I was out of town the last few days. I took a long weekend for a trip with my brothers. I’ll share a couple pictures in a few days, when I’ve cleared up some technical problems with my camera.

It was a family history trip. We went to visit the natural habitat of one of our great-grandfathers on Mom’s side.

The man has always been something of a mystery to us. He was larger than life in family memory, half joke and half cautionary tale. But we didn’t know where he came from in Norway, or where to look for the information. The clues I remembered steered me entirely wrong.

But one of my brothers did some digging in his spare time, and not only located the old man’s grave, but also made contact with a second cousin. That cousin met us in Iron River, Wisconsin, along with his wife (nice people; devout Baptists). So we heard some stories, saw some documents, and visited some locations. The result was a more detailed, and nuanced, story of our great-grandfather, John B. Johnson.

The story:

Our ancestor was born on the island of Ytreøy, near Trondheim. The first fact that caught my imagination was that his baptism name was Johan Arndt Johanson. The name “Johan Arndt” is significant. Johann Arndt was a German Lutheran theologian in the 17th Century. Not strictly a pietist, his devotional writings were prized by the Pietists when they eventually came along. In Norway, they were particularly popular with the Haugeans, members of the evangelical lay movement (I’ve written about it here before) that changed Norwegian society, and to which my paternal family belonged.

So if a common family (and all my ancestors were common as dirt) named their son after Johan Arndt, that’s a pretty good indicator that it was a Haugean family.

Young Johan Arndt Johanson, however, was a prodigal son. A laborer and a sea cook, he was immensely strong, a prodigious drinker, and pretty much uncontrollable.

He caught the eye of a young girl named Olina, who came from a Baptist family on the island of Hitra. Her father had died, but her mother told her in no uncertain terms that if she took up with that Johan Johanson, she’d be kicked out of the house. She defied her mother, became pregnant, moved in with relations, and (at some point, I’m not sure when, but after the baby was born) married Johan.

Johan went to America. Perhaps he was fleeing responsibility, but more likely he promised to send for Olina and the baby when he’d gotten established. I say that because it looks as if he came to America along with his father. This is reinforced by the fact that his father actually went back to Norway and fetched Olina and the baby home – perhaps to remind his son of his responsibilities.

Life was hard for Olina in America. Motherhood had settled her and renewed her Christian faith. Johan, who now called himself John B. Johnson (the B didn’t mean anything, it was just to differentiate him from all the other John Johnsons – he still wouldn’t use the name Johan Arndt) worked as a miner in the notorious town of Hurley, Wisconsin, where even today (we visited last weekend) the main street is pretty much all one industry – saloons. Family legend says that he used to come home drunk with friends, wake Olina up, and demand she sing for them. She obeyed, but would only sing hymns. She started a Sunday School for immigrant children, but had to beg rides from neighbors to get to church.

Eventually John raised enough money to buy a farm on the Muskeg River in the township of Oulou, near Iron River, Wisconsin.

I don’t know whether he lost the farm (for tax non-payment) before or after Olina died of stomach cancer. John, we are told, experienced a Christian conversion after her death, and changed his ways.

After they lost the farm, his son got a loan from relatives and bought property near the township of Saxon, Wisconsin, where they raised apples. They prospered at this, and were both known locally as “Apple Johnson.” John B. died in his 80s, in 1949.

Update: I’ve gotten further information on this story from our kind cousins. Olina was in fact baptized a Lutheran, which only makes sense in Norway. And they were married in Norway in 1880, nine years before John emigrated to America.