Something Incredibly Rare in Local History

The Thortvedts.   This family was full of talent and industry; they utilized both to the fullest!

The father, Levi, was an inventor, fiddler and a published author (beginning with his diary in 1903.)  The whole family saved their "letters, diaries, scrapbooks, photographs..."  This, in effect, recorded what they and their community felt about the things going on around them on a daily basis. In this day and age, recording the events of the world is no problem - but who is keeping a journal of the everyday family?  It absolutely is not like what you see on ANY television show.  So?  Who's doing it?

In December of 1870, Tone Thortvedt served as a midwife at the birth of their neighbors, the Skrei.

Orabel kept alphabetical listings of people, places and events in the area:

She had literally VOLUMES of data:

She was also an accomplished artist recording what folks thought then was routine, possibly boring "life":

She records the story behind the painting as follows:  "This painting depicts the first stagecoach arriving on the Red River.  In the summer of 1859, the Minnesota Stage Company built a road from Saint Cloud to the new army fort on the Red River Frontier:  Fort Abercrombie.  They had two stagecoaches filled with passengers on their way north to Fort Garry (the settlement now known as Winnipeg, Manitoba).  The plan was to have the passengers go from the stagecoach to a steamboat that had just been constructed on the Red River.  Things did not go according to plan.

"Along the way the stagecoaches met Anson Northup, the owner of the steamboat.  Captain Northup informed them that he had no intention of taking passengers on his boat.  'If you want to run her,' Captain Northup told them, 'you'll have to buy her.'  In the end, the Minnesota Stage Company had a raft made for the passengers.  It took 22 days to float down the river to Fort Garry."

The "rest of the story" is about two sisters, the Stirling's, who had traveled from Scotland to meet Elleonora's fiancee, Robert Campbell, who ran Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca in northeast Alberta.  After reaching Fort Abercrombie they had to float on the raft for 22 days, then sail 300 miles to the tip of Lake Winnipeg and take a birch bark canoe for the last 800 miles!  Now THAT is true love!!

I love to talk story, as they say in Hawaii, but, with all of my blogging, how much of it is personal or records day-to-day events in our lives?  Things like the price of a loaf of bread (almost $3 now, and I remember Momma sending me into a 7-11 to buy a loaf for a dime) or the price of a gallon of gasoline. (When I first got married I remember gasoline wars between service stations and buying gas for $.14 - fourteen cents! - a gallon.  It, too, is now $3 or $4 or sometimes even $5!)  I write about history, ignoring the fact that someday WE will be history!  The Thortvedts did good!