Everything is connected. . .

If this photo of the U.S.S. Powhatan were zoomed in more, I could show you which one of these men was my maternal grandfather, George Anderson. The Powhatan was a troop transport vessel during the first world war. As close as I can figure, the photo was taken in June of 1919, when the ship returned to Newport News, Virginia, after the war. It’s hard for me to imagine that the ship carried thousands of US troops in addition to the actual sailors you see here. In looking at the photo one day, I began to wonder: What would have happened if George hadn’t come home safely from the war? How many men should have been in this photo but didn’t come back? How has this affected everyone’s present and future, over a hundred years later?

As it was, George died when my mom was 11 years old. In “As Ever, Geo”, you can read the letters he wrote from the veteran’s hospital in Fargo, North Dakota after his second heart attack in 1942. He suffered his third and final heart attack on December 4, 1944, and died the next day.

The “1982” in the telegram from the hospital refers to the street address of the “residence of the deceased”, as shown on Geo’s death certificate. In order to better understand where that was, I Googled “Renton Highlands Street Seattle, WA 1944” and found an article by Stefani Evans, my very own cousin’s wife! In her article, Stefani, a board-certified genealogist, explains that Renton Highlands was the name for a group of duplexes that the government supplied to workers at the Boeing factory during WW2. Even I hadn’t known that my Aunt June and Uncle Bill met for the first time when their families lived across the street from each other in Renton Highlands. You can read the whole article by clicking on this link.

And for that matter, what if George and Hilma had never gotten married int he first place? If you’ve read “Oceans of Love”, you know theirs was a very “rocky” courtship and engagement, in which, judging by George’s letters, Hilma almost married “for money and not for love”. After George’s death, Hilma never remarried. How would all of our lives have been different if she had?

In 1894 there was a baby boy who died at birth, in between my great aunt Lydia and George (above). The baby was in breech position, and it was in the days when babies were born at home, and Cesarean deliveries were next to unheard of. You can read more about this in “The Day of Adversity”. My great grandmother, Marie, survived, and went on to have George in 1897. But what if Marie had died in childbirth three years before? There would have been no George.

Ole and Marie Anderson’s four surviving children, Lydia, Andrew (seated), George, and Jennie.

What if my grandma Hilma’s mother, Petronella Magnusson, hadn’t taken Johannes Peterson up on his offer to pay her way to the U.S. so she could become his bride? (See “Faces from the Old Country”.) No offense to my great grandfather Johannes, but I don’t think I would have done it. Especially since, while they had mutual friends, they had never “dated” and didn’t know each other well. Hilma wrote that when asked, Petronella always answered that she was happy with the man God gave her. Without Johannes and Petronella, there would have been no Hilma to marry George in 1927.

The “what ifs” don’t stop with the Anderson side of the family. I think this is Britta Helena Larson, who was married to my great grandfather Nels Johnson from 1883 to her death in 1887. Even if I’m wrong about the photo being Britta, what if she hadn’t died of tuberculosis, leaving Nels a single father with two toddlers? Even after her death, if Nels hadn’t married his second wife, Anna Caroline, they couldn’t have had my grandpa Emil in 1892. And Anna Caroline could have said “no” to Nels’s proposal, if she hadn’t wanted to raise two children who weren’t her own.

What if Emil’s little sister, Ruth Mildred, (also mentioned in “The Day of Adversity”), had not died of diphtheria in 1910 at the age of three? Would she have grown up, married, and had children, (who would have been my first cousins, once removed)? What would they have been like? What would she have been like? Would any of them have changed the world in ways we will never know?

In a similar story, Nels Nelson, my grandma Johnson’s father, passed away from appendicitis on February 23, 1900. My grandma Edla had been born October 5, 1899, which would have made her less than a year old at the time. Her mother, Charlotte, was left with three small children, all under the age of four.

Charlotte and Nels are pictured here with their son, Oscar, and their oldest daughter, Hildur, who died in 1898 at the age of four or five. Who knows what Hildur would have been like, or where her life would have taken her?

In 1903, Charlotte married Stengrim H. Detlie. Stengrim raised Charlotte’s three older children as well as the two they had together, and it’s always been my understanding that they had a happy life. There is a bit more about this toward the end of “Vintage Weddings”.

Emil (bottom right) was ordained in 1922 as a Lutheran minister. What if he had gone into another profession? Supposing he had not put aside his seminary studies at Augustana Lutheran College in order to enlist in the Army (with the majority of the college band) in 1917? Supposing he hadn’t married my grandma Edla right after graduating from the seminary?

In 1944, Emil answered a call to leave Chariton, Iowa and take a church in Bakersfield, California. A minister friend in Fresno wrote to him expressing his joy that the Johnsons would be coming to California. What’s interesting about this is the address of the Fresno church: Belmont and Thesta Streets. That exact building is now a Truth Tabernacle branch work, where Mark and I spent years teaching Sunday school with Carlos as our trusty assistant! See “Not Really Silver” to learn more about that.

But what if Emil had said “no” to Bakersfield? Then the pastor’s handsome son and a cute girl who attended the church with her mother would never have met, fallen in love, and gone on to be married in 1954.

And, if I hadn’t been born to them in 1958, you wouldn’t be reading this blog post right now. See what you would have missed?