My Trails into the Past

Nelle Olivia Lundquist, daughter of John G. Lundquist and Anna G. Johnson, was born on 16 April 1883 in Montgomery County, Iowa. [1] Her father had a farm outside of Stanton in Scott Township, and the schoolhouse was located on their property. [2] She attended Still College of Osteopathy in Des Moines, Iowa, and graduated on 11 January 1911 in a class of thirteen men and women. Her classmates who graduated mid-term included Sidney E. Cresswell, R.H. Simpson, Ed. C. Galsgie, Hulda Frandson, J.G. Connolly, Eleanor L. Harvey, Christine Ostrem, Roy F. Desart, Maud Tupper, Peter F. Kain, Helga Christensen, and Mabel Cleveland. [3]   She practiced primarily in Missouri and Montgomery County, Iowa. [4] In 1934, she attended a reunion breakfast of her class on 25 July at the Allis Hotel during the Wichita convention. [5] However, she was the only one in her class mentioned as attending. It must have been a reunion of any graduate of the school. [1] Fremont Lutheran Churc...

When one thinks about our ancestors getting land to settle in the Midwest or West, our first thoughts are that the settler either bought land from another landowner, purchased land from the federal government, or homesteaded the land. My husband’s great-grandfather, Per Alfred Lundquist, settled in Montgomery County, Iowa, located in the southwestern part of the state, in an area of rolling hills. I first checked the Bureau of Land Management’s website of the General Land Office, and he was not listed as buying land from the federal government. [1] Next, I checked with the local county deed records at the FamilySearch catalog, and there I found he purchased 80 acres of land from the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad on 11 October 1883. This land was in Section 30 in Township 71 of Range 37 of the 5 th Principal Meridian. [2] How is it that a railroad company would be selling land to our ancestors? The federal government wanted settlers in the plains and the West. They k...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again -  Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our mission tonight from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to:  1)   Do you have any ancestors from which you descend two (or more) times ? [thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]  Here's mine: I do not have this situation. My parents are not related in any way, one family has been here in the U.S. since colonial times, and the other came in the 19th Century. My husband’s family is the same. His mother’s family is from Sweden and his father’s family is from Cornwall and Germany. However, my husband’s mother, Thelma, is related to her cousin in two ways: first cousin and second cousin. Her mother’s brother, John Lundquist married Signe Johnson. They were first cousins. John’s parents were Matilda Erickson & Per Alfred Lundquist. Signe’s parents were Carolina Eriksson and Charles Emil Johnson. Carolina and Matilda were sisters, daughters of...

Agnes Hilma Carolina Lundquist was born on 16 July 1894 in Stanton, Montgomery County, Iowa, to immigrant parents from Sweden, Pehr Alfred Lundquist and Mathilda Lovisa Erikson-Holm. [1] Her parents were married on 15 March 1892 in Red Oak, the county seat of Montgomery. [2] Agnes was their second child. When I began researching my husband’s family, I looked for her father in ship passenger lists and found no record of Pehr Alfred Lundquist, nor his parents Anders Lundquist and Cajsa Lundquist. Two more siblings of Pehr Alfred, Johan Gustav and Ana Sophia, were also not found. I continued researching the family in US records but at the back of my mind, I really wanted to locate that passenger list. It’s the first connection to the old country. Then I remembered the Swedish naming pattern. Pehr’s name would be Pehr Alfred Andersson, being the son of Anders. Anders’ surname would Eliasson, as the son of Elias Pehrsson. Perhaps they did not come to America using the Lundquist name...

We are fortunate to have miscellaneous ephemera saved for various people in our family. My husband’s aunt was the receiver of these items, as everyone knew she would save them. She had filing cabinets organized by family with multiple file folders for each person. When I was working on the Kinship Determination Project (KDP) for my certification portfolio, I visited the archive and made images of many of these “one of a kind” documents. I used the documents to help fill in some personal information about David Lundquist, the person of interest in the third generation. One such document is a report card from his 8th grade. His teacher was Gladys Greeley and his school was in District 9 in Montgomery County, Iowa. No year is filled out, either on the front or inside. He was fourteen, which would put it about 1912. Inside the card, only the fourth, fifth, and sixth months were filled in. He scored high marks (in the nineties) in spelling, arithmetic, grammar, history, civics, and phys...

I have begun locating the Enumeration Districts (EDs) for our relatives who were living in 1950. Lisa’s paternal relatives can be found here . Her maternal relatives here . In order to locate the EDs, I need to know the address of each person. I begin by checking my genealogy database for a clue to their address and if I don’t have one near the 1950 time-frame, seek out a source on Ancestry or FamilySearch, using such sources as city directories, voter registrations, newspaper articles, and other records that give addresses. These are the relatives I expect to find on my husband Norman’s maternal side of the family. Nilsen Family Arthur N. Nilsen is Norman’s maternal grandfather. I know he and his wife, Lena, were living at 2114 X Street in Sacramento around 1947 from a city directory. When he died in 1954, he was living in Rio Linda on their chicken ranch. But when did they move there? Rio Linda is a small town in the county of Sacramento and there are no Sacramento County dir...