March 2025 Recap!

‘March’ is no one's favorite word…has no comments yet, and is not a valid Scrabble word.

—from my new favorite website, Wordnik!

The first quarter of 2025 is in our rear-view, dear reader. True to form, our upper midwest March oscillated between blizzards and sunny 60-degree days. While one can never be too sure how the weather will change, I took a chance and drove up to Fargo the first weekend of the month, to celebrate the birthdays of my Mom and brother-in-law, Adam.

Mom and me early 1980. Seated left to right, Mom’s Grandpa Ed and Grandma Edna McGough, and her Grandpa Arthur Lemke (whose wife Sadie passed away mere hours before my birth on 1/7).

Dad and buddy Liberty Rose Sauvageau (aka Libbens)

As I’ve been researching and writing about family history lately, Mom shared several pictures and files that she’s collected over the years. Of particular note was a series of articles from the Seattle Star (dated April through September, 1945), detailing the shocking sexual assault and murder of my Grandma Dorothy’s 5-year-old cousin Irma Irene McGough.

from the April 27, 1945 Seattle Star. Grandma’s Uncle James McGough at right

Grandma’s cousin Irma Irene McGough, with her mother, Beulah May Simmons

In going through some old pictures, we also came across an article, which very well may be the genesis of my lifelong desire to write. From the Winter 1983 edition of North Dakota Bowhunters Association quarterly publication is a several-thousand word essay headlined “Manitoba Black, Our Way” — penned by my dad. An excerpt:

“With a single movement, Scott [Lang, Dad’s friend] drew and released a 2117 Gamegetter tipped with a four-bladed Satellite. The [bear] lurched with all the strength she could command, ran a short 60 yards and died peacefully in flight…We were awestruck at the beauty of this fallen animal: it happened so quickly and now it was over. We carefully dressed her with the reverence fitting a forest queen…”

Dad with his “Manitoba Black”

As a boy of 6 or 7, I remember feeling spellbound by this article. My parents encouraged reading from a young age: Mom would regularly take Lacey and me to storytime at the Lisbon Public Library, and Dad would read to us before bed. But seeing my father’s name in a print byline led to the youthful realization of the accessibility, and the potential reach of writing. I was happy to see that Mom and Dad had saved this article, tucked away in a musty photo bin in their garage.

Of course, one of the nicer niceties of living a few hours’ drive to the F-M Valley is getting to hang with my nephew Fischer and niece Selah. A few months ago, as Fischer and I were bonding about baseball cards, I gifted him one of my favorites: a 1988 Topps Tom Lawless card (which, great name, btw). It was a favorite because the 8-year-old me had cut out Tom’s face and replaced it with my own 4th grade school pic.

Well, as Fischer and I were looking through his cards, he handed one to me:

Obviously my heart melted. He told me to keep it, and I almost did, but thinking better of it, asked him to hang onto the card to give to his nephew one day.

Just as I was saying my goodbyes, Selah (age 3.5) came out wearing a beautiful sequined gown, and the morning sunlight streaming into the living room was too good to pass up:

Leah, Churro, and I flew to Arizona for a few days, though our trip was shortened somewhat due to an 8” snow dump in the Twin Cities. We got to see Leah’s Dad and Stepmom’s winter place in Gilbert, hiked a bit, ran (20 miles for her, 15 for me) in the area’s first rainstorm in six months, and spent a half day at the Musical Instrument Museum in Scottsdale. It felt great to get a little sunshine for a few days there.

Leah and I on a hike in Scottsdale (photo by Mike Eggers)

Back at work, I got to engineer the live Before Bach’s Birthday Bash broadcast on YourClassical MPR. You can hear the broadcast in its entirety on the web. As this is Blue Collar Fugue, the March Fugue of the Month is JS Bach’s Fugue in C Major, performed by Samuel Backman here (at 47:55). It also gave me a chance to wear my “I’ll be Bach” Terminator mash-up sweatshirt.

