Hog Butcher for the World

The title of this post comes from the first line of Carl Sandburg's poem, Chicago, first published in 1914. Those with good memories, at least better than mine, may recall an earlier post from back in 2014 that I called The Butcher of Kansas City. The similarity is intentional, because this post is its sequel.

To briefly recap, The Butcher of Kansas City began with the search for a Swedish emigrant to America named Carl Victor Barthelsson. This Carl Victor, a butcher by trade, was born in 1849 in the Swedish city of Västerås. According to church records, in 1884 he left the town of Karlstad and was never heard from again. My earlier post then veered away to follow another Carl Victor, this one born in 1862. Following that trail led eventually in two directions, one to Magalia, California where his son, Harold, died in 1983, and the second to Scarsdale, New York where Harold's first wife, Joyce (Holloway) Barthelson founded the Hoff-Barthelson School of Music.

At the end of the story, though, we were no closer to figuring out whatever happened to the original Carl Victor. Let's stop here for just a minute, because I can see that with more than one person with the same name, then this story might become pretty confusing. So from here on, when I use the name Carl Victor, then I'll add in parentheses which one I'm referring to. So far we have Carl Victor (Kansas City) and Carl Victor (Karlstad). These are definitely two different persons - uncle and nephew. Also, I'll try to be consistent, but in the records the spelling of the names varies quite a bit: Carl vs. Karl vs. Charles, Victor vs. Viktor, and Barthelsson vs. Bartelsson, etc.

When Carl Victor (Karlstad) departed Sweden he left behind a wife, Anna Christina Eriksson (1840-1922), and three children: Victor Emanuel (1873-1942), Carl Johan (1875-1939), and Herman Mathias (1879-1961). At the time he left for America in 1884 these children would have been 11, 9, and 5 years old. The fate of Carl Victor (Karlstad) in the New World lingered as a mystery, and to her dying day Anna Christina was listed in the church books as a “wife” (hustru) and not as a “widow” (änka). Ann Meyer Nordström, the granddaughter of Herman Mathias, told me that in 1902 her grandfather traveled to America looking for his father. We don't know if he was following any real leads or not, but apparently he came back without solving the mystery.

In a way, though, the mystery of this missing butcher was all the more intriguing because there are American records that seemed to be very suggestive. There is a record of the birth of a child with the magnificent name of Oscar James Napolien. He was born in Chicago to parents Carl Victor Bartelson and Augusta Jenson (Cook County, Illinois Birth Certificates Index, 1871-1922). I first learned about this, our third Carl Victor Bartelson, on the Message Board service at ancestry.com. In 1999 – nearly 20 years ago! – a user named joycemount posted a series of messages in a search for her great grandparents. Here are most of the facts that she laid out, copied from her messages:

I am looking for my great grandparents, Karl Victor Barthelson, born in Stockholm. As I understand it, there is a county of Stockholm, as well as the city. I have no idea what parish he was born in, but he emigrated to the United States about 1880. He entered into New York, then moved to Chicago, where my grandfather, Oscar James Napolien Barthelson was born in 1882. Then they moved back to New York, where other children were born.

My grandmother was Augusta Johnson (Jenson?), she was born in Varmland. We don't know if she and Karl were married when they came to the U.S., or got married here, I'm not able to locate any marriage records so far.

We've been searching for him for about 12 years now, with no success, so would appreciate any help you can give us. (16 Apr 1999)

Another user on ancestry.com pointed out the records for the Carl Victor from Kansas City to which Joyce replied:

As I told you, Victor Barthelson [=Carl Victor (Kansas City)] came to US a little later than my great grandfather, Karl Victor, [Chicago] as my grandfather was born in Chicago in 1882.

I know they were meat cutters, and I'm sure that's why they went to Chicago, with the stock yards there, and there had to be work. (17 Apr 1999)

You can see information in these snippets that both support and undermine the idea that the Carl Victor (Chicago) is our missing man, Carl Victor (Karlstad). On the plus side, we have the name Barthelson (however you spell it). I don't mean to imply that the name is all that unusual, but it's definitely much less common than other Swedish patronymic surnames like Johansson, Andersson, Larsson, etc. Also, Joyce's great grandfather was a meat cutter, the same profession as our lost Carl. I also find suggestive the claim that Augusta was from Värmland because the province from which Carl Viktor (Karlstad) emigrated was Värmland. And beyond these messages, if you follow the records of Carl (Chicago) through time you eventually find that he died in New York City in 1906 at the age of 57. This would make his year of birth 1849 (plus or minus), and this agrees with Carl (Karlstad).

