John Mikalsen Hornnes and his wife, Lydia Gabrielsdatter Marstad, ca 1901
As extended family members will recall, Lydia Gabrielsdatter Marstad was the wife of John Hornnes, the son of Mikal Alfsen Hornnes and Anne Gundersdatter Uleberg and the older brother of my grandmother, Lil Anna Hornnes Schroder. Anna lived with John and Lydia for a period of time before moving to Seattle. The last time Anna saw Lydia was just before leaving Boston to come to Seattle for the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition in 1909. At that time Lydia was very ill with tuberculosis. Using that date plus the 1910 US Federal Census records that showed John widowed we were able to place Lydia’s death between 1909 and sometime in 1910. After several fruitless months of searching I finally found Lydia’s death. She died 2 February 1910 in Melrose, a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. The Wyoming Cemetery in Melrose could possibly be where she is buried.
A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a friend who is from Boston and returns there to visit his parents at least once a year. He said he is very familiar with the Wyoming cemetery and the next time he goes back he will see if he can find the grave and perhaps get a photograph. With his help and knowledge of the area we found the street address where John and Lydia lived while in Melrose, 282 East Foster Street. The pictures below from Google Maps show the street. They lived in the house situated off the street in back of the large white house with the flag. In the aerial view the house is on the left side, dark brown with a red-tan roof. There is a park across the street. It appears to still be a very nice neighborhood.
Above & below, Google Maps images, 282 E Foster Street, Melrose, MA
I have been trying with little success to find out when and where Lydia and John’s little boy, Mikal Alfred Hornnes, died. I found his birth and christening record in the Helleland, Rogaland, Norway parish register: #18, page 32, born 2 June 1900, christened 8 July 1900. Sometimes when a child dies very young there will be a notation in the margin that will give a death date or at least a cross marking a death but there is nothing in the margin of this record. The family moved often due to John’s employment with the Norwegian railway beginning with a short stay in Flekkefjord, moving next to Helleland where Mikal Alfred was born, and ending up in Voss north of Bergen before they returned to Kristiansand then leaving Norway for America. All the moves makes it more difficult to discern where Mikal died or if he lived long enough to accompany them to the United States in 1901. In 1905 when John applies for US citizenship he says he has no children so we know that Mikal died sometime between 1900 and October 1905.
In the process of looking for this little boy I noticed that someone I did not know or recognize as an extended family member had posted pictures of Lydia and John from this blog on Ancestry.com. I suspected that whoever had posted them might be related to Lydia’s family, the Marstad line, and that proved to be the case. Lydia was one of 10 children born to Gabriel Johan Sivertsen Marstad and his wife Olene Elisabeth Olsdatter who is sometimes found as Alene or Line on the records. Several of Lydia’s siblings also left Norway for America around the turn of the century. Many thanks to Kelby Sodeman who very kindly sent me a genealogical fan chart of the Marstad family that was originally compiled by Gladys McKee and Sidney Marstad in the 1960s and later amended in 1993 by Ruth Hanssen and Edna Marstad. Although this chart does not have places and dates it does have all the names of descendants of Sven and Ingeborg Marstad from 1775 forward in time up to the 1990s when the chart was revised.
The Marstad family name comes from a place or farm located not far from Flekkefjord and Kristiansand. On the map below the place is marked with a large dot to indicate the location; however, it is not as large a community as Flekkefjord even though it appears so on the picture. Evje og Hornnes where John was born and lived is at the upper right, the port city of Kristiansand is at the lower right and Flekkefjord is just above Marstad.
Map as found on Digitalarkivet.no, digital collection
George’s complete name on the Hidra parish register is really difficult to make out. When magnified the image is still hard to read and it is not clear whether the name is George Olai Johan Bernhard or Alexanhard/Elexanhard* or something else beginning with a C. The old handwriting style also complicates things a bit. The original blog entry, as noted above, gave the 4th name as Bernhard with a birth date of 13 December 1873 but the correct date should be 3 December 1873. The corrected middle name should be Elexanhard (*see correction below) as found on his Railroad pension papers. His name is often found in a variety of spellings in different records and he does not always use all of his names.
What I learned about George is that he came to the USA in 1892 and might be the first of the Marstad children to emigrate. He and his family appear to have settled in and lived in New York from the beginning. George became a naturalized citizen with one petition dated 1918 and another 1920. He married Johanne Kristine, known as Christina, Tønnesen Sunde on 4 November 1905 in Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church, Brooklyn, New York. She was 11 years his junior and came from Nes, Flekkefjord, Vest-Agder, Norway.
Kristine/Christina left Norway for the USA in 1902. The children of George and Christina as found on the 1930 US Federal Census: Edward age 24; Mabel age 22; Clifford age 16; and Helen age 14. Not found on the 1930 census is another child: George Clifford born 1910 died 1912. His death is listed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church records, 1826-1945 at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church. He is buried next to his parents in the Green Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.
The 1940 census has children, Clifford and Helen single and living at home with their parents, George and Christina and Jacob Sunde, brother-in-law (Christina’s younger brother) and William Sunde, nephew, living with the family.
On the 1885 Norway census Kristine’s parents are given as Mikal Tønnesen Sunde and Amalie (Malie) Tønnesen Sunde. Kristine’s birth year is given as 1884. The Nes, Flekkefjord parish register lists her birth as 23 October 1884, christening 16 November 1884. Since I had access to the bygdebok for Nes it seemed worth it to look and see if there was anything more about Christina's ancestry that might be interesting. It was a common tradition to name children after grandparents and Christina was no exception. She was named for her paternal grandmother, Johanne Kristine Olsdatter Sunde (1827-1862). The fascinating thing about her ancestry is that her great-grandmother, Christiane Rosenvind Steen, was born in Greenland in 1796 the daughter of a Greenland colonist, Johan Christian Steen who left Greenland and settled in Flekkefjord where he is listed as a merchant.
George was a boat captain and worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad. He died 9 February 1956, Queens, New York, New York, USA and was buried at the Green Wood cemetery 14 February 1956. He was 82 years old. Johanne Kristine (Christina) died in 1969 and was buried next to her husband and son, George Clifford (1910-1912) on 17 June 1969.
I am still searching for little Mikal but if in the process I find more about some of the other Marstads, I will do another update at a later date.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Name spelling correction:
The Bygdebok for Hidra herred, Gård og slekt, volume II, by Jan Helge Trelsgård and published by Flekkefjord Historielag, pages 522 and 523, have the correct spelling of George Marstad's complete name. It is Georg Olai Johan Eleonhard Gabrielsen (Marstad). His first name has the Americanized spelling George.
