Perfect English? That’s the way you heard it spoken when you were growing up. For those of us lucky enough to live here in the center of the universe, that pretty much means the Scandihoovian-tinged or Deutsch-inflected accents of Minnesota and North Dakota. Thus the message was plenty clear last week when the owner of Orange Julius, a West Acres …
This is my Norwegian immigrant grandmother, Anna Vorland (above), photographed by my father on the family farm northeast of Harvey, N.D., in the late 1940s. She’s been on my mind lately. A few years ago at New York’s Ellis Island, Dorette Kerian and I saw the official record of Anna’s entry into the U.S. with her new husband, Hans. He …
I took the above photo in 2011 of the land that constituted the first of two North Dakota homesteads owned by my Norwegian grandfather, Hans Vorland, 1865-1930. It’s located in Grand Forks County outside the Red River Valley, east of Aneta. I had been to the courthouse earlier in the day to see the deed and determine the exact location. …