But there's a big problem with this hypothesis: Carl (Chicago)'s son Oscar was born on 3 Dec 1882. This is more than a year before our original Carl Victor (Karlstad) was documented leaving his home parish. Also, Carl Victor (Karlstad) wasn't born in Stockholm, but in Västerås. One other negative piece of evidence comes from the New York census in 1905 in which Carl (Chicago) was estimated to have been born in 1851. That's off by 2 years.

Most of these points are fairly soft, but the one that really blocked me from concluding that Carl (Karlstad) and Carl (Chicago) were one and the same was the birth date of Oscar. If Carl Victor (Karlstad) didn't leave Sweden until 1884, then we must be dealing with two different people. By the way, this is not a case of misinterpreting the church records: the date is clearly written, 1884. So this discrepancy seemed like a damning piece of evidence. There is one possible way out the dilemma, though. What if the date, 1884, was not literally when Carl Victor (Karlstad) left for America, but rather that was the date when the parish priest finally gave up hope that a wayward husband would ever return to his home and family?

To give that idea some credence we could, in theory, look for several different kinds of records. We could try, for example, to find a manifest from the ship that took Carl Victor (Karlstad) from Sweden to America. However, the only such record in the emigrant databases is the 1884 date (and this is derived directly from the church records). No one yet has found a passenger list with any likely candidate. Similarly, no one has yet found a record of entry into the United States, even accepting Joyce's account that he came into New York. On the other side of the record gap, in Chicago, I've not been able to find a marriage record in the Cook County database either. In fact, the oldest record that we have for a likely candidate is the birth record of Oscar.

I never had the chance to ask Joyce Mount directly about this head-scratcher because she passed away in 2010. However, I did get in contact with her sister, Diane Aldrich, who is also interested in the family history and solving the problem. This was a search that had been stymied since at least 1987: one family in Sweden that could not find their relative in America, and an American family that could not trace their ancestor back to Sweden.

Finally, the penny dropped: could DNA help to solve the question?

The Barthelson cousins that I'd met in Sweden are my 3rd cousins once removed. That means that our most recent common ancestors were Per Barthelson (1814-1858) and his wife Kjerstin Persdotter (1814-1888). That would be 5 generations back for me, and four generations back for the cousins. At each generation the amount shared DNA between two relatives is reduced on average by 50%. You can do the arithmetic: would there be enough shared DNA after 4-5 generations to document a relationship that, on the basis of the paper trail, we're next to certain about? As it turns out, there is, but it's not so much that it's obvious. Ann has had her DNA tested on the ancestry DNA platform, as I have. The company then estimates our relationship as 5th to 8th cousins, and rates its confidence in that estimate as moderate. Without the documentation, I wouldn't have paid any attention to that estimate. Note also that their estimate is off by at least a generation or more. That's just the random nature of inheritance. When a father contributes a section of DNA to a child, does the child get their paternal grandfather's or their paternal grandmother's DNA from their dad? It's largely random. However, there's one way that you can increase the odds of finding meaningful DNA relationship estimates, and that's by getting samples one, two, maybe even three generations (!) before you. When we compare the DNA sample that my Aunt Phyllis (my father's sister) submitted – thanks again for that! – her relationship with Ann is estimated as 4th – 6th cousins with high confidence.

The next question, then, is: have any of the descendants of Carl Victor Barthelson (Chicago) had their DNA tested? When I asked Denise, the answer was yes. Both she and her son, Sam, had submitted samples to 23andMe. I'd also tried that testing service, so I logged on and looked at the DNA Relatives part of the website. To my shock, Diane's name showed up on the very first page! 23andMe estimates our relationship as 3rd to 4th cousins, and that we share 1.17% of our DNA. That may not sound like much, but actually it's on the high end of the range that you would predict for 3rd cousins 1x removed. So that pretty much sealed the deal for me: I'm related to both Diane and Ann through my 3rd great grandparents. Now to be even more certain, we should directly compare the DNA of Ann in Sweden (a direct descendant of the Swedish Carl Victor) with that of Denise (a direct descendant of the Carl Victor in Chicago).

