Andrew Anderson was a quiet man. I never heard him raise his voice. He was gentle and soft spoken. Grandpa Andrew lost his wife, Addie, in April of 1955. I was born a few months later in August. Grandpa spent over 25 years by himself after Addie died. He and Addie had eight children all of whom married and had children. Several of his kids lived very close by so he visited often but he also loved the peace and solitude of his quiet house that he had shared with Addie.

Our family kept him involved with our family events and holidays. He visited regularly and we have very fond memories of his visits. He came with us on all of our vacations. If we went to the Zoo, Grandpa came with us. Every time we visited the beach, Grandpa came too. He would sit in his chair at the edge of the water, with his pant legs rolled up and to watch us swim. I remember more than once a wave came along that caught him off guard and he got very wet but he didn’t care.

He had been around water all his life. He had been a sailor in Norway before he left for America in 1904. Once he arrived in Marine City, he work for Gus Englehart as a deckhand and shipmate on freighters on the Great Lakes.

A young Andrew and the crew as they sailed in the Great Lakes. Andrew is the man in the center of the back row holding the life ring.

After Grandpa died my Mother was going through his things to help settle his estate when she came across a thick stack of letters and post cards that he had saved. They were in his top dresser draw held together with twine. She opened the twine and the memories of them came flooding into her brain. She had remembered retrieving the mail and that her Dad would sometime receive letters which she could not read. The letters had very interesting and unique stamps on them. They were arriving in Michigan after very long journeys from far away places like Norway , China and Japan. She loved the stamps so much that she begged him for the stamps. After Grandpa read his mail, he carefully cut the stamps off and gave them to her before tucking the letter away for safe keeping.

The letters sat for decades in his dresser drawer. Periodically he would get one out, read it and place it back in the drawer with the rest. Mom could not read them. They were written in Norwegian. She wondered how she would ever figure out what they said. She wondered if he wrote letters back to his father and his brother. She thought that he did. She remembered him talking about it but she never really knew for sure. Mom would take the letters home and tuck them away in her dresser. Mom eventually found an address for her Uncle Haakon and Aunt Anna. She wrote a letter informing them that her Dad had died. She hoped that they still lived at the address she had found. She added that she hoped to stay in touch with them even though she had never meet them and had only limited postal contact with them. Several months passed before she finally received a letter from Anna. Anna wrote her a wonderful letter express her sadness about the news of Andrew’s death. And told her that Haakon was waiting in Heaven for Andrew’s arrival because he had died four weeks and four days before his brother. Anna did not know how to contact my Mother or her brother-in-law, Andrew.

In 1972, Mom received a surprise phone call from a man in Minnesota. He called her to say that your cousin (Haakon and Anna’s son and daughter-in-law), Bjarne and his wife, Sigrun, would be visiting him in Minnesota. Sigrun was his cousin. And that they would love to come to Michigan to meet Bjarne’s family also. He was calling on behalf of Bjarne. My Mother was delighted that her Norwegian cousin want to visit.

Bjarne and Sigrun arrived in the middle of summer and stayed with my parents. My mother invited all of her brothers and their families to come and meet them. They had a wonderful visit and soon after Mom and Dad were planning a trip the next summer to Norway to meet the family there.

It really bothered my mother that she did not know what the Norway letters said so when she and Dad visited Norway in the summer of 1973, she took the letters with her. Her cousin read them to her. She was thrilled. Her cousin Aslaug’s husband, Tormod offered to translate them for her if she would leave the letters with him when they came home. He promised that he would send the letters back with each translation. So Mom left the letters in Norway.

Aslaug and Tormod – Summer 1973

She anxiously awaited the arrival of each of the letters and it’s translation. After a few weeks, Mom received the first of what would be regular letters from Tormod. Each time she received a new translation she would be so excited. She would read them over and over again. I was a stay at home mom at the time and she would call me to tell me she had gotten another Norway letter. She would read it to me over the phone with such excitement! She would later tell me how disappointed she was that Grandpa had cut the stamps out for her when she was a child because the words behind the stamps were lost for ever. It took Tormod over a year to translate all the letters. Unknown to us at the time, his wife, Mom’s cousin Aslaug, was being treated for Cancer. She died fairly soon after their visit and before Tormod finished the translations. We were so sad to learn she had died.

These letters have become a family treasure. We cherish them and the translation which Tormod worked so diligently on for so long enabled us to see a side of our family which would have remained hidden had Grandpa not kept his letters and had we not been able to get them translated.

Happy Hunting,

Jan

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