The death certificate showed the cause of death to be a stroke.

Life began in 1874 in Sweden. In 1878 my grandfather returned from a church meeting and informed his wife to pack up their belongings. They were moving to another country where they could have religious freedom. With no room for negotiation Grandma Christina Marie began making preparations for my father and his three siblings to leave their comfortable home and begin the long journey to America.

In November of 1878 they arrived in Dry Valley, Custer County, Nebraska. My father was only four so he wasn’t able to understand the hardships they were enduring. There were no trees or water but the land was free for homesteading. That first winter the family lived in a dugout, in a clay canyon, with little food, heat or water. The following year they built a sod home from the prairie soil nearby. My father lived in that soddy until he was about thirty-six years old.

In 1909, my father helped build a soddy church on what became our farm and the Swedish community, at last, had their own church and their religious freedom.

In 1912 he homesteaded 160 acres of farmland, bought 480 acres of pasture land and built a new frame house. Grass was abundant with livestock growing and reproducing at little cost, maybe a block of salt occasionally. At that same time he married Helen Nelson and in 1914 Evelyn was was born. In 1915 Helen died and Evelyn was raised by her grandparents until my father remarried in 1920 to Marie Anderson. Evelyn lived with us for a few years. Later she settled in California and was rarely seen by her family.

The ‘20s were booming years and the farm and ranch thrived. Also three girls and two boys were born, me being the youngest. The home that my father built expressed all the ingenuity of a pioneer. It was built not far from the dugout where he had spent his first winter in Nebraska. A windmill was at the top of a small hill with a cistern to store water and a tank for livestock to drink. From the cistern, pipes carried water to our house by gravity. One line was built into a huge central stove in the basement so we had hot running water in the winter. Other lines went to the kitchen and bathroom. Underground pipes carried waste about fifty yards from the house to a canyon that served as a leaching field. In the meantime many trees had been planted near the house for shelter from the wind and the provision for shade and beauty as well as firewood to burn in the winter. An orchard with a variety of fruit trees provided us with apples, cherries, pears and peaches that were eaten fresh, or canned, so we would have fruit all through the winters. A garden nearby satisfied our needs for vegetables.

With meat from chickens and livestock, our farm provided us with almost everything we needed. My father produced a perfect home for his family. We had indoor plumbing, a telephone and a wind generator to charge a battery that allowed us to listen to a radio.

In 1929, six week before I was born, the stock market crashed. Initially this didn’t have much of an impact on us but then it stopped raining during the early ‘30’s and the crops that were planted didn’t produce. The grassland dried up leaving nothing for the livestock to eat. We managed to keep a few milk cows, some pigs, chickens and three horses from starving but the rest of our cattle died when the pasture land dried and there was nothing for the cattle to eat. To add insult to injury, a huge rainstorm flooded the area where the sod church had stood. Water inside and out reached high on the walls, collapsing the building and reducing the sod to a big pile of mud.

With the loss of his first wife Helen, his estranged daughter, his church, the orchard and the livestock, many things he loved and that had been providing an income were gone. To make matters worse the insurance company holding a mortgage on the farm gave notification to pay up or move. With so many losses my father’s health failed. At age 58 his life was over, leaving his wife Marie and five children nothing but memories, not even a place to live. His death certificate read that he died of a stroke but the cause of death was really A Broken Heart.