A comparison between the DNA samples from Diane Aldrich and me. Each line represents on of the 23 chromosomes, and the dark purple parts highlight DNA that is identical between us

So, I conclude that the Carl Victor (Karlstad) and Carl Victor (Chicago) are one and the same person. This opened up a whole new branch of the family that I hadn't known about. It turns out that in America Carl Victor married Augusta Johnson and together they had 6 children (that I know of): Hugo Victor (1884-1939), Victoria (~1891-1936), Clara Cecilia (1892-1896), a child unnamed in the records (1894-1894), Thekla Elvira (1895-1896), and Albin August (1897-1965). The family did move from Chicago to New York City in the mid 1880s. Oscar, the grandfather of Joyce and Denise, shortened the last name to Bartel, but his siblings kept the name Barthelson. Denise has been so very generous and has shared several pictures of the people I've mentioned in this post:

The first picture is the man himself, Carl Victor Barthelson. Actually, on the back of the photo he's identified as Gustav Victor Barthelson and cited as the father of Albin. On the whole, I'm inclined to accept that this is Carl. There is also another photo taken in Chicago in which the person is only identified as a Barthelson. Since the family left Chicago for New York in the 1880s, it's very tempting to conclude that this also has to be Carl. Do you see a resemblance with the last picture?

Finally, here's a picture dated 1926 of Carl Victor's wife Augusta together with her eldest son, Oscar James Napolien Bartel.

In closing, I want to make it clear that all of the hard work that went into digging up all these facts and putting the pieces together in a coherent story has to be credited to Joyce, Diane, Ann, Jan, and many others. I'm only the reporter. The only thing substantive that I did was to submit a couple of samples for DNA analysis.

West to Zion

My father was in the Air Force, and so during my early years we moved around quite a bit following him from base to base: Georgia, New York, Maine, back to New York, Mississippi, and Illinois until finally returning to upstate New York in 1966. All of these, you'll notice, are in the eastern half of the United States. At the time, though, the TV programs that were most popular were focused on the American West. Without breaking a sweat, I can clearly remember a number of them, shows like Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Wagon Train, The Rifleman, Wanted Dead or Alive, and in a lighter vein, F Troop. These introduced me to a world utterly unlike the one I was familiar with: deserts, mountains, and plains; populated by card sharks, gun slingers, drovers, cattlemen, and, of course, “wild Indians.” I don't think that I ventured west of the Mississippi until I was in my late 20s. There are still parts of the West I've only seen on TV, like the mesas and buttes of the Southwest, Devil's Tower, the Grand Tetons, the sequoias. This was a part of the world that was familiar, yet distant. So it came as some surprise to me that the American West was not quite so distant as I imagined.

I'm going to focus on a young lady named Clara Björling (also spelled Bjurling). Clara was born in 1840 in Kumla, Västmanland, the eldest of eight children of Jan Eric Björling (1817-1906) and Anna Greta Bergström (1817-1897). Her family name is pronounced something like“b-your-ling.” To put her in context, Clara was the 2nd great granddaughter of Lars Ericsson, the oldest ancestor on the Westerlund line that I've been able to document. To be specific, the line is from Lars Ericsson (1698-1757) to Maria Larsdotter (1753-1824) to Margareta Bjurman (1779-1864) to Anna Greta Bergström (1817-1897) to Clara. She is my third cousin 4 times removed.

In 1842 Clara and her family moved from Kumla to Kila, and six years later to Romfartuna. In 1849 they were back in Kumla for about a year, and then they moved south to the city of Västerås. At the age of 18 Clara set off on her own to find work. The church records say that she went to Stockholm, but in fact she moved south: first to Ringarum in the province of Östergötland, then to Dagsberg, and then to Norrköping. It wasn't until 1860 that she finally found her way to Stockholm where she lived in the quarter of Cerberus (a block of buildings). I haven't found a record of what she was doing for work during this time: she's simply listed as piga, that is, an unmarried young woman. A later family history says that while in Stockholm she sang with the Stockholm Royal Opera. On February 26, 1862 there was a life-changing event: on this day she was baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Then, together with Truls Asarsson Halgren, in 1864 she left Sweden to head to Zion, to the new Mormon settlements in the Utah Territory.

