There was too much info at “erling.html”, the enormous mass diluted the significance of both articles. I decided to divide them. This is information on Erling’s biography, skillfully written by his wife, Rita, and William A. Meis, Jr.

You may purchase the paperback at Amazon books under the title “Erling's Journey and Other Sagas: A Norwegian-American's Search for His Viking Roots”.

With permission from the author, I am able to provide two drafts from the book. Don’t forget! You can read this for free by subscribing to a free trial of the “KINDLE CLOUD READER”.

I will begin with preface material (part of a Preface that could have been written):

Many years ago now, Ester (Anna Marie’s sister) gave me a trove of 26 letters from my dad to Christie (her mother) written to her during his year in the Army WWI. Also, I have four letters he wrote from the Army to his half-brother Vigleik, the Lutheran Minister in Finley, ND. The content of these letters were abstracted for the conversation between the two soldiers on the troop ship in the Prolog to the book.

As an overview of the concept of the book, it is of the historical novel type with regard to the chapters about my eight grandparents and four parents, Much of these chapters is based on fact, much is extrapolated from facts, and other material is plausible imagination to fill in what is not known. The authors felt this was important in order to write interesting Sagas about each so to give a sense of what might have been in their lives beyond the bare bones of what is factually known. For example, the dialogue in the Prolog is all drawn from letters my adoptive dad wrote home to his sister from WWI in France. The encounter between two soldiers is plausible given what we know, but imagined in detail. Another example of imagined material is how my biological parents got together. There were no facts to go on, other than what life was like in that part of the world at that time.

As to the six chapters about me and the Epilogue, all the information is factual and nothing is imagined.

Perhaps a place to begin for an orientation to the structure of the book is the Appendix on Page 192 about the characters in the sagas. Biographical information about my eight grandparents and four parents follows.

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All for now, Terry.

Very best regards,

Erling

This is a little taste from the KINDLE CLOUD READER.

Next is a draft from the book.

 I will present 2 drafts from his biography.

The first is Anna’ thoughts.

Anna Ericsdatter Graua Boe: Mother of Christie, Emmads, Martha, and Ingebret

Finley, North Dakota, As of 1935

Never have any people been more privileged than my American neighbors who instead focus on our hard times. They complain that we’re living in a ‘Great Depression’ as they call it, but I don’t see any people starving around here in Finley, North Dakota. Unlike what I had seen in the Old World, I don’t see here people surviving on flatbrød and spruce bark tea, don’t see bony animals dying frozen in the fields, don’t hear mothers wailing in the night because they can’t make milk to feed their starving newborns. Nei, don’t see those things, so I don’t really see the hard times as being anything like we suffered in Norway during the Hunger Years. I seen the hobos riding the rails and wanderers that travel the roads up from Kansas and Iowa and Nebraska, looking for work and I heard their stories about people thinking God has abandoned them, but this surely is not the case. God does not abandon his people.

Take a look at that boy, Erling, my Emmads’ son. He is tall and strong as an ox, that young Erling. He runs through back yards, races down the street, jumps from the neighbor’s fence, raising a ruckus everywhere he goes. I remember that summer early on when his mother, my Emmad’s wife, Minda, hired that young farm girl, Enid, or Esther or Erin.…, It must have been Enid because she was Norwegian, she spoke Norwegian anyway, from over in Page, North Dakota, to help Minda take care of the children while Minda managed the family general store. Anyway, the poor girl barely made it through the summer although they gave her free room and board plus any clothes she wanted from their store and in return all she had to do was babysit two small kids, Erling and his little sister Solveig. But she couldn’t take it. She ran back to her parents in Page because, as she wrote in a note to Minda, “that boy is too hard to take care of, and you won’t let me punish him even though he can be so mean. The afternoon before I left he was howling his head off just because you went to a committee meeting.” Well, the truth is, Erling doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He’s just a strong, healthy little boy who likes to have fun.