I’ve been reading more this month, and I’d like to highlight a few of my favorites:

• I can’t quit thinking about this beautiful essay “Make Room for Space” (not only because Alysha is a dear friend). Read it, and then read it again. Follow/Subscribe to her Substack. You will not be disappointed.

• As March is the “5-year Anniversary of Covid” (as if that’s something we’re supposed to celebrate) I re-read this poignant essay by Chef Gabrielle Hamilton, about one of the many tragedies that unfolded in those early days of the pandemic.

• A dark, lyric essay by poet Tony Hoagland from the Winter 2019-2020 Ploughshares—“Bent Arrows: On Anticipation of My Approaching Disappearance.”

• Low: Notes on Trash & Art by Jaydra Johnson, which I immediately ordered upon hearing Johnson’s interview with Brendan O’Meara on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast while out for a long run.

• A lovely zine titled “Here’s to the Land: The NC State Toast Fanzine” by Erin J. Watson, from the Zine-A-Month Patreon

I took an informative two-hour workshop titled “Shaping Family History into Compelling Stories” by fellow Substacker Annette Gendler.

And I did some writing/revising/editing as well, adding the following pieces to my Substack and here:

• A poem questioning the pursuit of “success,” starring Ariana Grande and a starling

• A journal entry from March 2017, one month before Leah and I started dating

• A piece inspired by a spreadsheet I found from the Pine City (MN) Press

• A poem I wrote in 2nd grade, which was published in our school-wide chapbook. Kudos to the North Dakota Public School system, circa 1988, and to my Mom for holding onto everything I’ve ever written. I’ll leave you with that poem, which TBH might be one of the better poems I’ve written in 35 years:

February 2025 Recap!

Bolt and bar the shutter,

for the foul winds blow:

our minds are at their best this night,

and I seem to know

that everything outside us is

mad as the mist and snow.

—William Butler Yeats

What a wild ride February has been. America, it seems, is exhausted. How are you, dear reader? The yoga teacher in my wants to remind you to take extra time today (and every day if you are able) to just breathe. Maybe that’s right now; this moment. Just close your eyes and take three deep breaths. I’ll wait…

Great start. Let’s keep it up!

I’ve been looking for service opportunities this month. And writing; writing has helped. I stole my good buddy Tommy’s idea and volunteered for Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity. Orientation takes place in early March, and I hope to be building homes in underserved neighborhoods by the time you read my next newsletter (which, thank you, by the way). I volunteered to review grant applications for PFund, a local foundation “which helps build more equitable communities for queer people in the Upper Midwest”. While looking for opportunities in the veteran hospice space, I came across an organization called Grace Hospice. There are opportunities at Grace Hospice to perform legacy work (helping people write their memories), pet therapy (I’m looking at you Churro!), patient companionship, and vigil work as well. I had a nice conversation with their volunteer coordinator Bryan, who told me they currently don’t have any veteran volunteers, which I found shocking! Orientation for Grace isn’t until April, but I’m eager to help out in that space as well. 

[Quick aside: a number of years ago, I recorded an a cappella group called the Threshold Singers, which sings at the beds of hospice patients. Here’s one of their songs:]

So what? I hear you asking. Do I hear the dreaded bells of “virtue-signaling” ringing across the land? [That’s what “They” want, by the way, to turn us against each other with labels and buzz words. Don’t fall for it, friends. Use your brains, use your hearts.] Here’s the reality: I have time to spare, and my conscience can only rest when I know that others in my community aren’t needlessly suffering. 

My favorite picture of my grandma Helen. Unknown date, likely early 1940s.