Truls was born on 5 Jan 1835 in Lilla Slågarp in Skåne, in the far south of Sweden. He was a blacksmith by trade. He had been baptized into the LDS church on 26 Aug 1858. These were early days for the Mormon church in Scandinavia, and the state Lutheran church did not look kindly on the competition for souls. Truls was ordained a priest and sent to Torshälla where he was arrested and jailed for proselytizing. After release he continued his work in Gotland for 18 months, and then went on to Stockholm.

From Sweden to America

In April of 1864 Clara and Truls decided to emigrate from Sweden to America, heading to the Utah Territory that had just recently been settled by Mormons. The couple travelled from Stockholm to Copenhagen, and then to Liverpool in England. I haven't found specifics of how they got to Liverpool, but one common path was to sail from Stockholm to Copenhagen, then sail to Lübeck (now in Germany) on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea. A short overland trip from Lübeck to the port of Hamburg, from which a ship would take them down the Elbe River and across the North Sea to the port of Grimsby. From there a train ride would take them directly west to Liverpool (home of the Beatles!).

Top: One of the typical paths from Stockholm to Liverpool, with stops in Copenhagen, Lübeck, Hamburg, and Grimsby along the way. Sea routes indicated by arrows in blue, overland routes (probably by train) indicated by black arrows.
Bottom: The port of Hamburg in 1875, 11 years after the trip of Clara Bjurling.

In Liverpool Truls and Clara, still unmarried, boarded the Monarch of the Sea for the voyage across the Atlantic to New York. From this point on, although I don't have any records directly from Clara, a number of other emigrants did have contemporaneous diaries or later wrote of the trip in their memoirs. Some of these memoirs were written by people who were in their early teens during the voyage, so it's not surprising that often the fine details of the trip differ, but I think the spirit of the times comes through loud and clear. I've listed some of these sources at the end of the post.

Top: The Monarch of the Sea
Bottom: Liverpool in 1864

Clara and Truls were not making this trip alone. Far from it: the entire transport all the way to Utah had been arranged in advance by church officials. They were accompanied by 971 other Mormon emigrants aboard the Monarch of the Sea and were led by patriarch John Smith. Each emigrant either paid for the trip up front or, probably more commonly, signed a note promising to repay $60 plus 10% interest to the permanent emigrant fund. The ship, under the command of Captain Kirkaldy, was delayed in port, partly because of the difficulty in taking on acceptable sailors. This problem was caused by the high bounty the United States was paying for sailors to serve in the Navy: this trip was being taken in early 1864 at the height of the Civil War. The ship finally set sail on the 28th of April, 1864.

The Monarch of the Sea was a sailing ship, and so progress depended on the strength and direction of the winds. The wind seems to have been particularly fickle, often very light so that progress was slow, and at other times frighteningly strong. In one case the winds blew so hard that two of the jib beams were broken under the strain, and the sailors struggled to repair them while the ship was underway. The strong winds, of course, led to seasickness among the passengers. One young girl recorded that her father actually lashed her to the ship in the hold because it was rocking so severely. She also recalled an occasion in which her uncle was just sitting down to a meal of peas when the rolling ship sent him and all the food flying, and he was soon on the deck sliding around in the middle of his dinner.

Page from the passenger manifest of The Monarch of the Sea with Truls Halgren and Clara Bjurling listed at the top.

Meals were a problem. Each emigrant received a ration of oatmeal, rice, peas and meat (bacon and corned beef), occasionally some potatoes, coffee and tea. As the voyage progressed the meat, shall we say, "ripened," so much so that one man claimed that when a barrel was opened it could be smelled the length and breadth of the ship. It was so bad that he thought the barrels must be ready to explode from the pressure inside. Even beyond the quantity and quality of the rations, though, a big problem was that the ship was simply not equipped to accommodate cooking for nearly a thousand people. There was a single pot where each family, in turn, could have their food cooked. Often it came out scorched, but no one was in a position to complain.

There were more severe forms of illness on the trip than seasickness. The details are sketchy, particularly since the information comes from the passengers themselves and not doctors. Speculation of the nature of the disease(s) on board included measles and scarlet fever. The impact of the diseases was borne by the children. The reported numbers vary, but somewhere between 42-66 children and one adult man died and were buried at sea. Even assuming the lowest number of deaths, this is heartbreaking. But also during the trip 14 couples were married. One of these was Clara Bjurling and Truls Halgren. The family history says that, because so many people were confined to their bunks because of seasickness, the captain asked Truls and Clara to get married immediately so that they could be moved into the the married quarters and open up space where they had been berthed.