I never had those problems back in Norway because my four children never got to be that fun loving, nei, never got to play all the time, never had enough to eat so he was often just tired and worn down. We never had nothing, really, even before my husband, Engebret Boe, died and I had to take all our kids and go to live in the mountains in my pappa’s housebarn above Mjølfjell during the winter of ’02. Our life was even worse there in the mountains, until Christie and Emmads finally had enough of hard farm work, enough of Norway. and they borrowed the money from his older half-brother, Vigleik E. Boe who had already left Norway for America and settled here in Finley, North Dakota, borrowed the money to get themselves on a boat from Bergen to Liverpool where they boarded the White Star ocean liner, Baltic, and landed in New York City, ja. From there they travelled by train all the way to Finley where Christie learned store work and Emmads staked a claim on his ‘quarter’ of farmland just outside Finley, very near Vigleik E. who was an ordained Lutheran minister like his father Engebret, except Vigleik had his own church and didn’t travel around to small towns to preach.

I was already an old woman, 69 years old I was, when my Christie and Emmads brought me to America to live with him. It was not an easy trip, riding in an old truck from my farm near Mjølfje to Voss, then taking a train from Voss to Bergen, and from there crossing the ocean on the Bergensford to New York Port. From there, with my Emmads who came to meet my ship, we took the train all the way to Finley. Emmads was worried that it would be hard for a woman at my age to get adjusted to the customs of the new country. He was afraid that I would not be satisfied with many things over here, but I am happy to be with my daughter Christie and my Emmads and their young families. Christie was nineteen and Emmads was seventeen when they came alone to America in 1906. Almost 25 years we were separated. They wrote to me many letters that were long and detailed and especially beautiful, but letters go only so far, ja?

I was twenty-three years old, just a simple farm girl, really, when I first met my children’s father, the man who became my husband, and that man, Engebret Engebretsen Boe was forty-four. He was a travelling preacher through the Hordland area back in Norway, and he came to stay with us when he was holding a service in Mjølfjell, during the winter of 1883, or maybe it was 1884.

Just from his name I could tell that Engebret lived on a farm, the Boe farm. That’s because we take the farm name as our last name, and if we move to a different farm we change our last name to be the same as the new farm. This is how it was in Norway when I was young. After 1923, the government made everyone adopt a permanent family name, ja. I’ll tell you another funny thing about how people are named in Norway. A boy is given a first name and he also inherits his father’s name. That’s how you get Norwegian names like Engebretsen (son of Engebret), Larsen (son of Lars), and Jensen (son of Jens). For girls, they also inherit their father’s name, so Vigluksdatter is daughter of Vigluk, and I was Anna Eriksdatter, daughter of my father Eric. And our last name, Grau, came from the name of the farm where we lived, near the town of Mjølfje.

My pappa, Erik Graua, was a believer, so when Engebret Boe came to our hamlet a dozen miles outside of Voss, he told Engebret he could stay with us for the two days while he preached and baptized babies.

That first night, after a simple dinner of fish soup and flatbrød, always flatbrød, my pappa and Engebret sat in the corner near the fireplace while my mamma, Trine, and I cleaned up the table and made up an extra bed on the floor for the preacher. I noticed that my momma, who was always very nervous and quiet anyway, was even more agitated than usual. She kept looking over at the men speaking softly in the corner, and when I followed her gaze, I saw that the men were looking at me and mamma, or I guess, as I later understood, mostly at me.

I ignored them, but the following morning, I remember it was still dark and it had snowed overnight when my pappa called me to go downstairs with him to the barn, and, as I was milking the cow, my pappa told me I would be leaving with the Reverend Boe, as he called Engebret, to travel with him back to the Boe farm near Odda. “The poor man’s wife died at the end of last summer,” my pappa said, “and he needs someone to care for the younger children.”

“So I am to care for his children, Pappa?”

“Yes,” said my pappa “And marry him as well. He also needs a wife.”

My pappa made it very clear I had nothing to say in the matter, and I had no real objections anyway. I already spent all my time caring for my younger brothers and sisters, ja. Engebret was a good looking man in an older, rough sort of way, and as a preacher and a man with his own land and house, I thought he was probably a strong man who could and would protect me, so I felt like my life might be as good, if not better, with Reverend Engebret Engebretsen Boe than it was with my pappa and mamma and all those brothers and sisters.

