This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: Howe, Haugen, Anderson, Kennedy, Amland, Cochran, Johnson, Long, Landers, Norem, Voll, Carefoot-Mowat, Solibo, Nagel, Adair, Richardson, Caragata, Billington, Hatlelid, Adamack, Satrevik Classification: Biography Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/idB.2ACE/31 Message Board Post: CHARLES & ANNA HOWE [Tjerand & Anna Haugen] “Charles Howe was a man born with a spirit of adventure in his veins,” according to his granddaughter, Lorene Anderson.1 Born in Norway in 1855, Tjerand Ingebrigtsen Haugen [by which name Charles Howe was originally known], was the fourth son of Ingebrigt Ingebrigtsen Haugen of Etne, Hordaland, Norway, by his wife, Eli Olsdatter. Charles’s granddaughter Harriett recalled that he once told her that when he was fourteen, his father advised him, “Now you are a man and another mouth to feed so you must seek your own livelihood”2 “Grandfather said he put everything in a little knapsack and hiked to the seaport of Bergen where he and another little boy were hired to work on a ship about to sail.....the other little fellow later fell from a mast (they did only flunkie work and were abused, à la Charles Dickens descriptions) and was killed before Grandfather’s eyes.”3 Lorene advises that “he went to sea as ! a cabin boy” and “He was on board one of the first steamships which had engine trouble and they were six months getting back to Norway.”4 Charles Howe once told some of his Howe granddaughters that his large powerful hands were the result of all the heavy work he did during his youthful years at sea.5 Anna Howe Kennedy’s biography records that her “Father trained and worked as a merchant sailor, travelling frequently to England. It was as a sailor that he learned the English language. My Mother went to live with a family in Bergen after the death of her mother. Although she worked as a domestic, the family treated her as a friend and daughter. Father’s cargo vessel was shipwrecked, and while he was being nursed by the family, a romance blossomed between the young couple and marriage ensued.”6 Born in 1853, Anna Amland was the younger daughter of Anders and Marta Amland of Tysnes Island. When Marta died young in 1868, leaving Anders a widower for 37 years, Anna, aged fifteen, and her elder sister Ingeborg, had been sent to live with their mother’s sister. Their father was a farmer and fisherman who was bedridden for the last twelve years of his life. Anders Tomasson Amland lived to the remarkable age of 96 and died in 1905. After living with her aunt for a time, Anna headed north to Bergen where she found employment as a maid in the Bergen household where Charles was recuperating. The owners of the Bergen house where Charles boarded and Anna worked, apparently did not initially approve of his intention of marrying Anna. In any event they reconciled themselves to the young couple’s romance and Charles and Anna were married in the parlour of that same house in the city of Bergen sometime in the year 1881 or in early 1882. On December the 11th, 1882, ! in or near Bergen, Anna gave birth to their first child who was named Ingebrigt after his Grandfather Haugen. Charles had been receiving letters from his younger sister Lusine who encouraged her brothers to come join her in Illinois. Lusine Haugen had gone over to the States on her own in 1878 and had landed a position as housekeeper to the Governor of Illinois. Convinced by his sister’s favourable reports of life in the New World, Charles and Anna Howe immigrated to the United States in June of 1883 with their infant son Ingebrigt and Charles’s brother Nels and his wife Bertha. Either while being processed by American Customs and Immigration [probably at Ellis Island, New York], or in their first few years in the United States, Nels and Tjerand Haugen anglicized their surname to Howe and Tjerand changed his first name to Charles and that of his son Ingebrigt, to Martin. The name change occurred either because the immigration officials arbitrarily changed their surname, or as a result of a desire on the part of Charles and Nels to adopt American sounding names. The Howe Family headed out to Illinois to join their sister Lusine, by then known as Lucy Howe, who was then residing at Morris near the centre of the Norwegian community in Grundy County southwest of Chicago. Charles and Anna and their infant son Martin settled nearby [presumably on a farm] north of Morris and south of Lisbon, where Anna gave birth in July of 1885 to their eldest daughter Elizabeth. At an undetermined time after her birth, Charles and Anna and family moved some twenty miles east to Joliet, where Charles found employment working on the railroad. Their son Andrew was born sometime in 1887, either in Joliet or near Morris. Charles found that he didn’t much care for railroad work, so he ultimately