On 3 June, 1864 the weary travelers reached New York after a voyage of 37 days. There they were processed at Castle Garden (the predecessor of the more famous immigrant reception at Ellis Island). This consisted of a medical check and recording of names. I can't imagine this was done too carefully: there were over 900 immigrants on this ship alone, and by the end of the day they were already on their way out of New York on the next stage of their trip.

New York to Nebraska

On the evening of June 3 the company boarded a steamer to take them up the Hudson River to Albany. They arrived there about 4 a.m. the next day and then boarded a train to start west. The train pulled 22 passenger cars and traveled parallel to the Erie Canal. They made it to Rochester at dawn, June 5, and by 1 p.m. had reached Buffalo. There they crossed the Niagara River on a steamer and reboarded a train on the Canadian side of the border. By the next day they had made it to Port Edward, crossed the Detroit River, and then continued across Michigan. The entourage arrived in Chicago at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, the seventh, where they spent the night.

The overland route, by train (in black) and steamship (in blue), from New York to Wyoming, Nebraska.

The next leg of the journey was from Chicago to Quincy, Illinois. After crossing the Mississippi, the train continued across Missouri, first to Palmyra, then to Brooksfield, and finally to St. Joseph on the Missouri River. Most of the trip from Albany to Quincy was not made in passenger cars. Rather, the emigrants were loaded into freight box cars and sat on wooden benches without any back support. After crossing the Mississippi they were again confronted with the prospect of continuing in the freight cars, and at this point they mounted a small rebellion:

"Here our company refused to travel that way and we had to wait till the next day. We had no shelter for the night and no access to our bedding. We went into the woods and the weather being fine, and by the use of shawls and overcoats we made ourselves tolerable comfortable. I think it was the most comfortable night spent for a week. The following day we were furnished regular cars, and we traveled on to St. Joseph. I think now it may be that the railroad company had been furnishing cars for the transporting of soldiers to battlefield and that the freight cars, fitted up with temporary board seats were such as had been for such used transportation, and perhaps on this account was unprepared to furnish cars for an extra train as was required for our company." (Reminiscences of H.N. Hansen)

After a week, the saints reached St. Joe. "St. Joseph was not much of a place at the time when we arrived there. We were dumped off near the Missouri River on the sand. If there was a depot we were not taken to it. Perhaps if there was one, it would have been too small to accommodate our crowd. Here we boarded a steamer which slowly paddled us up the Missouri River to a place called Wyoming, about seven miles above Nebraska City where we arrived about the middle of June. This was the place selected from which we were to begin our tedious journey across the plains." (Hansen)

Walking from Nebraska to Utah

The last, long leg of the trip was made on foot. This was organized by the church. Wagons pulled by teams of oxen had been sent out from Utah in the spring to meet the emigrants and lead them back to Salt Lake. The expedition in which Truls and Clara travelled was led by Captain Isaac A. Canfield (1818-1891). After six weeks roughing it along the Missouri, the expedition started off on 27 July 1864. It consisted of about 218 people, 30 teamsters, and about 50 wagons. The expedition had two purposes: to bring the emigrants to Utah, but also to pick up goods for merchants and cooperatives in Salt Lake City. In fact, each emigrant was allowed only 50 pounds of goods including bedding.

Isaac Augustus Canfield, company captain.

One of the other impacts of the ongoing Civil War, beyond the availability of passenger cars for the train, was that many of the Army units were called back from the West to take part in the hostilities back east. A little more context might be helpful here. The construction of the transcontinental railroad had just begun, but would not be completed for another 5 years. However, telegraph lines had been strung from the Atlantic to the Pacific, so as the expedition proceeded they were able to send news of their progress ahead to Salt Lake City. And here's a little reminder from those Social Studies classes you may have dozed through back in the day: in 1862 the Homestead Act was signed into law. This allowed any American to claim up to 160 free acres of federal land. This impacts our travellers because these federal lands were not empty: no, they were the homelands of numerous Indian (Native American) tribes. Clara, Truls and the rest of the expedition were to travel through territory occupied by the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux tribes. The influx of homesteaders and the departure of soldiers were two elements that opened the door to armed conflicts.

