5 random adjectives 3-5-23

Carrie Keiser

5 random adjectives

Good

Jaded

Wretched

Peaceful

Dynamic

I had a good long talk with my jaded neighbor. She said she was having a wretched time remaining peaceful considering the dynamic personalities she has had to deal with.

An Inferred Story for Pioneer Ancestor Anna Kerstine Johanesdatter

12MAR2023

Flynn Family Story Slingers

Prompt: employ these in a story:

Good

Jaded

Wretched

Peaceful

Dynamic

By Cary Holmquist

Someone should have talked to Anna Kerstine Johanesdatter back in 1865 to get a good, dynamic personal story written down about why and how she emigrated from Norway and crossed the American continent with her sister to reach the Utah Territory.

Someone spoke much later to Anna’s sister and wrote a story that mentioned Anna a number of times.  But how Anna felt about these things was not recorded and so her story is largely inferred from the second-hand account about her sister’s journey.  

My interest in Anna’s story comes from her being my second-great-grandmother. So I am curious about what her life must have been like and how she felt about many things, rather than from some jaded, hand-me-down recitation of dates and a few names and places of events that shaped her life.

From her sister’s account, these two young Norwegian women were in a wretched situation before they left Norway.  They had joined the Mormon Church in secret, against the wishes of their family and were subsequently disowned by their remaining family—their parents had died when they were very young—and their older siblings and neighbors were not sympathetic about them finding a new and controversial faith.  Their ostracism from the family and small community left them destitute from their inheritance, though they were hard workers, mostly serving as maids and laborers.  They also made money saved as seamstresses to earn their passage to Utah, where they planned to join the other Latter-day Saints in building a peaceful Zion in the West. 

They arrived by ship in New York in 1863 and took trains westward to the Missouri River in Nebraska and joined a ox company of Saints heading to Utah.  It is said that they walked the entire way from Nebraska to Salt Lake City, having very little for funds to pay for any other kind of transportation.  

Not much of their pioneering ventures were recorded.  Once they reached Utah, they seemed to have struck out in their own, searching for ways to make a living.  I imagine they spoke only a little English, so their prospects in this westward land of America were very limited. 

Anna somehow found work helping a recent widower to raise his younger children in central Utah, in Sanpete County, where he was sent to help colonize and farm the desert and founded the community that became Fairview.  In 1866 Anna married this man, Isaac Young Vance, originally a farmer from Illinois, and she bore to him six children, the second of whom was my great-grandfather Isaac Wilford Vance, before she died in 1876, worn out from hard work and bearing six children in less than 10 years.

Not a word of her own is known to have passed down.  Perhaps that was because Anna’s children were so young when she died, considering Isaac Wilford was only seven years old, and so he never got the chance to know his mother Anna and his father was evidently not much forthcoming about her.  Even that summary is inferred from the few facts we have documented about her and her pioneering efforts.

By: Ryanne Leavitt

The wretched man wandered through the woods, searching for a place to rest.  His journey had taken him many miles and had been harrowing at times.  All he longed for was a peaceful place to settle and call his own.  It is good to yearn for happiness, it is good to desire love and a sense of belonging, but this is not what life had given him so far.  All he had ever known was poverty, hunger and despair .  Born in poverty, he had set out to make something more of himself, but was unprepared for a world filled with dynamic, bombastic, greedy men.  Every time he got a step ahead, it seemed to him those greedmongers stepped in and found away to snatch even the bread in his hand.   And though he had had a jaded view on life, that longing still persisted.

As he walked on, his energy lagged and his tired limbs slowed to a snail’s pace.  He dropped to his knees, no longer able to stand.  It may have been minutes, or hours or days, when he awoke, there was a stranger hovering over him, smiling down gently into his eyes.  He slowly began to realize he was no longer in the woods, but on a soft bed in a worm abode.

His eyes fluttered shut and a peaceful sleep over took him.  The sweetest dreams filled his sleep and upon waking this time, he was able to see more clearly his surroundings.  He was home, not just back in his tiny village, but in the house he had once deemed too lowly and poor to offer comfort.  Now he came to know, that this place was his joy, it was his hope.  As he lay there, looking up into the wizened eyes of his father, the memories came flooding to his mind.  Not those of being hungry or worrying about what others thought of his tattered clothes, but the hearts and flowers of his youth.  The trips to the woods to learn to hunt with his father, even the time spent making bread int the wood hearth with his mother.  The countless hours playing cowboys and Indians with his brothers and the home made fishing poles of string and sticks taught him the greatest lesson, life is not the the things you accumulate, but the love you share with those around.  It was good to be home.