Falling down another rabbit hole on Ancestry.com.

Okay, I get that I might never find Frank Johnson. But since he would have been my first cousin, once removed, I think I have a right to at least look for him.

These kids, on the other hand, were my first cousins, twice removed. That’s because their father was my great grandfather’s brother. Frank gets to be only once removed because his father was my other great grandfather’s son. Before you get too impressed, I only know that from reading the relationship to me that shows on Ancestry.

On the left you can see those children’s parents, Peter (Peder) Anderson and his wife, Ane Marie. Peter’s brother, Ole Anderson, is pictured with his wife and children. That’s my maternal grandfather, George, on the far right. I think Peter and Ole look a lot alike. For more on that, you can read “Seeing Double”.

My first question, in looking at Peter Anderson’s kids, is why Emma and Annie both died so close together in 1901. You can see that Annie died on June 23, and Emma on July 3. This would have made Emma nineteen years old and Annie about ten. I found their gravesites on FindAGrave.com, but nowhere in Newspapers.com could I find an article or an obituary.

I found this in the Redwood Gazette for July 3, 1901, the same day Emma died, but it’s for a son, not a daughter. And who knows how many Mrs. Andersons there could have been in Granite Rock, Minnesota in July of 1901?

There was another mention on July 17, 1901, of an Anderson girl dying from diphtheria in Granite Rock. It does make me think the sisters could have died of diphtheria as well. Or was it some sort of accident, from which Annie passed away and to which Emma succumbed roughly eleven days later?

My next question was why Herman would have died at the age of only 29. Again, I have found no death records or newspaper articles to explain it. Both Canada and the U.S. were engaged in the first world war, so could he possibly have been killed in action overseas? It was in October of 1918, so could it have been the “Spanish flu”?

I’ve read that the influenza epidemic hit Canada in October 1918. Martin P. Magnusson, pictured above, married into the Johnson family in Ludington, Michigan, in 1912. He died in British Columbia on October 11, 1918, and I have always thought he might have been a victim of the “Spanish flu”. I decided to search Ancestry for my Anderson cousins in other people’s family trees, hoping that someone might have included a cause of death for any of the three siblings.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered a photo of two little Anderson boys I had never heard of before in someone’s public photo gallery. Their names were Cornelius and Andy. I thought it was a bit odd that they weren’t in the group photo you saw at the beginning of this post. But they were included in a family tree with Peter and Ane as the parents, along with all the rest of my “first cousins twice removed” as siblings. This is what I found when I checked the census data for 1880 from this tree.

I didn’t think much of the fact that they had Peter’s wife listed as “May C” because in other places I had seen her listed as Mary. And I’ve seen enough of these census reports to know that spellings can be far from accurate. Even Ole’s wife was really Jorjine Marie, and she sometimes got listed as Mary. But strangely, Cornelius and Andrew were the only kids listed. Then it dawned on me.

In 1880, “our” Peder and Ane Marie were still in Denmark, and their oldest son Christian was barely four months old! Not only that, but Cornelius and his family were in the US, in Rockford, Illinois! Still, this family tree had both 1880 census records on Peter’s “facts” page. Had they included them both in case one was right, or did they even realize that one of them had to be wrong? Still, if somebody posts inaccurate information (read “What’s in a Name?” to see some wrong info from the Johnson side) that’s their business, not mine. I see this quite a bit while clicking around on Ancestry, and that’s why you have to be careful when taking facts from other people’s trees. While I’m sure I have some mistakes on my family tree, at least I have it set on “private”, so others won’t accidentally copy “my” wrong information into their own families.

Of course I had to look on FindAGrave.com, and that’s where I realized that not only did the parents’ birth and death dates not match, but this Peter’s wife was named Marie Christine, and her maiden name was Hansen. Our Peter’s wife was Ane Marie, and her maiden name was Christenson. I guess if you just glance at the information, (Anderson, Peter, Marie, Mary, Christine, Christenson), it could be confusing. What’s sad is that Marie Christine died in 1914, the same year as one of her sons. Now I’m curious, but that’s another rabbit hole altogether. Besides, is it really any of my business?

Because I “had” to find out more about Peter and Ane, (which I felt was my business) I searched through Newspapers.com for references to Granite Rock, Minnesota, from about 1899 to 1905. If you search the name “Anderson” from Minnesota, you’ll be inundated with articles about people you aren’t even remotely related to. (Or maybe you are, and don’t know it.) I can only assume this is Peter from our family, and you will see that in January of 1901 his property taxes were $7.94. Louis Anderson could have been the “L. Anderson” who was to lose a teenage daughter to diphtheria that July.

This is from the Redwood Gazette, March 6, 1901. We know it was “our” Mr. And Mrs. Anderson, because by 1910, that’s where they were.

This mention from the May 1, 1901, Redwood Gazette makes me think Peter may have bought land in Raymond (in Kandiyohi County) before selling his farm in Granite Rock. I found it interesting that Christ Hanson was visiting relatives and friends near Sleepy Eye, because that was where Ole and Marie lived at the time.

Naturally I had to find out how far Raymond was from Granite Rock, and it actually isn’t that far. I don’t know how Peter and Ane traveled, but if you take a car now, you can do it in 55 minutes.

By May 22, 1901, besides corn planting being underway and John Jaske having lumbago, Peter had sold his farm to Joseph Home for $28 an acre. Online I found out that $28 back then was equal to about $1,049. I don’t know how many acres he had, but it sounds like a pretty good price to me.

According to the 1910 census, Peter and Ane were in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota, with Herman, age 20, and Amanda, age 17, still at home. They weren’t farming anymore, and though you can’t see it here, Peter was listed as a laborer, doing odd jobs. What’s incorrect about this entry is that Peter was 65, not 55. Peter was born in 1854 and Ane in 1852. You will notice that Ane Marie was listed as Mary, and she was mother to 8 children, 6 of whom were still living. Just in that small screenshot you can see two other women who had lost at least one child. For more information on that, see “The Day of Adversity”. Ane Marie died in Granite Rock in 1915, but Peter eventually went to Canada, where he passed away in 1941. I still have a few questions about this branch of my family, but I was glad to have gotten this far. The info I needed for this post was (almost) complete. I just had a few more things to find out…

It turns out that the other Peter and Marie were on Ancestry, so between that and Newspapers.com, I found the answers to some of my questions about their family. Cornelius and Andy (whose middle name was William) unfortunately both passed away in March of 1888. I couldn’t find out from what. Another son, Andrew C. Anderson, born in 1892, died in November of 1914 at the age of 22 while working on a streetcar in San Francisco. Marie had died from heart disease in April of the same year. Peter died in San Diego in 1939, but was buried in Minden, Nebraska along with rest of his family. After I don’t know how many hours of research, I was happy with my “sleuthing” results, even though it was, to be honest, none of my business!