When I told my mamma what pappa said in the barn, she started to cry. That surprised me, and I must say that her tears upset me. When I asked her why she was crying, she turned away and didn’t really answer me, but she helped me put together a small bag of my things, and didn’t talk to me for the rest of the day. She hugged me tightly the following morning when I said good-bye and, in the last moment, she ran back into the house and came out with a small package that she handed me. It was her bunad, the traditional Norwegian dress that she wore only once, many years before she had any children, to take a photograph with my pappa soon after they were married. I still have that costume somewhere in my things I keep in a trunk under my bed here in Finley—the bunad and a few other objects from Norway that still mean something to me. My pappa only said I was lucky to be chosen by a man of God who benefited from special grace for his deep faith and allegiance to the Bible. My mamma didn’t say much at all because she kept crying each time she tried to form words.

Although we were together for three weeks on the road, Engebret didn’t ask me to have sex with him until we had a proper ceremony in Odda. But after we exchanged vows in front of his children from his first wife, Kristi, and some neighbor families on a Saturday, in a green grassy area on a small cliff overlooking the Sørfjorden, and he gave me a gold ring that I later discovered was the same one his first wife once wore, he got right to it, ja. Pretty much all the time, every day, and by the time he left in September to take up his preaching again, I had missed my time of the month and I was certain I was pregnant.

The baby, my first daughter, Grethe, was born in early May before Engebret returned from his mission. Then there was another girl, Christie who later went to America with Emmads. Emmads was my first boy, and one year later after him, another girl, Martha, then another boy, Ingebret, who arrived a few years before Engebret died and left me with no choice but to move in with my family back in Mjølfjell, ja. It was a shock, to be left alone when I was still so young. Then to be back with my family where I started, to a father who tried to get rid of me! It made me feel like I hadn’t gone very far in all those years and didn’t have much to show except those children, and I couldn’t really even care for them. Not properly the way I wanted to. I was very sad.

At first, when Engebret was alive and I was still young, I thought I was lucky my pappa had sent me away. The Reverend Engebret Engebretsen Boe was a respected man in Odda and since I was his wife, people treated me well. It was clear they felt sorry that the preacher had lost his first wife. At first, I felt Engebret’s older children by Kristi didn’t want me around, but when they saw that I took good care of their younger brothers and sisters, they decided I was a good person who really did want to help out with the family. That’s how day-to-day life was. Then I had my own children as well. Just girls at first, which didn’t make Engebret very happy. But the boys did come along.

The one only thing I never told Engebret from the very start was that I didn’t really believe in the church. Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is a God in the way that we Norwegians have always known there was a great force in nature, ja. You can’t live in a land that changes from ice cold winters to hot sunny summers, where the spring brings such wonderful leaps into flowers, into green fields, into babies, into life, and the fall brings such a quick drop into the death of everything around you without being hit in the face that there’s some powerful force all around us all the time. But the church stuff is different. It’s mostly just rules and stories, some good stories, some very worthy stories, from the Bible.

And Engebret was very strict about the rules, ja. There were rules about how everything should be done, the cleaning, the cooking, the farming…, even the baby-making, but I knew enough to understand those rules didn’t really come from the church. They were his own personal rules about the way he was raised and lived and how he wanted his own children to be raised and to live, and that was that, ja, that was that.

I remember one morning, during the summer, when it was a beautiful warm day, not a Sunday, but a workday when we should have been in the fields. I packed a lunch in my rucksack and planned to take the children to the fjord to play along the shore and take pleasure in the warm sun. Engebret stared at the rucksacks next to the door. He frowned. “Where are you going?” he asked.

When I explained that I wanted to take the children to play in the sunshine, he said, “It is not Sunday, is it?”

He spoke so sternly, I bowed my head and answered, “Nei, it is not.”

“On Sundays we rest. On every other day, we work,” he said.

I said, “Doesn’t God want the children to be happy and take joy in this life?”

Engebret quoted from Ephesians 5:22: Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the Savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.

