Belonging to Denmark

“Family gives us our original sense of identity.  We belong to some people and they belong to us”    Rachel Held Evans    


    Martha Marie Hansen was sixteen years old when she, her brother Peter and her sister Anna emigrated from a dairy farm in Denmark on the Jutland Peninsula to Waukegan, Illinois.  Like many single immigrant girls from Scandinavia, she knew no English, had no money and was valued for her marriageability and ability to work hard. A distant relative who owned a rooming house sponsored her passage in return for work as a housemaid.
    Now, over 100 years later, I look for her wedding picture and find a different picture that tells me how little I know about my paternal grandmother.  There is nothing written on the picture, no date, no names of the four young women in their Sunday best, standing arms linked.  That might be because Grandma Reckling, as my siblings and I still call her, had only been educated at her local church until she was confirmed.  She could read and write in Danish enough to sign and date her name and memorize the catechism but recording details about herself was not something she did.  
    I wonder who took this picture, who the other girls are, how soon it was taken after she arrived in Waukegan, why they were all dressed up? I notice the sidewalk, the other houses in background, the electrical poles.  I am only sure that it is her because she is the tallest in the group and her big round eyes staring directly into the camera are mine.  Her thick dark hair pinned in a modest style around a heart shaped face, tells me she has not been in this country long enough to cut her hair.   Like the others, she is wearing a necklace but her dress is cruder, not well-fitted to her, with a ribbon substituting for a waist band. The picture gives me some details of a story I only vaguely know. 

I asked her once how she met our Grandpa? The only part of her answer I remember is that they met at the rooming house where he was staying and she was working.  I wish I had been more curious. Were they attracted to one another right away?  Did I imagine that he caught her eye when she was serving the stew and potatoes the boarders usually got for dinner?  Or was that part of the story she told?  She was still a teenager.  Ten years her senior, he had been a plasterer and union man for over a decade.  An inexperienced farm girl, was she attracted, intrigued or seduced?  He was the grandpa who frightened me with his swearing and demands.  Did he frighten her?  Did she flirt with him or was he the best option to escape long hours of cleaning, washing sheets and serving food?
    I wish I had a letter that she might have written home, some clue to her life then.  I think she told me that her mother and a sister, had died in the 1918 flu pandemic.  Still recovering from the German occupation of World War I, her father could not afford to keep her on the farm.  Is it my imagination or did she still  have younger siblings?  Was she sent away when her father remarried?  A younger brother, Robert, visited Waukegan from Denmark once during the 1960’s.  For Grandma it was very important.  Why hadn’t I paid more attention then?  
     She had come to Waukegan with an older brother Peter, did he write letters home?  Did he and their sister Anna also work at the boarding house?  I know that Grandma’s sister Anna married shortly after they arrived but I don’t know anything about Peter.
    If there are pictures from Grandma’s wedding, none of my siblings or cousins have located them. In family lore, most of her story begins with her eldest son, my father’s birth.  Grandma’s story through him belongs to me.  I record what I know,  so that if my grandchildren wonder about how they might belong to me, they will have a trail to follow for their own questions.  
​      Some distant cousins in Denmark have asked about Marie who went to America through a geneaology site and suggested that Pete and Anna had slightly different stories from mine.  My sister Kristine remembers a different story about Grandpa and Grandma meeting.  Any and all who have information about the meeting and Grandma Marie's early years, or a better story than mine should feel free to post a comment.  It is through sharing stories that we find out who we are.