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 Grandmother Helga's Photo Album: Clues to the Past Shortly after my mother passed away in 1999, I discovered an old photo album that she had stored in her basement. The album was in a box that apparently hadn't been opened for several decades. In fact, no one in my family had ever seen the photo album. When I flipped through the pages and studied the old black-and-white photos, I realized that it had belonged to her mother, my grandmother Helga Reinhard, and it included photos from the early 1900s. Unfortunately though, most of the photos weren’t captioned. I was four years old when my grandmother Helga died so I barely remember her, but I do know that my mother was very fond of her.
The photo album also contained several pictures of Helga’s mother, Anna Swang (pronounced "Swong"), who had lived in North Dakota and died in 1933 at age 65. No one in my family knew anything about Anna other than she was born in Norway in the 1800s, had come to America as a young girl and that my mother, Anne, her granddaughter, had been named after her. These were the first photos that I or any of my living relatives had ever seen of Anna and her husband Nels (my great-grandfather). It was interesting to try to get to know Anna only through her pictures.
During the past two years in Portland, I spent countless hours poring over Helga's photo album, trying to figure out where the pictures were taken, who the people were, and what their lives were like. The photos fascinated me, but also baffled me because very few of them had captions. The photo album was a treasure trove and I decided that I’d visit North Dakota someday to try to learn who these people were and what they were like. The story of my mother's family was like a giant puzzle waiting to be solved.
It was fascinating to reconstruct the lives of my ancestors based on only one photo album, and after spending seven weeks in North Dakota, I think I've solved the puzzle. I've described the results of my research on the next two pages:
Above left: That's my grandmother, standing third in line. But what is this? I know she graduated from Minot Teacher's College in 1920, so is this her graduating class, and is this Minot? Above right: I knew that Helga had taught school in North Dakota before she married in 1923. Were these children at her school? What school was this, what was it like, and where was it? After studying Helga's photo album in Portland, I had lots of questions – and very few answers.
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