Regular readers of the Crier may remember my writing about my aunt who in her 80’s filled 8 cassettes of reminiscences about her life. Her daughter, my cousin, transcribed it after her death. I have a copy. It is wonderful family history. In recent columns I have written about pioneers and their lives. This column will be about another kind of pioneer. Those who came to our country in the early 20th century.
Ida Emilia Andersson was # 5 in a family born to a sort of truck farmer in the southern part of Sweden (Skone). My mother was # 4. All 6 of the children came to the US, and the father Anders Jonsson, came after his wife died. In a previous column I related how Aunt Eda (she changed her name from I to E in the US, probably because that’s the way it was pronounced) endured the trip across the Atlantic and passed through Ellis Island. This narrative continues her Odyssey, but first we will go back and see how and why she decided to emigrate.
As was customary in Sweden among working class people, young girls and boys were expected to go to work at a young age, in the summer while in school and full time after graduation. With girls it was usually as a house servant. Aunt Eda had done this for several years while attending school. It happened that the family she was working for had the head house servant get sick and Aunt Eda had assumed some of the duties, chief among which were milking 5 cows 3 times a day. Also, working in the fields. Aunt Eda had enjoyed this kind of work much more than house work but when she returned home and told her mother, the lady became very upset. She announced: “No daughter of mine is going to work as a field hand.” In spite of Aunt Eda’s protests, her mother arranged for a job which consisted of taking care of an old lady. Aunt Eda balked at this. She had no ambition to care for an old lady (if you had known Aunt Eda you would understand she was not tempermentaly suited for this kind of thing). Her mother said “Then you’ll have to go to America”, since the 4 older siblings were already there. Aunt Eda wasn’t thrilled about this, either, but her mother said “you’ll have it nice over there, and you’ll have all the money you can use. It’s wonderful there.” That’s the way America was regarded in those days.
The time between making the decision and leaving was pleasant for Eda. She went to church every Sunday and the library was right beside the church. She would check out a book to read every week. Among them was a Swedish edition of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. She also did embroidery and listened intently to conversations between her mother and grandmother. She said she hadn’t paid much attention to that sort of thing before. She left for America February 14, 1909.
She went to her father’s brother Nels Johnson (his name Anglesized from Jonsson), in Granville, Illinois. She stepped into quite a situation. Her uncle’s wife, Aunt Mary was ill. They had 3 children. The oldest, Hulda, was 6 years old and had been sent to Uncle Nels’ sister Louise because they lived close to a school. The other 2 were at home, 3 year old Esther and Sigrid, just learning to walk. Fifteen year old Eda found herself, in effect, the lady of the house. She had never cooked before but she had to try. Her pay for all this was 2 dollars a week, paid once a month. The first 10 dollars she earned was sent to her mother to pay for her passage.
Her life was a mixed bag. Aunt Mary was not an easy person to get along with. Uncle Nels was good natured and jolly, but also a terrible tease, and loved to set up his greenhorn niece to things just for laughs.
Aunt Eda relates a couple of cooking incidents. Once she was going to make cookies. The recipe did not tell how much flour to use (not unusual in recipe books, at that time). She used way to much. In fact, she couldn’t roll it out so she baked it in a loaf and then sliced it. She said it wasn’t very tasty.
Worse yet was her chicken soup experience. She had never done this before and didn’t know that an old chicken had hairs on it after the feathers were plucked and had to be singed to get rid of them. Nobody could eat the soup because of the hair in it. She was only at Uncle Nels’ place that summer. Farmers didn’t need hired girls in the winter so in October she went to live with her brother Albin. He was married and farming for himself. She enjoyed her stay there. Albin’s wife Sophie was very nice and played the piano so the winter was spent with much singing.
In February, 1910 she went to work for a family named Robinson, not Swedish. They made fun of the way she said jam and jelly (yam and yelly). (Incidentaly, I found Aunt Eda in the 1910 census living in the Robinson household listed as the hired girl). Work there was not easy. Every Monday she had to do the washing and afterward use the water to scrub down the chicken house. She had Sundays off so she generally went to Albin’s house that day. The Robinsons were friends of the Hopkins who were well to do and prominent citizens in Granville. Mr Hopkins had the first automobile in Granville. He took Aunt Eda for a ride. She was so excited she couldn’t wait to write to her mother that she had a ride in a wagon that went by itself, no horse. Her mother wrote back, saying “shame on you to lie like that. I don’t want you to ever tell a story like that again”. Aunt Eda never got a chance to write to her and straighten things out. Her mother died before she could do so. Her mother had been afflicted with asthma all her life and the strain on her heart finally got to her.
It’s a sad place to stop but we will and pick up next time on the experiences of a somewhat modern pioneer.