Place and Time

This chronicle will explore the journeys of my maternal ancestors as they made their way from Europe to the United States by boat and to California by train and horse-drawn carriage.  Needless to say, this was a time of great transition as they discovered new places and uncharted territories. Of Norwegian and German blood, they were immigrants, strangers here in America tempted to the west by the promise of free land.

The past only exists in photographs and writing and therefore is necessarily fragmentary. This narrative then will be marked by gaps, missing information, and ambiguities. Often, I must rely on stories that have been passed down orally, or were written without citation, sometimes events witnessed only by a single party. Therefore, while my own intentions are to reconstruct a story that resembles truth as much as possible, it will necessarily have an element of fiction. There is no perfect original from which to copy, only fragments.

Aside from very scant fragments of information expunged from government documents and a few newspaper clippings, I owe nearly all of the information contained here as well as most of the photographs to the studious preservation efforts of my grandmother Bernice Stager. May she rest in peace.