He picked up the rucksacks and brought them back unto the house. Then we all went to sweat in the fields in the heat because it was a workday not a playday, and I was filled with misery for the children… and for myself.

In truth, the rules began to wear me down. It was always a struggle to do things properly. I began to see how it was a life that wore Kristi down too, and why she died so young. I felt tired all the time when Engebret was around.

But then, Engebret was gone all winter long and when he was gone, I and the girls and the little ones could live pretty much the way we wanted unless one of Engebret’s older children, like Vigleik E. Boe, came by for a visit. Vigleik E. was like his father in every way. When he was in the house, then we had to act strict and pious although I could never see the sense of it. Martin Luther wrote that salvation came from faith and the Bible, and from some of the stories I read in the Bible it was clear to me human beings could have peace and love and happiness without being so serious all the time.

I have lived a double life. After all, I was the preacher’s wife, and I could never, never ever, let Engebret know that I was not a believer in the way that he was. He suspected me, ja, I know that he did. And Vigleik E. did as well. He became an ordained Lutheran minister himself after he went to America. Their suspicions were centered on the fact that my children were simply not filled with religious fervor they expected, and I was happy about that.

In my ‘Norwegian trunk’ here, I have a picture of our family taken after my last baby, Ingebret, was born. The kids are all smiling. I have a little smile myself. And Engebret was in a good mood the day that picture was taken so he has a smile on his lips too, but look into his eyes. Those empty eyes staring off into the distance fixed on his vision of God. That’s where his dreams were always leading…, to God. Well, that’s where he went a few years after that very picture was taken, to his God, in His heaven and I was left alone with all those children.

So, Engebret pushed himself to preach in the villages and the tiny settlements all the way to the end. About ten years before he died, Engebret moved us to Skanevik, a small fishing village on Skånevikfjorden, because it was difficult for me to keep up the farm with Engebret away preaching for nine months of the year. He was 62 years old when he left Skanevik for the last time in 1902, and headed north toward the village of Rosendal. Somewhere on the road that passed alongside the Hardangertfijorden his heart gave out and he collapsed.

He was not yet dead when they brought him back to Skanevik. I held his hand as his breath came slowly and he gripped my hand with all the strength left in him. “The cross,” he said. l knew he meant his Viking cross. “For Emmads…” He gasped, took three or four deep, deep breaths. Then he begged hoarsely with tears in his eyes, “Do not let the children fall away,” he pleaded. “Do not!”

I knew what he meant, but I could not make that promise, even though he was dying. Was that a terrible thing for me to have done? I have grieved over my lack of charity all my remaining years to this very day. Perhaps it was my small revenge for all those years of joy smothered by his seriousness. But I often ask myself, what harm could a little lie have done? My lack of that last kindness is my shame. Anyway, I removed his cross and placed it around Emmads’s neck before we buried Engebret Engebretsen Boe next to Kristi and their other dead children. May he rest in peace.

So I took the children back to my pappa’s chicken farm in Mjølfjell. My mamma and pappa were old then, but not much older than Engebret would have been if he was still alive. The farm wasn’t really much more than our wooden housebarn, a small goat herd, a large vegetable garden and our chicken coops. My children like to tell stories to our neighbors here in North Dakota that although we raised chickens, we had to sell all the eggs for cash and each child only got to eat one egg each year to celebrate Easter. Nei, that’s a good story to entertain Americans, and we were very, very poor…, but not that poor. We did eat a lot of flatbrød and gruel made from flour and water, and we were often hungry, but we had cheese from the goats. We kept back some eggs for us to eat, and when one of the chickens grew too old to lay eggs, I would wring its neck and we would have chicken pie and chicken soup for that whole week, ja. Maybe once a year we would slaughter one of the old goats so there was tough, stringy goat meat. And of course there was always dry salted fish. There were fresh vegetables in the summer and root vegetables in the winter, so we never starved, but we were a lot poorer than all these North Dakotans who complain about this Great Depression. Soft, they are, ja. Americans don’t know hard times like we had it back in the Old Country.

