The Wallin Siblings: Blazing a Path

“We grew up together in the same Nebraska town…. buried in wheat and corn… burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky… blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron.  We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it.”  ―Willa Cather, My Antonia

I recently wrote about my great-grandfather Frederick (F.I.) Wallin and his wife Christina, my Swedish “gateway ancestors” on the Wallin branch of the family tree.  Here is the family in Nebraska around 1903.  In the back are Aurora, Ray, Isador, Ithel, and Inez; my grandfather Sture Nels is standing in the middle; and great-grandpa Frederick, young Leonard, and great-grandma Christina are seated in front.  Such fine Swedish names!

Unlike the Peterson branch of the family, the Wallins all lived to adulthood to marry and, in most cases, have families of their own...

Isidor Hilmer (1879-1977) was called “Ike.”  He and his sister Inez were born when the family was still in Chautauqua County, New York, before they went west to Nebraska.  Ike was married twice and had five children with first wife, Selma Nyberg.  It is said he lived long enough to see six generations.  He died in Idaho at age 98.

Inez Christine (1884-1960) was married three times, the first time at age 16.  Her second husband, John Wade, was a steam railroad bridge builder.  Inez had two daughters, and she died in Los Angeles at age 76.

Frederick Iranus (1886-1944) was called “Ray.”  He was a carpenter.  He married twice—first to Esther Dahlberg, with whom he had four children, and then to Dorothy Farnum Kaiser, a widow who was his housekeeper after his first wife died.  Dorothy lived only four more years, leaving Ray a widower for the second time at age 54.  He died four years later.

Ithel Georgianna (1888-1944) was married to Ellis Passmore when she was 20 and he was 33, and they had three children.  Ellis was a civil engineer for the Burlington Railroad and later the CB&Q.  After Ithel (pronounced “ee-thel”) died at age 56, Ellis moved to California.

Aurora Linnea (1890-1976) was a schoolteacher, both before her marriage (in Nebraska) and afterwards (in California).  She and her husband Elmer Levene had no children, but Aurora’s mother Christina lived with them after her father Frederick died.

Sture Nels (1892-1979) was the only one to move east—to Illinois—which he did after the Great Depression and the droughts of the 1930s took their toll on the Great Plains farmers.  Sture was in a near-fatal car accident in Iowa in September 1940, while making final arrangements for the move.  Sture and his wife Sara had five children, four of whom lived to adulthood.

Leonard Carl (1898-1977) and his brother Sture both served in World War I.  Leonard and wife Helen Carmichael had two children.  Leonard ran a general store in the hotel that his father built around 1920.  Later he later moved to California to take a job with Boeing Aircraft, where he died at age 78.

So the first generation to come were Nebraska farmers; and the second generation moved beyond the Nebraska prairie to other places and things; and the third generation went to college, if they were willing to work hard; and my generation grew up believing that we could achieve anything we wanted—in no small part, I now know, because of the path blazed by those who came before.

F.I. Wallin - Gateway Ancestor

“How will our children know who they are if they do not know where they came from?”

(author unknown)

I am a fourth-generation American on most branches of my family tree.  The first of my Wallin ancestors to live in America—my “gateway ancestor”—was my great-grandfather Frederick Isadore Wallin (1849-1926)—more commonly known as “F.I.”  

Frederick’s mother died in childbirth while having him.  In Sweden he was a tanner and the son of a tanner—one of the lower occupations on the social scale.  Yet a number of his personal papers survive, and the records say that he “read aloud well” and had a fine tenor singing voice.  He came to America (via Gothenburg, Sweden; Glasgow, Scotland; and Moville, Ireland) on the ship “Anglia” in May of 1871 at the tender age of 21; the ship’s steerage class passenger list was filled with Scots, Irish, Germans, Swedes, and a few Norwegians.  He was a lieutenant in the New York National Guard from 1874 to 1878—when this picture of him was created.  He became a U.S. citizen there and married Christine Bengston/Wennerholm, another Swedish immigrant.  The 1880 census finds them living with their baby son in Jamestown, New York, where Frederick is a store clerk.  But soon the young family went west to Nebraska, where Frederick was a peddler by trade, according to the 1885 Nebraska census.  By 1900 he is a farmer, and he and Christina have seven children—Isadore, Inez, Frederick, Ithel, Aurora, Sture, and Leonard.  Soon afterward he and Christina “moved to town” (Hordville, Nebraska) and built a store.

These words were written by his grandson Robert (my father) about Frederick’s later years:

“Old Frederick never really liked farming.  When his son Sture was 17, Sture wanted to go out on his own; so he told his father that he would finish out the year on the farm, and then help his dad build a store in town during that winter.  (This proposal was prompted by the old man telling Sture that there wasn't enough money for a new ball glove this year, while unloading a gallon of whiskey from the supply wagon.)  So they built the store, with living quarters in the back and twelve rooms upstairs, which made it a hotel.  The guests were traveling salesmen who went by train and would time their routes so as to spend an evening playing cards and having a few nips with F.I.  Let it not be thought that he was a bad man; he was a founder of the Fridhem Lutheran Church in Hordville.  This would have been about 1910, and Gramps ran the place until about 1920.  Later his son Leonard had a store in the same building, but the hotel business went out with the automobile.”

F.I. lived to be 76 and died in 1926; Christina died in 1935.  They are buried at the Fridhem Lutheran Church cemetery in Hordville.