Throwback Thursday - My Family Heritage
My maternal heritage is Swedish, with perhaps a tad bit of Norwegian thrown in to keep it exciting - not sure the Swedes, or the Norwegians, want to admit that - waaay back in the family tree. Someone in the family has a copy of this going back to the 1500s I think.
This is a 1928 photo of my mother's parents, Ebba Engstrom and Carl Joseph Shenholm, also spelled Schenholm (they passed away several decades ago, around 1979), at their farm in Wisconsin and my Aunt Daisy, who is now 92 and living in NH.
I remember as a kid spending lots of visits at their home in Northfield, Vermont in the mountains. It was a neat house for a kid but not sure I would feel the same now - there was no central heat, so the house was heated year round with an enormous fireplace, and sometimes the stove in the kitchen which also burned wood.
There were fairly large holes in the the floors of the 2 bedrooms upstairs that could be uncovered to let the heat rise. And the house originally had an outhouse, which thankfully was replaced by a real bathroom by the time I came along as a grandkid. My grandmother raised chickens until she got too old to manage it, so there were always fresh eggs to gather. Many years after they moved out and had passed in Florida, my wife and I were in Vermont and were actually able to find the place, still with its big red barn on the dirt road going over the mountain. It was quite the deja vu!
It's been fun going through some old photos I got from my Mom, most of which I had never seen. What a treasure to have.
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