EVERGREEN

On a July afternoon with all of inland LA baking on yet another day of sun with no end in sight, I make a pilgrimage of sorts to Evergreen Cemetery to pay my respects to family. Not my parents, this time, who lie buried on the green Hollywood Hills, nor my grandparents Ernst and Selma Sundberg, who lie buried on other green hills in Glendale, but my great-grandparents John Emanuel and Elsa Sundberg (and related kin) who lie in LA’s oldest (anglo) cemetery just a block from the official line of East LA and all the lavanderias, panaderias, and Mexican auto repair shops you could ever want - old LA, now 99% Hispanic.

A week ago, I was on my way back to LA from Omaha and, ultimately, South Dakota, where my cousin Jane’s daughter Mary Jo had gotten hitched to another Dutch American kid from the Great Plains, Jesse Van Essen. It was a good chance – in one fell swoop – to meet up with all of my Uncle Jack’s clan: Jane and Gary and their two grown kids, her sister Julie and her two grown kids (alright, youngest "grown" son Peter starts college this fall), and, of course, Uncle Jack and Aunt Joan, like second parents to me after living with them in Pella, Iowa during my high school years.

Not by choice, I had ended up with an extra day in Omaha the Monday after the wedding waiting for an early flight out the next morning and had decided to take advantage of being on old Sundberg stomping grounds to dig a little deeper into the part of our family history that transpired on the banks of the Missouri. J.E. (John Emmanuel) had migrated from Sweden to Omaha in the early 1880’s, gotten married to a svenska flicka there (a year older than he was), and had all four of his kids there before pulling up stakes and taking the whole family south to LA for a new chapter in their Swedish immigrant saga.

Omaha is full of Scandinavians – and therefore full of Lutheran churches. But which one to start with? I had checked on the Web several weeks before my wedding trip and found too many, but one, Augustana Lutheran, had a promising ring to it. (Grandpa Sundberg had attended Augustana College in Illinois, so it must have some Swedish connection.) Thankfully, the church had a very complete website including a history page, and on it it mentions being the first Swedish Lutheran church in the area, the mother church of the Swedish Lutheran community in Omaha. In fact, its beginnings go back to 1868, three years after the Civil War!

http://www.augustanalutheran.com/

I emailed the (female) pastor and almost immediately got a message back saying that I was probably on the right track and that the church secretary was an amateur congregational historian and would love to help me out if I stopped by during my day in Omaha.

(Back to last Monday) Cousin Jane, now free of wedding duties and stresses, volunteered to drive me down to Omaha Monday morning, both to get me to my airport motel and to check out (“industrial espionage” her engineer husband Gary calls it) a fancy tea shop in Omaha, one that not only sells tea, but “gives” teas. This was all to get ideas for her own Dutch-themed store in downtown Sioux Falls. (Jane has also started "giving teas" in the Sioux Falls area.)

Jane dropped me off at Augustana Lutheran, in an “old” suburb, west of the downtown and up the hill, away from old Omaha’s distinctive slaughter house smells - now very much in the center of town. Augustana was not my great-grandparents’ church, but the offspring of two old Swedish Lutheran congregations that had merged in the 1930’s. But it holds complete archives from both.

The secretary, Melissa Prohaska (rhymes with Nebraska), met me in the comfortable church library, where she already had open for me on a table a history of Immanuel Lutheran church (Svenska Evangeliska Lutherska Immanuels Kyrkan) written for the church’s 50th anniversary in 1918 (!). And she had opened the metal filing cabinet in the basement with the archives of the two old congregations. She was apologetic that she couldn’t get the bottom drawers open, just the top one, but Jane saved the day by remembering that many old cabinets have a special button inside to unlock the lower drawers, and after some diligent searching (and taking out every sinngle envelope and booklet in the top shelf), Melissa managed to find the magic button to get the other drawers open. Which was a godsend, because that’s where the membership books turned out to be. (I’m mailing her a bottle of champagne as a thank-you gift for all her efforts!)

