Nobody really knows where the name “Berg” came from. Oscar’s father, Andrew, was named Anders Olafson – “Andrew, son of Olaf” – in his home village in rural Sweden. He came to America in the late 1870s, and wound up in Lake Lida, Minnesota with the name Andrew Berg.
Berg? I have no idea. I have this 20%-serious theory that he arrived at the bureaucrats design at Ellis Island at the same time as a group of Hasidim from eastern Poland, one of whose descendants is trying to figure out why his family are the only Olafsons in their synagogue.
Andrew married Caroline Slorby, of and had two kids before she died in childbirth. Andrew them re-married Ida Venholm, another immigrant from Sweden, and their first son Oscar, born in 1889, was the first of ten more kids.
Oscar was born in Lake Lida, and grew up working on Andrews farm – but he had other plans.
Sometime in the 1910s, he headed to Saint Paul. There’s a photo, somewhere, of him in a Saint Paul streetcar driver’s uniform, in front of the Como Park streetcar station, the one at the south end of Como Park. And then the trail goes cold again.
He popped up again in 1927, starting a photography studio in Jamestown, North Dakota. Business was good enough that he needed an assistant. He wrote to a couple of women in northeastern Minnesota, XXXXXX, who’d spent years establishing photography studios all over the upper Midwest, including one in Bovey run by Ralph Enstrom that’d already produced a photo that would become iconic in the upper Midwest…
…but that’s coming up later on in the week.
But one of the aunts knew that one of the girls working at the Enstrom studio, their niece Beatrice, was looking for a move. Bea moved to Jamestown to take over as the assistant at Berg Studio.
They got married not too long later – 1930-ish, I think.
Grandpa Oscar and Grandma Bea.
My father, Bruce, was born in 1936.
Oscar was, by all accounts I’ve heard, quite the outdoorsman; a hunter, a fisherman, a golfer, a man about town (in a fairly small town).
But neither I nor my dad knew much about that. Oscar died of a cardiac arrest in March of 1942.
It’s been said that my brother, sister and I would have been very different if Oscar had lived longer. Oscar was, by all accounts, a lot more brusque, a little more “direct”, much more “Type A” than Grandma. We’ll touch on that later next week.
All I know is that Oscar, like a lot of guys in that era, had to adapt to a lot of circumstances in his day. I can’t imagine they romanticized it enough to call it “Reinventing Oneself” back then – it was more a matter of necessity spawning invention.
But as someone who’s had to do the same over the years, I would have so many question for Oscar.
It amazes me how people moved around in those days. The family legend says Grandpa grew up on a sharecropper farm in Kentucky, joined the Navy and sailed around the world in Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet, mustered out with his Navy buddy who hailed from some Indian-named lumberjack town in the North Woods called “Bemidji” where he met the buddy’s sister and . . . .
That is one fantastic picture. Kudos to the family for preserving it. That coat looks warm… and no fear of crazed lunatics defacing it.
Did Oscar come from any of these locations in Sweden:
Berg, Ostergotland, SE
Berg, Stockholm, SE
Berg, Uppsala, SE
Berg, Jonkoping, SE
Berg, Kronoberg, SE
Berg, Kalmar, SE
Berg, Blekinge, SE
Berg, Halland, SE
Berg, Vastra Gotaland, SE
Berg, Varmland, SE
Ellis Island was notorious for assuming the patronymic was the name of the town they came from in the old country.
Pig, I am not sure it was notorious but more rule of thumb. Also, I think you meant surname, not patronym. Most Jews did not have surnames, only a given name and ben/ibn father’s first name. My hebrew name makes no mention of the surname at all. I am actually dumbfounded Scandinavians had the same. Under the soviet rule and on, everyone had to have first name, patronym and surname. We dropped patronyms when we moved because they are different from second names and nobody uses them here. And so, everybody who came over from the old country, especially from small towns, had to invent surnames (they all had patronyms) so they can be registered at Ellis Island. It could have been derived from place of birth, what you did, whether you had to cross a river when you left, whether there was a cliff overlooking your house, silly stuff like that. No idea how my friend’s grandad ended up with a last name Harris though, lol.
Both sides of my family emigrated here in the late 1800’s (nearest I can figure is 1896 – my father’s side) from Germany and my mother’s side from Italy in 1920. The German family name, was shortened by some of the family members, to an easier to pronounce version.
Can’t help but notice on the immigration forms that they filled out, how different that procedure was then, compared to now. They were asked where they were going, if they had family there, if they had money, a job and then given a medical check. Apparently, my grandfather from Italy, had some chest congestion and a cough. Both he and grandma were quarantined on Ellis Island for three days until it cleared up.
Great pics.
Boss, legal immigration in the 1980’s was the same – “They were asked where they were going, if they had family there, if they had money, a job and then given a medical check.”. Oh, and somebody had to vouch for us if we had neither family nor money.
Regarding the name, there are any number of possibilities, including “error at Ellis Island”, but one that I found in my family is that my great uncle actually started using his mother’s maiden name as his name when he came here. Since he’d successfully dodged the draft already in Austria-Hungary, Germany, and England, I think he figured that if any spies came after a particular emigrant, he’d do well not to be using the name he used in Bohemia and Bavaria.
(side note; when Uncle Sam came calling in 1917, he answered as a loyal citizen, and they didn’t take him)