made the decision to move his family north to Minnesota after the birth of their daughter Anna in January 1890. We don’t know where in Minnesota they resided, thought it’s possible they may have gone to join Nels and Bertha at a farming communi! ty near Chandler in Murray County, Minnesota. After two years in Minnesota, they headed west to South Dakota and took up a homestead on 160 acres one mile east of Presho. At about the same time, Nels and Bertha Howe also homesteaded at Presho, therefore giving rise to the possibility that the two Howe Families may have journeyed together from Minnesota. Barely settled into their South Dakota homestead, Anna gave birth to their daughter Sadie in March of 1892. In December of 1893, Anna and Charles greeted the arrival of their youngest daughter Matilda, and their family became complete with the birth of their seventh child, John, sometime in 1895. For the next twelve years, the two Howe brothers and their families enjoyed the experience of living in close proximity to each other at Presho. One family story has it that sometime in the 1890s, Charles Howe decided to head west into the Black Hills to prospect for gold and ended up staying there an entire year. Soon after arriving there, Charles was forced to go into hiding since the Sioux tribes considered the Black Hills to be sacred Indian country and did not take kindly to others intruding into their territory. Since the Sioux wouldn’t let anyone in or out of their sacred lands, it took quite some time before Charles was finally able to make good his escape and return home to his family with nary a nugget to justify his year-long disappearance. Expecting him to be gone no more than a month or two, Anna had been worried sick that something awful had happened to him. And during that entire time, she had had to take care of her children and the homestead all on her own.7 Thankfully, Nels and Bertha were there to help her out if things got too tough. In February 1902, Charles Howe took out his American Naturalization papers in Lyman County, South Dakota.8 He wanted to increase his landholdings and concentrate on ranching but could not do so in the Presho area where all the available land was taken up. Therefore in 1904 or ‘05, he pulled up stakes again, loaded up the wagon and took his family 100 miles west to the vicinity of Cottonwood where they homesteaded and lived in a dugout on Neves Creek for a time. Their son Martin had already homesteaded there and Andrew also took up a homestead which he turned over to his sister Anna. 9 Circa 1907 or ‘08, Charles and Anna and family moved right into Cottonwood. Charles’s youngest brother, John I. Howe, had come over from Norway in 1890 and after having fought in the Spanish-American War, had eventually made his way to Cottonwood in 1906 where he also took up a homestead. The Howe Brothers went into partnership and became the owners and operators of the Cottonwood Hotel and General Store. Once again there were two Haugen brothers from Etne living and working in close proximity. A joyful family event occurred just after Christmas in 1910 when Charles and Anna’s eldest daughter Elizabeth married Harry Cochran right there in Cottonwood. The young couple settled on a homestead in the vicinity. Tragedy struck the Howe Family in 1911. Young John Howe, the Benjamin of the family and just fifteen years old, died suddenly under mysterious and tragic circumstances. He was found dead out in the barn and it has been conjectured that he may have been murdered. His death was one of three unexplained fatalities in the Cottonwood area that winter. As described by both his cousin Johnny Johnson (his mother’s nephew) and by his teacher, Florence Long (his brother Martin’s future wife), John C. Howe was a happy, good-natured and well-adjusted young fellow. He helped out at his father’s and uncle’s general store, and as a result of a series of unsolved thefts of store merchandise, one of his duties at the time was to make nightly inspections of the supply sheds. Did he catch the thieves red-handed and if so, did they murder him?10 Almost ninety years later, the cause of his death remains unknown. Charles and Anna and their six surviving children must have been absolutely devastated by John’s untimely and dreadful demise. Their sorrow over the loss of their youngest son may have acted as a subconscious motivation for Charles and Anna’s subsequent move. In 1912, after only seven years in Cottonwood, Charles, ever the restless soul, made the decision to head north to western Canada where vast areas of open prairieland had been opened to settlement over the previous decade. Accompanied by his son Martin, they journeyed about 400 miles northwest to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada, and then made their way 100 miles south to their final destination. “Charles Howe was already