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Sparkle (1)
I traveled recently to a conference in Kansas. Wichita, to be exact. There are some reasons why I don't like traveling, but one of the reasons I do like traveling is that it gives me several hours of uninterrupted time to read. I absolutely love to read, and don't often get that time where I can spend hours on end with a book. But with airport wait-time and all day plane rides, I definitely get enough time to settle in with a good book.
For the past year or so I've been bringing along my Kindle, simply because it's so convenient. But I always get reprimanded during take-offs and landing, because it's an electronic device. So I have to put my Kindle away during those times. This time around, I completely forgot to bring other reading material with me. On the flight out to Kansas, I just sat there reading the Sky Mall magazine. As I flipped through page after page of expensive gadgets and unnecessary toys, I decided that I would make sure to get something else to read for the trip back.
So at the end of the week, I wandered into the small news/gift shop store in the Wichita airport and browsed through the latest books and magazines. I really have very little interest in the latest Angelina Jolie story or the Sandra Bullock break-up scandal, so tabloids were out. I didn't really want to purchase a novel, because they're cheaper to get on Amazon for my Kindle. But then towards the back of the store, something caught my eye: a cookbook. Upon looking closer, I discovered that the cookbook was one book in a four-part series, which was a historical biography of a pioneer woman in Kansas who settled with her husband (and infant daughter) in the Salina area. I was intrigued.
The books are called "The Butter in the Well" series, which retells the story of a family through the journal entries of the matriarch. Her name is Maja Kajsa Svensson, and she along with her husband, Carl, and her 3-month old daughter left Sweden in 1867 for America. After a brief stop in Illinois, they made their way across the country to Kansas. I bought the first two books in the series, both edited by Linda K. Hubalek. The first one is called very simply,
I usually tend to gravitate towards stories of Michigan history and historical figures, but I was immediately drawn to these books for two reasons: 1) Because I love diaries, and think that they are so very cool. I love nothing more than reading the first-hand thoughts, feelings and stories of times long ago. And 2) I love reading about that particular time period in Kansas, because it's around the same time period that Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family lived there. In fact, the same grasshopper plague that stunned the Ingalls family was documented here in the first book. (That really must've been something. Could you imagine a large, dark storm cloud of grasshoppers coming down out of the sky and eating everything in sight -- every grass blade, every vegetable, every plant -- even your clothes? Ugh. Gross. That had to be a plague from God for some reason. Not sure why, but it's just too bizarre to be anything otherwise.)
Anyway, the first book is written by Maja. Later in the book, she becomes naturalized and the U.S. Government gives her a new name of Mary C. Swanson. Talk about a genealogy nightmare! Not only that, but she describes the census taking of both 1870 and 1890. The enumerator in 1870 put her husband (Carl) down as "Charles" and her name down as "Anna" -- even though she tried to tell him that wasn't her name. The man also listed their last name as Swenson, not Svensson. He got Carl's age wrong, too. Is it any wonder that we genealogists bang our head against that "brick wall," wondering how in the heck our ancestors mysteriously "appeared?"
I loved the first book, even though the details were sketchy and the writing simple. Her first few entries definitely made me appreciate my home. All this time I've found reasons to