So, Christie must have been about 19 and Emmads about 17 when we heard from Vigleik E. after he went to America and was the minister of a small Lutheran church in the town of Finley in the state of North Dakota. In his letter, Vigleik E. offered to sponsor Christie and Emmads to immigrate to America.

I was torn because I knew they would have much better chances to make something of themselves in America, but I would lose my girl and boy maybe to never see them again. But now I am here with them and have seen that things are different in America. What was so hard for me in Norway can be a great good in North Dakota because it helps people get ahead and have a comfortable life. Vigleik E. is a highly respected minister with six grown children, a good wife and a nice parsonage. All his children went to St. Olaf’s or Concordia, the Lutheran colleges in Minnesota. Now my Christie and Emmads help me out. They live only 18 miles apart, Christie in Cooperstown and Emmads in Finley. Sometimes I live with one of them and sometimes with the other. I hope for their children the same as for Vigleik’s children. I can enjoy what happiness I have left to live. That’s what it means to be Lutheran in America.

The only things I truly miss here in North Dakota are the sea and the mountains. Why did my people with Viking blood in their veins and the smell of saltwater deep in their brains and blue-gray eyes that reflect the deep water of the fjords and the sky on a crisp, cold Norwegian winter choose to settle in this flat, flat land? Emmads likes to say, “Such a shame to have all this wind and no sailboats.” The only force of nature here is the constant wind blowing day and night, relentless wind that blows through the elm trees and races across this northern prairie. The wind blows through the cracks in our old house, toward the graveyard where soon I will rest in this foreign land. At least I’ll always be near to my daughter Christie and my son Emmads, and their precious little children who make me smile in my old age.

The 2nd draft from his biography; This Tells a little about Engebret. (from the biography)

Engebret Engebretsen Boe: Father of Christie, Emmads, Martha, and Ingebret

Odda, Norway, as of 1859.

On a cold spring morning in 1859, not long after Norway gained its independence from Denmark, only to then be forced into union with Sweden under a Swedish king, and just before the Hunger Years when crops failed, the ice lingered, a great famine spread across the Scandinavian lands and Norwegians began to question why God’s hand was being withheld from bestowing benevolence on their deeply Christian nation, a young man, Engebret Engebretsen Boe was plowing his family’s parcel of thin Norwegian soil hemmed in between the deep gray waters of the Sørfjorden and the hard granite face of Trolltunga Mountain near Odda, when his iron plow struck stone.

Sparks flew from the ground, Engebret’s hands tingled, and at that very moment, golden sunlight appeared over Trolltunga. When Engebret knelt on his right knee to check the damage to his plow, he was shocked to hear God’s voice speak to him from a soft cloud hovering over the western edge of the fiord. He heard God say: “Engebret, these are hard days, but there are much harder days ahead. There will be famine and war and death. Your faith will be tested. But you will take up the Holy Book and preach the Word of God to comfort the people of Akra, of Etne, and Fjaera, of Skanevik, Sundal and Jondal, to all of the Sunnhordland and even unto the Nordhordland.”

Engebret bowed his head before the Lord’s words, held tightly to the ancient Viking cross handed down to him across unknown generations and wondered aloud why God would choose him, a poor, barely educated farmer to comfort the people of the Western Fiords. Why not send ordained Lutheran ministers from Oslo, or at least young seminarians from the Church of Norway from Bergen? “Why me?” he questioned, just as all wandering preachers have asked when called by God to preach the Word; and of course, as all itinerant preachers discover, the question was met with utter silence and so no answer was given.

Engebret’s first revival service was held in the early fall of 1859, for three families in the hamlet of Halsnes on the shores of Lake Litledals. He spent the previous night deep in prayer, his large head resting over his folded hands, unable to sleep as he formulated the words he wanted to preach the following morning. He had sheltered with the Ove Ringsaker

family in their log hus with four other adults (Ove, Ove’s aged parents, his wife, Hege) and six children on the upper floor; and two cows, three goats, four sheep and ten chickens on the lower level.

