I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to be Berndt Oleson Græsli.

He was born in 1863, named Berndt Oleson – “Berndt, son of Ole”, in a tiny farm hamlet named “Græsli”. a place small enough that being known as your father’s son was plenty specific enough. Græsli was in the hills of east-central Norway, close to the Swedish border, in a municipality (think “township”) called Tydal, which was a tiny isolated backwater then, and still is today [1]. The oldest sons of each generation swapped between “Berndt Oleson” and “Ole Berndtson”, going back as far as I can tell to the early 1700s.

But times were tough in Tydal. My grandmother – Berndt’s youngest child, who grew up speakiung Norwegian until she was 8 – passed on stories she’d heard of people eating tree bark soup the winter after a crop failure. Sometimes the problems were external – the Swedes invaded in 1812 – but it just wasn’t a hospitable place.

The chronology isn’t clear, but at some point in the late 1800s, one of the many periodic depressions that afflicted Tydal, Ole Berndson’s father went bankrupt, and the farm got foreclosed on. Bernd, by this time in his twenties and with nothing to inherit, emigrated to the US, and moved to greater Thief River Falls, which today reflects the fact that it was a favorite destination for Norwegian emigrés. He took as his last name the anglicization of his home town, and became Berndt Gresley.

He got a job as a drayman, which was the trade he listed in the 1900 and 1910 censuses. By this time he’d moved to Middle River, MN, and built a house that was just torn down fairly recently

Being a drayman was a hard life – but it apparently not as hard as the alternatives. He sent word to Norway, and 5-7 years after he left Norway, his two younger sisters followed suit; Kari Olesdatter moved to a little town along the Canadian border in North Dakota, married, and became Carrie Dennett. Ingeborg married a farmer near Binford, North Dakota, and became, ironically, Ingeborg Olson.

I don’t know much about Berndt. He died 15 years before I was born, in 1948. I try to imagine sometimes what the world must have seemed like to him, starting out in a world not a whole lot different than it’d been 500 years ago, and seeing two world wars, rural electrification, trains and cars, aircraft of any kind much less jets, and a world where his children didn’t consider it preposterous to move more than 10 miles from where they were born.

Berndt is in the bottom three photos, along with his wife Mary (button center), son Ralph (bottom left). Top left, clockwise from top: daughter Minnie, son Ralph, my grandma Beatrice, daughter Alice.

And as someone who rolled the dice and moved to a place that was socially different than the world I grew up in, but economically and technologically utterly recognizable, I wonder what must have gone threw Berndt’s mind as he pondered spinning life’s roulette wheel and moving 3,000 miles to a place that existed in his mind only in the stories sent back in letters from people who’d emigrated before.

[1] Although during the war, the town was a stop on the underground railroad smuggling refugees, guerrillas, downed airmen and Jews to Sweden.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023 at 11:00 am and is filed under Where Credit Is Due. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.