If you had told me a month ago that I’d be spending my writing time in February working on various genealogy-centric essays, I simply wouldn’t have believed you. Yet, here we are. It started, as I thought about my grandma Helen (Thue) Sauvageau in early February—she passed away in February of 2017. As I thought about her, I created an account on FamilySearch and pretty quickly started finding information about the Sauvageau and Thue side of the family (my dad’s folks). It’s pretty wild, but I was able to track the Sauvageaus back to Marcé-sur-Esves and Poitou-Charentes, France in the 1640s. I traced my Grandma Helen’s grandparents to Møre og Romsdal and Hallingdal, Norway in the 1860s.

Helen Sauvageau’s parents: Albert Peder and Inga Olive (née Braaten) Thue. Prior to 1953. According to Dad, this was taken at their old farmstead near Kindred, ND.

My mom’s family was a bit harder to trace, but I’m making some progress there. I wrote a little about my research and findings regarding her maternal grandmother, Edna Celina (née Melsness) McGough here.

In the process of that research, I registered for an account with Newspapers.com, which features a wealth of digitized newspapers from around the world. Cross-referencing these with family tree sites, military drafts, and census information has allowed me to feel closer to my long-gone ancestors than I ever imagined. I had no idea, for instance, that my great-grandfather Arthur Lemke’s brother Albert died in a house fire which started when he fell while smoking a cigaret [sic]!

February was a good month for adventures in Classical music. For my birthday, Leah got me tickets to a Schubertiade performance by the Schubert Club, featuring local band Kiss the Tiger at a Saint Paul bar called Amsterdam. As a big Schubert fan, it was great to hear some new and traditional takes on his music.

Schubertiade at Amsterdam featuring Kiss the Tiger

I got to record my second opera in February: Snowy Day, as performed by the Minnesota Opera. Joel Thompson composed Snowy Day in 2021, based on the 1962 children’s book of the same name by Ezra Jack Keats. It was a lovely opera, and since I was recording it for work, I got to see it four times (during rehearsals) prior to the opening night recording. Check out a promo from the production below!

Then, back at MPR HQ, I got to record audio for countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and pianist John Churchwell, as they performed music of Robert and Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Wolfgang Korngold. I’ll likely post a video of that in the next month as well.

Something fun

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Something fun 〰️

Something fun that we did in February was taking Churro to Pug Night at Unleashed Hounds and Hops in the North Loop of Minneapolis. Beer and pugs: what could be better? I counted about 40 other pugs, and of course dozens of other breeds. We even met another fawn pug named Churro and talked to her parents for a while too.

The Human Caterpillar of pugs named Churro

Churro giving strong “can we go home now” vibes

Until we meet again, dear reader, keep breathing!

Who Was Bomie’s Mommy?

As a way to distract myself from the slow-motion suicide of our once beautiful United States, I’ve been researching my family tree.

There are many many websites available for those interested in their heritage. The obvious benefit of there being so very many of these conglomerators (ancestry.com, familysearch.com, findmypast.com, etc.), is having relatively easy access to information that didn’t exist a quarter century ago. The (also obvious) problem with all of these competing websites is information mismatch. One branch of the family tree may be filled out and flourishing on myheritage.com, while that same branch would be sawn off on ancestorrecords.com.

I was quite surprised to find how fully fleshed out my family tree was on my dad’s side. In fact there are some quite interesting lines reaching (tangentially of course) to King Louis XIV, The “Sun” King of France (who built Versailles, among other achievements).

Louis XIV - infamously NOT a Sauvageau

On my mom’s side though, the family tree is a bit murkier. I’ve also discovered some interesting things there, and I’m preparing an essay on these discoveries, but one aspect in particular has been bothering me.

Family history

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FUN!

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Family history 〰️ FUN! 〰️

As a 10-year-old, I remember Mom taking Lacey and I to a small apartment in Dilworth, MN. The cramped living room was filled with distant relatives, some of whom I remembered seeing at weddings and holidays. These were Mom’s cousins, aunts and uncles, and her maternal grandfather, Bompa. The 700 Club was airing on the small TV set in the corner, as my second-cousins, great-aunts, and great-uncles conversed. Some were quiet, others laughed, but in all their eyes I saw the same dread. When we entered the room, Bompa raised his ancient arm, pointing to the rear of the apartment. Mom nodded and led us in that direction.