Engebret considered that when the sun rose over the small lake behind the Ringsaker’s house, their youngest child, Jergen, was to be baptized, along with three unbaptized children from two other families. They would gather together in the chill morning air, and the children’s brows would be washed with the clear, cold water from the lake preparing them to receive the Holy Spirit and be reborn in the generous love of the Lord.

On that morning, Engebret would note that while the other children cried loudly as the water trickled over them, little Jergen smiled and giggled and cooed, delighted by his christening.

After the ceremony, as the families sat at a rough-hewn farm table under a 300-year-old oak that protected the Ringsaker family from the sun and rain. Engebret spoke his very first homily.

But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein. (Matthew 19:14)

At first Engebret was nervous since he had never spoken publically, but his natural, plain-spoken style and obvious sincerity pleased the Ringsakers and the other families. As he gained confidence, a newfound strength and passion expanded Engebret‘s vision to include all the people of Norway as children who have their own kingdom, their own pact with God, similar to that He provided the Israelites, under the guidance of the Church of Norway, and the multiple implications of his talk, while it remained spiritual, were also political and met with general approval. The following day, as Engebret set forth by foot on the road toward Fjaera, he marveled that his first mission had already earned him two speciedaler (silver coin), one from the Ringsakers, and a half-speciedaler each from the other two families.

During that fall and winter, Engebret developed the routine he would follow for the remainder of his life. Each September, after harvest, he set out from his farm near Odda, walking from hamlet to hamlet, each hamlet often consisting of, at most, a dozen poor farm families that had settled in a rocky mountain valley, or near a bend of two fast flowing streams, or around a small crystal clear lake. He carried a birch walking staff and in his rucksack very few possessions other than his Bible, a ledger to log both his earnings and the names of the families he visited, an extra woolen shirt, two pairs of socks, a leather vest, a heavy black coat, a knit cap and a small pocket knife. Most days he wore a black, wide brimmed, high crown, felt hat to protect him from both sun and rain. When it was very cold, he wore his knit cap as well under the hat.

And it was often very cold. The terrain was rock-strewn, steep, and rough. As he walked, the days grew shorter until by year’s end there were only a few hours of sunlight. He grew a thick, blond beard that in later years contained an equal amount of gray. He retained almost all of his hair during all his hard life, and he wore it long and tied in back with a leather thong. His eyes were a piercing gray blue. He was tall, thin, with large hands and feet. He wore heavy boots that needed resoling whenever he found a Lutheran shoemaker willing to offer him that charity.

Engebret was a friendly, but not an easy-going man. He was serious about God, family and Norway. He was eager to talk with everyone, but he had little patience for small talk although he could be drawn into a discussion about farming. Mostly he wanted to talk about sin and salvation through faith in God. He preached a prophetic gospel similar to that of the charismatic Hans Nielsen Hauge whose message spread across Norway like a howling blizzard only 50 years before Engebret himself started his itinerant preaching. They both spoke directly to the people, using stories and visions presented in simple, unvarnished, accessible language, promising peace and eternal life for those who maintained a deep faith in God’s saving grace and followed the words of the Holy Bible. However, unlike Hauge who spent many years in prison for preaching outside the official structures of the Church of Norway, Engebret kept his homilies well within the confines of accepted doctrine. Also unlike Hauge who wrote dozens of books, Engebret Engebretsen Boe was not a writer and, therefore, we only have stories handed down by the various families he visited to know what he said and did. In that sense and in certain other ways as well, he was more like Jesus than Hauge.

Men admired Reverend Boe, but found his seriousness somewhat standoffish, and so he had few if any really close friends. Women were attracted to him, and this caused some problems for Engebret because various families with daughters of marrying age were anxious to find husbands for their girls. Engebret was therefore presented with numerous compromising situations when he was on a mission and staying overnight with different families over the long, dark winter months. It was only through serious prayer, strict self-control and deep faith in his vocation that Engebret Boe was able to resist the ever-present pull of lust and desire.

