should say when WE were kids, because there are six kids in our Brekke family (Wayne, Susan, Sandee, Bill, Melissa and John). His stories would be about just about anything--fairy tales, heroes, myths and legends, ghosts, wars, famous people and events. You name it, he had a story about it, and if he wasn’t too busy preparing lessons for the next day or studying for a class he was taking or being a farmer or a school superintendent, he loved nothing better than to regale us with a tale or two. Dad was a great story teller and not one bit shy of embellishing a good story with a few additional details gleaned from his own imagination. He operated on the principle that every good story can be improved upon. If the truth was interesting, just think how much more interesting it could be if it were stretched and exaggerated a little here and there. In this he was emulating some of the great American story tellers...Washington Irving, O Henry, Mark Twain, even present-day Garrison Keillor come to mind. We had no clue about that at the time; we were just tickled to be the recipients of great stories and bedtime was the perfect opportunity to beg for one.
As we grew older, Dad added stories about our own family...the early settlers in Dakota Territory. How they had come to Dakota around 1880 in a caravan of covered wagons and set out building tarpaper shanties and sod houses....or maybe they'd dug a cave out of the side of a hill or creek bank to live in. Most of what he told us bore a reasonable resemblance to the truth.
This was during the days of The Lone Ranger. Hollywood was making a fortune off of both big screen and TV Westerns. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books had been written and published decades earlier, but I had yet to see one. As Dad told his stories, I imagined myself as a young girl growing up in those days out on the wide open prairie. It was thrilling. When our great-grandparents arrived in Dakota Territory there were almost no trees. Buffalo bones covered the ground in the nearby Sand Hills. One of the only landmarks was a giant rock that could be seen from a few miles distance. At first that rock, the silhouette of trees following the Wild Rice River, and the position of the sun were all they had to guide them. Sioux Indians still traveled their seasonal hunting trails back and forth when our ancestors arrived in the 1880s. Sometimes an Indian would stop at a homesteader’s shack, maybe to trade meat for bread or for some other purpose. Prairie fires were a constant source of concern during summers, along with crop failures and far too much hard work. Settlers were caught in life threatening blizzards. At times wolves would follow their wagons for miles. Babies were born and children died. One financial crisis after another toppled their dreams or nearly did. Still the pioneers found time for socializing, for laughter, for song and dance, and for God. They maintained hope. And through hard work and perseverance they built the land of their dreams. In doing so, they built America.
After hearing the stories my dad told to me, I was hooked. One day Dad showed me a family tree. It came as a bit of a surprise to learn that our little family in North Dakota was attached to a bigger group of people somewhere out there. It turned out that “out there” was Iowa and Illinois and Norway. I’d always known about Norway of course, but Dad had been thinking we should find out where our Brekke ancestors lived in Norway, so he’d been busy writing letters and getting answers. He’d learned from his uncle, Ole Johnson, that our family had come from the community of Vik, which lies along the Sogne Fjord, a little north of Bergen in the west of Norway. Uncle Ole had even put together a pretty extensive family tree. This family tree was a wonder to me. I liked knowing that I had some connection to all those people. So many stories, I thought! Those people, those places, and those stories are important. What’s more, they are interesting. We are immensely enriched by those stories.
Putting the pieces of a family’s history together after nearly two hundred years have gone by is a lot like working on a complicated jigsaw puzzle. At the same time, it’s a more than a little like solving a mystery, really a series of mysteries. I started this project years ago. Now I intend to finish it, begininng here on this blog with Endre Mikkjelson Brekke, his wife, Anna Olsdatter Hopperstad, and their 3 children, Ragnhild, Mikkjel, and newborn daughter, Olina, who traveled from Norway to America in 1853, with many close family members aboard the Hans Holmboe. What I post here will be only part of what I have learned. If you are a descendant of Endre and Anna or in some other way related to them, welcome to the story.
