Tracking Matilda

 

 

Harvest Festival, Skördefesten, is over now in the Åland Islands. Winter comes early and the tourists leave like flocks of migrant birds.  Their backpacks and bicycles fill the departing ferry boats that take them back to Stockholm, Tallinn or Helsinki. I’ve never been there, I’m not sure I have the time left to get there, but I’ve learned so much over the past days that I feel a kinship that must only be explained as genetic.

It has been ten days since I wrote about my journey trying to find my mother.  The journey has changed as all good and productive journeys do. In order to understand my mother I followed my Grandmother, Matilda Serelia Wiberg to her roots.  It was no easy task.  When last I talked about her I said that she was the youngest of seven children and that I had no clue how she got to America.

Genealogical research is not for the faint of heart even if you have Ancestry.com to help you. But with due diligence, I found that the 19 year old was actually the tenth of eleven children and that she followed her nearest older sister Alma over here.  Alma made it straight to New York City but for some reason Matilda landed in Boston.  I have no idea.

Well I might.  You see I believe that even the young Matilda was hard headed and bent on having her own way.  Spoiled?  Perhaps.  Does an older adult’s character offer a clue to the young girl?  If she was unable to follow her sister, (illness? ran out of money?) she would get here however she could.

I feel that they were both running away: away from a rather harsh land of boulders and subsistence farming, a land where your brothers and sisters disappeared from your family’s genealogical chart within a few months of their appearance.  Perhaps a land where you were meant to marry a distant cousin and as a woman produce 11, 13 or 15 children in the space of as many years, the last one being born after your husband died.  It is all there.  Right in her chart.

These days the Åland Islands are out there on Facebook looking Summery, with beautiful beaches and quiet roads where your bicycle will take you to charming cafes that sell local handcrafts.  Back then it was not so.  Living on tiny Andersö, in the parish of Geta, there was not much to attract a young girl in the early 20^th Century.

She made it to the big city, in the land where the streets were supposed to be paved with gold.  What made her so afraid later on that she became bitter?  Was the freedom she craved too much?  Did she long for the cool nights and the sound of the Baltic Sea?

I have much more to write about Matilda and what I think made her the way she was.  But that will wait for the next installment.

I Remember Mama

I've never been one to write memoir, my life has been way too complicated and void of self-exploration, but recently I have been doing the Ancestry thing, for reasons described below, and I have decided to publish here this little memoir clip to see if this is something I want to pursue.

 

 

 

I Remember Mama

 

Last night I followed an Ancestry rabbit hole and a batch of memories cascaded out with me when I was done. 

 

For some time now I have been researching my mother’s family, trying to understand her complex and difficult personality.  The biggest rabbit hole in this research was my grandmother, Matilda Seralia Wiberg, a harsh, always judgmental dynamo whose English was barely understandable and who, when she walked pounded across the floor like an oncoming Rhino instead of the 110 pound bird she was.  At first I thought her an undocumented alien, there was so little information about her and her journey to America from the Aland Islands (look them up, all 6757 of them; they have a fascinating and dark history).

 

 

 

But then the dam opened up, and though I still can’t pinpoint how she got into the United States, I did find the documentation of her birth through Finnish records (ever try reading Finish?) and finally her US Passport application in 1919.  She was the youngest of seven children, the daughter of a “lake man, dependent lodger”, someone who ran a ferry and owned no property.  I assume with that many islands his was a popular occupation.

 

But I only knew her when she lived in a house on Staten Island that I visited quite often as a child.  Last night I decided to look for that house and through a series of memory chains I found out where it was (I really had no idea of the address), that it hadn’t been damaged by Sandy, and that it looked exactly the same if not better than it had in the 1950s.

 

 

 

As I stared at it on the screen (and attached a screen shot of it to Matilda’s Ancestry profile) music began playing in my head and I began to remember a strange practice of my childhood, the habit of my mother of calling me in from play to sit in front of the television every time both the TV series and the movie of I Remember Mama were on the screen.

 

 

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I liked both.  They spoke to an era of immigration and new things.  Set in the early 1900s San Francisco, it followed a Norwegian family in their daily struggle to assimilate and still remain a part of their own Scandinavian culture.  Not too deeply explored but in a loving way with Irene Dunne (in the movie) and Peggy Wood (in the TV series) as the wise and loving earth mother.

 

My mother seemed to identify with Mama but I identified with Katrin, the oldest daughter and the writer and narrator of the story.  It always started out (abbreviated version): “I remember the big white house on Steiner Street, and my little sister Dagmar, and my big brother Nels, and Papa. But most of all, I remember Mama.”

 

Now, as I look back on it, I realize that my mother wanted, in the worst way, for her family to have been that family and for us to be that family, to somehow drop back to when she was growing up in that Scandinavian/American culture, to be kinder and gentler and more family.  We weren’t.  We were a mid-twentieth century family with a far more complex history.

 

But now, at least, I respect her longing for a harder yet easier time in which she grew up; a close knit Scandinavian family, a loving quiet father and a mother she perceived as somewhat like the Peggy Wood character.  She would never be that character. She was the first in the family to go to college and would spend her life working while the neighborhood mothers were all disapproving, though perhaps secretly envious. She was a distant mother; I much preferred my sweet father and his kind, Victorian mother.

 

Explorations of this sort can never reveal to you the motivations of a person in their entirely but now, at least I can say that I better remember mama.