We located two huge old books with the membership data – one from 1890 (redone from an earlier one) and the original membership book with its first entry in the 1860’s and its later Swedish-born members entered willy-nilly in many different hands. Touching those venerable pages was like contacting, via time machine, that first struggling, infant Swedish congregation in Omaha, far from Sweden, still writing in the old tongue in fancy penmanship (or messy penmanship), with each name a prized new member recently off the boat from Småland or Skåne (or on a second migration from Illinois), seeking comfort and friendship from fellow Swedes in a strange, new English-speaking land, still filled with armed Indians.

We found great-grandfather John Emanuel’s name in both books – listed first, as befits the patriarch of the family, with “hustru” (wife), “son”, and “dotter” (daughter) dutifully listed below. Including that nameless baby of family lore who had died in infancy of “ungulate fever” that Dad and cousin Lois had alluded to, now with a name (Ivar Hilding), a birth date (January 25, 1891), and a death date (“dög den 6 Juli 91”) penned in at the far right side of the entry page. Hmm. He hadn’t lived “only weeks”, as I had been told; he had survived almost half a year! Another potential branch of wider Sundberg kinfolk that was never to be. He would have been my dad’s uncle had he made it to Los Angeles with his siblings and lasted to 1922. “Ivar Hilding” was one of those vague names of long-dead family that are mentioned in passing that I, in my lack of full attention at the time, hadn’t connected to anything. Yes, Dad had mentioned that name ...

The other three children - Hjalmar, Ernst (my grandpa), and Aunt Esther (Astrid Elvira Ingeborg) - were all there, too. Little American-born Lutheran tots. Hjalmar, the oldest, would have only been 11 when J.E. took him on that great Western train adventure from Omaha to LA in the summer of 1896. My grandfather would have been only seven when they left the Great Plains for good.

Church membership books can be nearly as dry as US Census data. But stringing these dry dates and entries together can suddenly reveal new truths and connect previously unconnected family information. The most meaningful tidbit waiting for me to discover was the two dates listed in separate books under “transferred membership”. Both in the summer of 1896. June 1 was one, and July 21 the other. This apparent discrepancy only made sense paired with the family history that JE had taken the eldest boy with him to LA to get established first (job, living quarters) then returned for the rest of the family. If my interpretation of the two dates is correct, JE had accomplished both objectives in less than two months, and by the end of that July, JE with Elsa and the kids were sitting on the train across the plains and Rockies to their new home on the Pacific. (Minus little Ivar, who no doubt lies buried in some Swedish cemetery in Omaha.)

And so the John Sundberg family vanishes from the ledgers and church life of Immanuel Lutheran of Omaha, which went on, as I read in the 1918 account, to become a prosperous downtown congregation, ultimately joining with its mission church Zion Lutheran in 1936 to found a new church west of the downtown, an economically sensible decision during the Great Depression.

Of all the Lutheran churches connected with various generations of the Sundberg family, only Angelica in downtown LA seems to have suffered serious decline. It’s anglo congregation (as I mentioned in an earlier blog Dec. 7, 2005) has withered to less than 10 members on a Sunday. Its Spanish-language and Korean-language (and Maya-language) congregations are small but stable. I have yet to go on the trail of the Immanuel Lutheran church here in LA south of the Santa Monica Freeway (not a “good area” today) that my grandparents helped found in the late 1920’s. It has an entry in the LA City Directory in the early 1930’s with an address, so it existed, but it waits for another day's research ….

(Back to Evergreen Cemetery.) So, today I finally made it back to Evergreen to lay flowers (yellow dahlias) on the graves of JE, Elsa, Hjalmar, and Carl Arthur Sundberg (another infant death in 1917, belonging to my grandparents this time). July has been a busy month in Sundberg history - Elsa's birthday, the month they arrived in LA. Uncle Hjalmar, too, whom even my dad never knew, and his high school buddy Elmer Bloom drowned at the beach in Long Beach back in July 1902 (July 13 – a date to beware of), and his birthday is July 17 (1885). Especially after my recent visit to Omaha, I felt I owed him and my great-grandparents a visit. Oh, and I also left a bloom for Elmer Bloom, who also drowned that July in 1902. His family's graves are right next to the Sundbergs’; both grieving families must have bought the same plot together that summer.