past middle age when he started to pioneer in Canada and he had to have a pioneering instinct to make such a bold move.”11 Charles and his son Martin both took up homesteads and pre-emptions to the north of the Wood Mountain Hills in southern Saskatchewan down near the Montana border. “With the closing in of below zero weather and deep snow, Martin and his father returned to South Dakota to spend the winter, getting their horses and equipment ready to ship out to their homestead in the spring.”12 In the month of April 1913, Charles and Anna and Martin, in the company of a family friend, J. P. Johnson, and Anna’s Norwegian nephew, Johnny Johnson, set out on the long northbound journey to their new homes in Saskatchewan. A series of letters written by Anna in Norwegian, circa 1917-1920, to her daughters back in Cottonwood, have survived to this very day. The following extracts of translations of Anna’s letters provide us with a few glimpses into their lives way back then: “Plessis [Sask, Canada], January 14th Dear Children, Since you all have often surprised us with so many beautiful things, I must write you a few words to tell you that we received your gift and we are sending you a heartfelt thanks. And not to forget [our Grand-daughter] Harriett [Cochran] for the letter you wrote with your sweet little hands. You are making very good figures. We are about the same. I believe we will get a hired hand one of these days. It is too much for us to work with all alone. You are all greeted from the heart. Your devoted Mother. February 14th. Dear Children, We have had it extremely hard here for a long time with snow and cold weather. Here there have been coal shortages — the railroad could not bring in enough. We are lucky we are having enough at home. Ole Hatlelid and Graekar stayed here a few days. They were after coal. [Son] Martin is here now with his little daughter [Thelma]. He is in good shape this year. You are all greeted from the heart and I wish you all a happy New Year! Your ‘Hengiven’ Mother. March 3rd. Dear Children, I have now again received your dear letter that you sent, Lizzie. We are glad to see that you are all well. That is also good to hear that Andrew is well. Papa is very sick at times of that old stomach trouble. Martin was here last Sunday and he stayed over till Monday. They are all in good health. [My nephew] Jan [Johnson Amland] was with him. Martin told us that Tillie had gone to Cottonwood. We had helped her to go to Regina. We did not know she had gone [from there to Cottonwood?]. We have had a letter from [our niece] Hannah [Howe]. They are all well. We have not yet sold our land in Presho [South Dakota]. One person offered $4,500 for it, but it is listed for $6,000. I understand they have had a good harvest there [in Presho] for many years now and it [our property] is located close to the town. I believe we will get the railroad here [at Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan] come Summer. Your Hengiven Mother. April 23rd. Dear Children, We have not so long ago received your dear letter and are glad to hear that you are well. We are also glad to hear that Alvin Landers and Sadie have come a long way on the road, and I am hoping it will be warmer before they arrive. Martin and family is fine now. We have some small calves and more are coming. Small calves need good care in cold weather. It is good that we have plenty of feed for them. Your Hengiven Mother. September 30th. Dear Children, We are now through with the threshing, plowing and disking. We have only a few potatoes left to dig up. We did not get such a big harvest but we got more than last year of wheat and flax. The price is high so we get something out of it anyhow. We went to Lafleche last week and we stopped at Martin’s. They had been ill but they were all up and around and talked to us. I am hoping they are all better now. I hear that [our daughter] Anna [Kennedy] has had another little boy [Wayne]. I am glad that [our daughter] Sadie is over there and helping her [sister] until she gets strong again. We had a letter from [our niece] Hannah and [her mother] Bertha (widow of Charles’s brother, Nels Howe, of Presho, SD). It has been dry there in the late Summer so the harvest was bad. If they had not had frost, they would still get some corn. Heartfelt greetings to you all from your devoted Mother. October 8th. Dear Children, I have now again received your dear letter and I am happy to hear that you are all well. We have dug up the potatoes — we have more than we can use. I am also getting some cabbages which are quite large and firm, and about a bushel of turnips. We use a lot of these vegetables. We also got a few tomatoes and cucumbers. I always have a lot to do. I just churned some butter and made some potato pancakes and did some cleaning. Your devoted Mother.”13 Charles and Anna took out their