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.