The bedroom door was open wide. The curtains were drawn, blocking out the mid-afternoon sunlight. Upon the queen-sized bed, lied my great-grandma, Bomie. She was sleeping on her back, curly mass of white hair in a mess, her mouth open wide. I stood in the door frame, unable to move. I didn’t want to look at her. My eyes sought out other parts of the dank bedroom. I noticed the vanity in the corner had a large rectangular mirror. I thought it odd that nobody had bothered to cover up the looking-glass with a dark sheet, worrying, when she dies, won’t her spirit be trapped in the mirror? Meanwhile, Mom approached the bed and softly laid a hand on the comforter. We stood there for five minutes before joining the others in the living room.

Bomie and Bompa (Edna and Ed McGough), with my Uncle Larry Lemke on the davenport, circa mid-1980s

Within a few days, Bomie had passed. Hers was the first funeral I can remember attending.

Thirty-five years after Bomie’s death, Leah popped into my office to ask me how my research was going. Well, I’m concerned about Edna Celina, I said. Bomie, or Edna Celina McGough (née Melsness) was my Grandma Dorothy Lemke’s mother. Edna’s branch of the family tree was dotted with question marks. I knew that she and Bompa gave birth to eleven children, and that my Grandma Dorothy was the eldest of them. I could trace Bompa (Edward Francis McGough)’s family back to his Irish great-grandfather, Thomas McGough (born in 1818). Bomie’s lineage was mysterious, at least on the available family tree websites. One listed only her mother (“Miss Tole?”) with no further information available.

On another site, I found Edna Melsness mentioned in the Minnesota Census of 1910. Edna was 3 at the time, living with someone named Gust Hicks in Holy Cross Township, Minnesota, about twenty miles south of Fargo along the Red River. Mr Hicks was listed as head of household. The line below Hicks read Ingaborg Paulson, next to Inga was scrawled: “mother”. Below Ingaborg was my 3-year-old Great-Grandmother, Edna Melsness: “boarder” and an 8-year-old Aleda Melsness. 

The next clue I found were some school records for Edna Melsness from 1915 through 1919, listing Inga Paulson as “mother” and another Minnesota Census from 1920, still listing Gust Hicks, Ingaborg Paulson, and 13-year-old Edna Melsness (absent Aleda) in the same household in Holy Cross Township. That’s it! I concluded, Edna’s mother was Ingaborg Paulson. All I could find about Ingaborg, however, was that she was born in Sweden in 1863, and that she was widowed. I knew that Edna was born in Starbuck, Manitoba in about 1906, which would have made Inga 43 at the time of Edna’s birth. So I set out to find more information about who Edna’s father was. He was clearly dead before the 1910 census, which listed Ingaborg as a widow. Also from the 1910 census, I knew that Edna’s mother was Swedish and her father was Norwegian, so I started looking around for Norwegian immigrants, with the last name of Melsness, who likely died in Canada before 1910. 

I came up empty-handed. Over and over. I texted Mom, who said her cousin Kim had found some information on ancestry.com, but I couldn’t corroborate it.

As the days ticked by, I kept thinking about poor Ingaborg. A Swede, widowed in Starbuck, Manitoba, deciding to move to rural Minnesota with her two young daughters at the dawn of the 20th century. What happened to her? I reactivated my subscription to newspapers.com and scoured the Fargo Forum and Daily Republican for the years 1900 to 1925 for any mention of Edna Melsness or Ingaborg Paulson and again, came up empty. Only a brief wedding announcement on January 31, 1924: “E. F. McGough weds Miss Melsness.”