Canadian Naturalization Papers in December of 1914. Between 1912 and 1920, there were four more marriages in their family: Andrew married Lena Hausle in 1912, Martin married Florence Long in 1913, Anna married George Kennedy in 1916, and Sadie married Alvin Landers in 1917. By 1920, Charles and Anna, by then in their mid-sixties, were ready to retire. They sold their farm to their daughter and son-in-law, Sadie and Alvin Landers, and then headed down to Chicago to make arrangements to return home to the land they had left behind some 37 years before. Letters from Charles and Anna to their daughters tell of their preparations. “Joliet, Illinois, August 18, 1920 Dear Lizzie and Anna and Tillie, We are well up to this writing and we are now ready to go across the ocean. We are going from Joliet [Illinois] 24 August and 27 August we are going from New York to Norway. The ticket cost 280 dollars from here to Bergen Norway. Now Lizzie and Tillie, you must write to us care of Bergen Norway and let us know how everything is going. [My sister] Lucy [Norem] is well and [her] family also. Our best regards to all of you. Your Father, Charles A. Howe”14 “Joliet [Illinois], August 31st, 1920 Dear Children, We have just received Tillie’s letters and pictures from Brookings [SD] and are hoping that you are all well. We were in Chicago yesterday. We had many places to go so we were quite tired when we came home yesterday evening. But we were able to arrange everything for our trip back to Norway. It is lucky for us that we can now travel as British subjects or else it would have taken another month before we could have departed. We shall go from Chicago this coming Monday to New York and there we must stay a few days before the journey over the ocean. We had the wife [Mabel] of [nephew] Oskar [Norem] (youngest son of Charles Howe’s sister, Lucy Howe Norem) with us in Chicago and she was a very good help to us. It is not good when you are not familiar with the city. I shall greet you all from Aunt Lussi [Howe Norem]. You are all greeted from the heart from your devoted Mother”15 Charles and Anna spent almost an entire year over in Norway visiting with both their families in 1920 and 1921. Whereas Charles’s eldest brother Ingebrigt Haugen and most of his family lived way up at Vardø at the top of Norway, Ingebrigt’s eldest son John, had moved down to Stavanger, about 120 miles south of Bergen (as the crow flies). Therefore it made it convenient for Charles and Anna to go to Stavanger where they stayed with Charles’s nephew, John Haugen and his wife Olava and family. Fortunately, a photo of that visit still exists. It was taken in the garden of John Haugen’s Stavanger home and includes John and Olava and their eldest son Monrad, and Anna and Charles [Tjerand] Howe. John and Olava’s granddaughter, Margrethe Voll, has noted the strong family resemblance between her Grandfather and his Uncle Tjerand [Charles]. Charles and Anna would almost certainly have visited his birthplace at Etne. Although his brother Ole Haugen had died in 1903, Ole’s widow, Rannveig, was living and may still have been residing at the Haugen home [where Charles was born] at Gjerde near the town of Etne. Also there at Gjerde were Charles’s younger sister, Henrikke and her son Ingebrigt Haugen. In addition, various Haugen, Hegelund and Børretzen cousins probably still resided in the vicinity. Upon their return to North America in 1921, Charles and Anna settled out on the West Coast at Vancouver, British Columbia. Close to the ocean and the mountains, their new home must have reminded them of Norway. In January of 1923, they received the news that their youngest daughter Matilda, had married Ole Hatlelid, and that they had taken up residence in the same vicinity as Sadie and Martin in southern Saskatchewan. They now had three children living in the States and three in Canada, with a total of sixteen grandchildren. Unfortunately, Anna’s health began to deteriorate and she died in Vancouver on May 20th, 1925. She was laid to rest in Mountain View Cemetery. Thelma Carefoot-Mowat can recall when her Grandfather, Charles Howe, almost ran into the mower while she was trying to teach him how to drive. It was the Spring of 1928 and Grandpa Howe had come from Vancouver to visit his children in southern Saskatchewan — Martin, Sadie and Tillie. Charles and his son Martin and family had just returned from a visit with Sadie and her husband Alvin Landers and family. It was then that Charles asked his son to give him a driving lesson. Knowing what his Dad was like, Martin replied that he would instead have his daughter Thelma serve as his father’s driving instructor. Thelma states that her Grandpa Howe was a proud and stubborn man who found it humiliating that a twelve year old girl could drive a car whereas he could not. He was determined to learn how to drive and her