There are two records of their progress from emigrants, and this combined with newspaper reports of the expedition's progress make it possible to track Clara and Truls in their journey from Nebraska to Utah. Initially the company followed the North Branch of the Platte River to its confluence with the Sweetwater River. Along the way they crossed the rivers several times. These rivers are wide but very shallow, only reaching up to the axles of the wagons. Early after they began, they ran right into evidence of the Indian resistance. Here is the account of Hansen:

Cheyenne Dog Soldier

"One day we passed a house right by the road side, it was burning slowly, and about two or three rods from the house laid a man dead presumably the owner of the place having being killed by the Indians that same day, perhaps not an hour before we arrived on the scene. I do not know whether anyone examined to see if he was shot or where, or how he was killed but we saw that he was dead. I, like boys would be likely to do ran with the rest to see the sights.

The ground was dusty where the corpse lay, and it was so besoiled that it was difficult at first glance to tell whether it was a white man or an Indian, but of course by a little closer examination it was seen to be the body of a white man and we took it for granted that it had been the owner of the house which now was burning. The Indians had taken out of the house what they wanted and then fired it. They had emptied the feather beds and the contents were flying round by the breeze. They evidently thought they had no use for feathers, their custom not demanding so soft a bed. Whether the rest of the family was murdered and laying somewhere in the weeds or the burning house, or if any of them had been carried away by the Indians we did not learn, and I do not know if any gave the matter serious thoughts at that time."

Overland trail (in yellow) from Wyoming, Nebraska to Salk Lake City, Utah. The route follows the North Branch of the Platte River through Nebraska, the Sweetwater River in the Dakota Territory (present-day Wyoming), and through the South Pass to Salt Lake.

The accounts of Rev. Hansen and others record numerous deaths along the way, likely a combination of sickness and fatigue. Fortunately, the trek started early enough that they were not trapped by snows in the mountains as had some earlier expeditions to Utah. There were periods when water and firewood were difficult to find, and as they traveled west the forage for the oxen gradually dried out. Wagon wheels broke down, wagons themselves were overturned, the oxen stampeded on one occasion with one breaking a leg and two others had their horns broken off. Despite these setbacks, the company made good progress and finally arrived in Salt Lake City on 4 Oct 1864.

Truls and Clara Halgren settled about 40 miles north of Salt Lake City in Ogden, Utah. They had eight children: Asser Theodore (1865-1875), Ellen Wilhelmina (1866-1923), Anna Magdelena (1868-1944), Alma (1870-1871), Clara Sophie (1873-1874), Olivia Victoria (1875-1878), Joseph (1877-1951), and Otelia (1879-1944). The portrait of the family below shows Clara with baby Joseph on her lap, so this was taken sometime around 1878-1879 depending on how old you think Joseph is and whether Clara was already pregnant with Otelia. Truls was twice called upon by the church to missionary work, once in Sweden and once in Finland. His biography and portrait are included in the book Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah, published in 1913. Truls passed away in 1902, and Clara in 1910. They are both buried in Ogden.

The Halgren family, probably 1878-1879. From left to right: Truls Halgren, Ellen Wilhelmina, Olivia Victoria (sitting), Anna Magdalena, Clara (Bjurling) Halgren, Joseph.

A later photograph of Clara (on the right). The young girl on the left is not confidently identified; perhaps it's Anna(?).

As far as I'm currently aware, Clara was the first descendant of Lars Ericsson to emigrate to the United States. The wealth of records maintained and made available by both the church and Clara's descendants made it possible for me to much better understand and, to a limited extent, relive her experiences traveling across the world in the 1860s. I hope that I've been able to give you a taste of it as well. I came away from this story with a great deal more appreciation and admiration for their tenacity and ability to withstand the hardships that these people suffered in order to restart their lives in the American West.

Some source materials

Note: I have not directly consulted the hard copies of these journals and manuscripts, only that which is available online. Therefore the citation details may not be entirely accurate.

• Mormon Migration.
• Do you remember? The lives of Joseph Halgren and Sara Alice Aldous As remembered by their children.
• Finlinson, G. 1974. George Finlinson family, 1835-1974, comp. by Angie F. Lyman. Privately printed.
• Hansen, H. N. 1971. An account of a Mormon family's conversion to the religion of the Latter Day Saints and of their trip from Denmark to Utah. Annals of Iowa, summer 1971: 722-28, and fall 1971: 765-67.
• Sprague, M. O. Reminiscences. Utah Pioneer Biographies 27: 51-52.