My Norwegian Roots

This post is basically for my mom.  She was very close with her grandma Rangna, her father Rangvald Carlsen was the first in his family to emigrate to America to join the saints in the Salt Lake Valley.  I've heard many stories about my Grandma Rangna, my Grandpa Denzel's mother.  She died a year before I was born so I never knew her.  She was born in Midvale and when she fell in love with a small town boy named Paul Clark she married him and moved to the country.  My grandpa tells me that she had a hard time adjusting to small town life and never really stopped missing the city.  So in that I can relate, except it is reversed for me. 

It occurred to me that there would be some gravestones nearby I could visit for my great-great grandparents Annie and Rangvald Carlsen.  So I got online and looked up their burial plots.  They were in Murray City Cemetery.  A lady from the Sexton's office walked me to their gravestones.  I had cut some berries from a bush that grows next to the driveway because I figured flowers wouldn't last long in the cold. 

I've always felt connected to my ancestors.  I've often contemplated what it would be like to leave a place that had always been your home and cross an ocean to get to a land that you had so much faith in.  I've looked up pictures of the land in Norway where the Carlsens emigrated from and it is beautiful, green and lush.  I can't imagine how different they found the high desert of Utah.  Although I haven't ever met these people in person I'm so grateful to them.  I'm grateful that they sacrificed so much so that I could be born in a free land with all the opportunities to make my life what I wish it to be. 

Here's the pictures of their graves that I took for mom to see.  Maybe one of these days we can visit them together. 

 Sixty-seven at his death.  Too young.

 James M. Carlsen 1905 - 1908

 Roy H. Carlsen 1907 - 1908

 Wilhelmine A. Carlsen 1860 - 1884 (maybe this was Rangvald's first wife?)

 Carl W. Carlsen 1883 - 1884 (A baby with Rangvald's first wife?)

Grandpa Rangvald's marker is in between these trees and Grandma Annie's is on the right in this picture.