sister Evelyn Howe advises that he was a man who definitely liked to keep up-to-date with the latest technological developments. Thelma points out that in early Ford cars, you had to adjust both the spark and the gas when you started out, and during the course of the driving lesson, she noticed that her Grandpa had not remembered the proper sequence of her instructions. Just then Thelma saw that he was headed straight toward the mower. Reacting quickly, she pulled at the steering wheel to avoid a collision, whereupon her Grandpa got mad and scolded her. Thelma stopped the car and ran crying to her Dad sobbing that Grandpa was mean and had blamed her for his mistake. She then announced she would no longer attempt to teach him to drive. One is left wondering if he ever did l! earn to drive.16 At the age of 74, Charles remarried in June of 1929 in Vancouver. His new bride, Janette Solibo Pastad, was a 52 year old widow from Norway. Their marriage didn’t last long and they separated soon afterwards, probably in 1930. Not long after his separation, Charles received a most welcome visit from his eldest granddaughter Harriett, the daughter of Lizzie and Harry Cochran. “During my stay with Grandfather [in Vancouver], we spent many hours in Stanley Park where I swam and he watched the ships move back and forth. He was so pleased when I was asked to sing in the church choir (some of our songs were in Norwegian and they taught me phonetically to sing along). We walked and travelled around Vancouver much of the time (by trolley). He was always so dear to appreciate my cooking — apparently he had really been ‘burned’ in his second marriage — he’d expected they would share living costs — she got all she could from him, rings, etc., and then was through with him — of course she was also at least twenty years younger than Grandfather and also had assumed he had a great deal more wealth — and he THOUGHT she was really a wealthy person, too. Ah, disillusionment!” “I recall their [Grandfather’s and Grandmother’s] return from Norway in the early 1920s — I understood they had visited their parents on that trip17 — and that Grandfather was regarded as a great success by all, to the extent that he contributed an organ to a church in Bergen.” “Grandmother had a very bad time with respiratory problems in Vancouver (asthma or bronchitis?) and thought it reminded her of ‘home.’ The climate was not good for her and Grandfather had regrets about that after her death [in 1925].”18 Charles Howe paid his last visit to Saskatchewan during the Summer of 1942. He visited with Tillie, Sadie and Martin and their spouses, and he also got to know several of his grandchildren, who now numbered 32 in total. And he met Bette Nagel [Adair], his eldest surviving great-grandchild. Several family photos document his last visit. By then in his 87th year, he looks surprisingly healthy and hearty in the pictures. Nevertheless, old age and infirmity soon brought an end to the varied life of a rather remarkable gentleman from the land of the Vikings. Charles Albert Howe, originally known as Tjerand Ingebrigtsen Haugen, departed this life in Vancouver on March 10th, 1943. He was laid to rest alongside Anna in Vancouver’s Mountain View Cemetery. <><><> NOTES 1. WAVERLEY 44, published ca 1978; history of the Rural Municipality of Waverley No. 44 [in the vicinity of Wood Mountain], Saskatchewan, Canada, “Charles Howe,” by Lorene Landers Anderson, pg 94. 2. Extracts from a 1986 letter written by Harriett Cochran Richardson (D2B) to D M Howe Caragata 3. Ibid 4. WAVERLEY 44, “Charles Howe,” by Lorene Landers Anderson, pg 94 5. "Childhood Memories of Anne Howe Caragata" 6. Extract from the Biography of Anna Howe Kennedy, by her daughter Doris Kennedy Billington, who interviewed her Mother. 7. “My Memories of Grandpa Howe,” by Thelma Howe Carefoot-Mowat 8. The Family Papers of Martin & Florence Howe 9. From the Biography of Anna Howe Kennedy; also, from The History of Jackson County, South Dakota, pg 65: “The John and Charles Howe families came to the Cottonwood community from Presho, So. Dakota, in the Spring of 1904. They homesteaded south of Cottonwood.” 10. Interview with James D. Howe 11. WAVERLEY 44, “Charles Howe,” by Lorene Landers Anderson, pg 94 12. THEY CAME TO WOOD MOUNTAIN (Saskatchewan, Canada), published ca 1967; “Martin C. Howe,” by Florence C. Howe, pg 203 13. The Anna Amland Howe Letters, courtesy of her granddaughter, Helen Hatlelid Adamack. Anna’s letters were translated into English by her great-nephew, the late Sigvard Satrevik of Seattle. 14. Ibid 15. Ibid 16. Interview with Thelma Howe Carefoot-Mowat 17. Since their parents were all deceased by 1911, Anna and Charles Howe visited with their siblings and other relatives while over in Norway in 1920-21. 18. Extracts from Harriet Cochran Richardson’s 1986 letter to D M Howe Caragata <><><>