Sometime after 1900, a recent graduate of what would become the university of Minnesota school of pharmacy, Sven Hendrickson, who as a 15-year-old young man had moved by himself from Steigen, Norway to Minnesota to work on a farm \ufffc, moved from Minneapolis to Dunseith, North Dakota. He set up a pharmacy, and along with his wife, Jeanette, an immigrant from Quebec, \ufffchad four children, including a daughter, born on March 17, 1912, and inevitably named Patricia \ufffc. The Hendricksons \ufffc moved around a bit, and wound up in Jamestown, a scrappy little railroad town about halfway between Fargo and Bismarck<\/p>\n
Sometime after that, in about 1922, Oscar Berg, the son of Swedish immigrants, who had worked as a farmer and a street car conductor in st paul, moved to that same little town, Jamestown, to start a photography studio. He did it with the help of a couple of women from Northern Minnesota, who had made quite a career of getting people started in the photography business. A few years later, when the studio was successful enough for him to need to look \ufffc for an assistant, he reached out to those two women, who recommended their niece, \ufffcwho was working at a studio in Bovey Minnesota.<\/p>\n
The niece, Beatrice Gresley, the daughter of a couple of Norwegian immigrants, took the job and \ufffcmoved there in about 1928. Sometime after that, in about 1932, Oscar and Beatrice got married. \ufffc<\/p>\n
Somewhere around the time that Oscar and Beatrice were working away at the studio, Sven and Jeanette\u2019s daughter Patricia decided to attend the little college on the North Hill of Jamestown \ufffc. There, she would major in English, become homecoming \ufffc royalty, and meet a strapping young all American four letter athlete and chemistry major, Donald Hall, from Starkweather, North Dakota. They \ufffc would marry not long before Oscar and Beatrice had a baby, at the new hospital just down the hill from the college \ufffc. That baby would be about five years old when Oscar died of a heart attack, leaving Beatrice to run the photography studio for the next couple of decades. \ufffc This was about the time that Sven moved to Wahpeton North Dakota to start a new pharmacy. \ufffc<\/p>\n
Pat and Don would go on to live in Devils Lake, Grand Forks, Aberdeen, and, finally, Bismarck. They had three kids, the oldest of which , Jan, \ufffcwould go back to Jamestown to go to college, and meet Oscar and Beatrice\u2018s only son. They got married, and not long after that I came along. The son, Bruce, was a high school teacher \u2013 maybe the best high school teacher in the history of high school teachers \u2013 for about 40 years. And their daughter and I both went to that little college on the North Hill before we and our little brother moved to bigger places with more opportunities.<\/p>\n
My parents split up a few years later, and my mother moved to Turkey for five years, but came back to Minot, built a dream house with her second husband (another Jamestown native who’d joined the Navy but kept a foot in the state) and lived there until they both died, in 2020 and 2022, respectively.<\/p>\n
Oscar died in 1942.\u00a0\u00a0 Sven, in 1948.\u00a0\u00a0 Don and Pat moved to Arizona in the ’70s.\u00a0\u00a0 Beatrice passed away in 1980.<\/p>\n
And last week, I moved my father from Jamestown to Billings, Montana, to be closer to my sister, her husband and her four kids, all of whom love doting on dad\/grandpa. \ufffc
And so for the first time in about 120 years, there are no Bergs, or blood relatives of mine, in North Dakota. \ufffc<\/p>\n
That’s a weird feeling. I lived there for 22 years, but they were the first 22, so my sense of place\u00a0<\/em>is still very rooted there.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve become more of a homer in the past 20 years or so, as I see some of the virtues of the place I left behind 2\/3 of a lifetime ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometime after 1900, a recent graduate of what would become the university of Minnesota school of pharmacy, Sven Hendrickson, who as a 15-year-old young man had moved by himself from Steigen, Norway to Minnesota to work on a farm \ufffc, moved from Minneapolis to Dunseith, North Dakota. He set up a pharmacy, and along with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89414"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89416,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89414\/revisions\/89416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}