Finally, it dawned on me to expand my search to Google, which led me to a newspaperarchive.com clipping from the June 22, 1943 Moorhead Daily News:

Moorhead Daily News June 22, 1943

Holy shit! A revelation. Edna’s dad didn’t die prior to 1910, he was alive and kicking until 1943! And living in sunny Santa Monica, to boot. And not only that, this obit mentioned that O.H. [Olaf] Melsness was apparently married to someone named Augusta Sole, and then, upon her passing, remarried to another Norwegian, named Thea Gulbrandsen, and they had at least one additional child in 1912. Was Thea Gulbrandsen my great-grandma’s mother? The timing seemed to bear it out.

I started looking into Thea’s origins next. She was born in Norway on May 4, 1870 and immigrated to Minnesota in the 1890s, where she married a Swede named Peter Hersberg in 1900. I couldn’t discover much about Mr Hersberg, apart from the shocking fact that he was at some point admitted to the “Third Minnesota State Hospital for the Insane” in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Even more salacious, I found Hersberg’s official death certificate, stating that he died while at the asylum, with the note: “Refused to eat. Starved.” Wild! Hersberg passed in 1910, though, which meant that there was either some very salacious happenings between his wife, Thea Gulbrandsen, and my married(?) great-great-grandfather, or simply, that Thea was not Edna’s mother.

So then, perhaps Bomie’s mommy was Augusta Sole? Miss Tole??

I started rooting around in Manitoba’s government records (thank you for being so organized and not hiding behind paywalls, Canada). The last name Melsness did turn up one death: Osker Alfonse Melsness, only 10 months old, who died January 23, 1903. Edna’s older brother? The obit for O.H. Melsness stated that he and Augusta had five children (of eight) remaining. Osker’s place of death was RM Macdonald. The Rural Municipality of Macdonald, Manitoba, is just southwest of Winnipeg, and contains the small town of Starbuck. BINGO! This led me to findagrave.com, where I searched for Starbuck, Manitoba cemeteries. The Starbuck Cemetery, dating from 1902 has over 600—mostly Swedish and Norwegian—immigrants buried there, and only ONE Melsness:

Augusta O SOLE Melsness (wife of O.H. Melsness) born Feb 4th, 1872, died July 5th, 1908. Called Higher.

This lovely, lichen-covered headstone was the proof I was searching for. Bomie’s mother was Augusta Sole, a Swedish immigrant, who at age 26, in 1898, married Olaf H Melsness in Moorhead, Minnesota before immigrating to rural Manitoba. Over the next ten years, Augusta gave birth to eight(!) children, some in Minnesota, and at least two, including Edna/Bomie and her sister Alida in Manitoba. According to the records that I have found, including a 1906 Canadian census, Edna would have been her youngest child to survive. It’s important to note that my original search of the Canadian census records failed for “Melsness” because the poor penmanship of the census-taker shows the last name as “Mesness”. Once I searched that last name, this document was uncovered:

In chatting with Mom about these details, she confirmed: “I remember something about Bomie’s father sending her and Alida to go live with family in Minnesota.” I learned that Alida returned to Manitoba and married, but I know even less about her three other siblings, Barney, Henry, and Walter.

I’m left thinking about Bomie, too, on her deathbed in 1991, with plenty of family surrounding her—yet her own mother passed away when she was only two, and her father, Olof, remarried when Bomie was six, and ostensibly disappeared to the west coast, while Bomie continued to reside with Ms Ingaborg Paulson.

The death of Mrs Augusta Sole is tragic: this young, 36-year-old Swedish immigrant, who gave birth to eight children and left behind her five surviving babes, all under ten years of age. If Augusta hadn’t passed away, Olof would have had no reason to send my 3-year-old great-grandmother to live with relative strangers in Minnesota, which is where she would meet Bompa and begin my Mom’s family tree. If Augusta hadn’t died so young, my beloved Grandma Dorothy wouldn’t have existed, nor her ten brothers and sisters, my mom wouldn’t exist, my uncles and aunts, my cousins, my sisters, my neices and nephews; I wouldn’t be here, piecing together this story, 117 years after Augusta’s death.