After his first tour, when he was back farming in Odda, Engebret considered the difficult circumstances he would encounter when he departed again in the fall to preach the Word to the buxom, blond Norwegian daughters of the families he would be lodging with, and he resolved that during his second tour he would find a woman he would ask to be his wife. That’s how he came to meet and marry the rather plain but hardworking and fervent Kristi Vigluksdatter Ulvik.

The Ulviks farmed a parcel of land in Eidsborg, near Dalen where three different streams flow into Lake Bandak. The father, Frode, had four daughters, and he wanted to marry off the eldest, Bodil, to Engebret, a proposition he had broached with Engebret the previous year. But during the summer, Bodil had run off to Bergen where she married a sailor who worked on the small schooners transporting dried and salted fish across the North Sea into the Baltic region, making port in Riga where they unloaded the fish and returned to Bergen with hand tools and other manufactured goods produced by Latvia’s newly industrialized economy.

So Frode suggested Engebret might be interested in his second, daughter, Reidun, who was even more attractive and charming than Bodil, but Engebret had his eye on the third daughter, Kristi , who was tall and strong and busily occupied at one menial, difficult task or another whenever Engebret had the occasion to observe her.

Arrangements were made and when Engebret Engebretsen Boe finished his second tour he passed back through Eidsborg before planting season and arrived home in Odda with his new wife just in time to begin plowing and sowing. As it turned out, Kristi was also adept and eager at other forms of plowing and sowing, and when the birch leaves turned bright yellow and the harvest was gathered, Engebret left for his third tour in September, and Kristi was already pregnant with their first child, Ambjorg.

Ambjorg was followed by Asheim, then Einar, who died from a respiratory infection after living only one month, before Engebret was able to see the infant. A year spent grieving passed, and then Kristi gave birth to Ingeborg, then Torbjorg, then Gerd who died of mumps when she was three. By then, the family was well into the Hunger Years and all the children of Engebret and Kristi suffered from malnutrition as did Kristi herself. Still, there were more children. Kristi gave birth to Vigleik E., who would eventually emigrate and settle in Finely, North Dakota, and would become an ordained Lutheran minister, a level above his father’s itinerant preaching. Then two more children, Tone who contracted whooping cough and passed away at five months and then the last child, Mona who lived to a very old age after she moved to Oslo and married a glassblower.

During all of these years, through death and near starvation, bitter cold, deep snows, increasing poverty and fewer and fewer speciedaler, Engebret continued his annual pilgrimage through the Hordland, preaching and praying with families, many of whom were experiencing pain and suffering even greater than his own. He was still relatively young, and strong and he possessed unyielding will and determination fueled by his deep faith in God’s providence and a commitment to Norwegian independence.

Eventually, life did get better for the families in Western Norway. Normal weather patterns returned, the harvests improved, there was food on the table and families were able to be more generous with the stipends they offered Engebret.

However, during the summer after Mona was born, when Engebret paused for prayer as the family worked in the fields, he noticed that Kristi’s dresses were hanging slackly on her tall frame. She was losing weight. He fretted about her weight more than he might have otherwise because she was also pale, weak and often exhausted. One day after Kristi remained at home while Engebret was cutting hay with Ambjorg who was now a teenager, Engebret and his son returned home for their usual hardy lunch only to find Kristi collapsed on the ground by the chicken coup. Ingeborg was trying to calm the younger children who were weeping uncontrollably over their mother’s body.

Engebret and Ambjorg carried Kristi into their hut and laid her down on her bed. She whispered to Engebret that she did not have long to live. He accepted her judgment as the will of the Lord, so he stopped working in the field and prayed over his dying wife for three days while Ambjorg and Asheim took care of the farm and Ingeborg too care of the family. On the early morning of the fourth day, Kristi opened her eyes wide and spoke softly to Engebret telling him she saw the Angel of Death at the foot of her bed. Then she closed her eyes and simply stopped breathing. Engebret buried her in the small family plot next to her children, Einer, Gerd and Tone. Then he went back to tending his small parcel of rocky soil until the fall when he set out on his 18th annual mission.

The book is so well written, it will be of interest to non-family as an adventure novel.

It will be of special interest to family as an historic journey. Enjoy!

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