Writing Women Back Into History – Alma Drake

L-R, Evelyn Scott, Shari Orser, Marlys Orser, Alma Drake

Since March is Writing Women Back Into History month, I thought I’d tell a little story about searching for the full story of my maternal great-grandmother, who died bearing the name “Alma Drake.” She died when I was about 3, so I don’t remember her. My oldest sister, Shari, has a photo, one that appeared in the Pierce County Tribune, the newspaper in Rugby, home to my maternal grandparents, and the Westhope Standard, the newspaper in Westhope, ND, that was founded by my great-grandfather, A.J. Drake, later continued by my great-uncle, Clifford Drake. The photo shows my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, and Shari. Shari was born in 1951 (sorry, honey, but hey, nobody you know will read this!) and my sister Nancy was born in 1953; I’m not sure when this photo was taken, but Shari is sitting up nicely and has long blonde hair in ringlets, my mother’s favorite style for her golden daughter. And judging by early photos of my mother, it was her mother’s favorite style for her, too. Four generations in one photo — either Nancy wasn’t born yet, but it looks like Shari is older than two — or she didn’t want to sit still for a photo. I don’t know. It’s quite the photo, though.

I’ve known for as long as I can remember that Alma Drake came from Norway, and that she homesteaded by herself, and that she kept her homestead for a while after she married A.J. (who was apparently much older than she — I’ll get to that), and that my grandmother Evelyn, her first child, was born in the soddy with only “the Norwegian hired girl” to help with the birth. Both my mother and her only sister, my aunt Pat, told me that Alma wouldn’t speak about her life prior to coming to North Dakota; according to her, that was when her life truly began.

About a year and a half ago my sister Nancy and I started looking into geneaology, trying to follow the female lines back. Nancy brought me Alma’s obituary. It said that Alma Brown Drake was born in “Vickersund” in Norway, in May of 1876; that her mother died when she was a baby and her father remarried. The family came to the US in 1884, and settled in the Superior, WI, area. When Alma was 17 or 18, she and a brother moved to Bottineau, ND, which is in the same county as Westhope. It’s still not clear to me if Alma worked as a waitress in a cafe in Bottineau, or if she and her brother owned a cafe there. I have yet to find a city directory, or anyone who can tell me about Bottineau, ND, in the 1890s. I do have, from my grandmother Evelyn Scott, Alma’s brother’s Psalm book. It’s in Norwegian, and was printed in Norway. In gold on the front of it is printed “E. Brunes.” Inside the front cover, in pencil, is “E. Brown, West Superior, Wisc.” Emil? Elling? We’re not sure. It may be that they homesteaded side by side. Alma became a US citizen in 1901, and in that same record, from Bottineau County, were two other people with the last name “Brown.”

My sister Shari said we’d never be able to trace anything in Norway, because obviously “Brown” was a “made-up” name the family took when they arrived in the US. “Brunes” on the cover of the Psalm book says otherwise. The Norwegian government has a wonderful website. I found Vikersund (famous for some type of extreme skiing, as well as a small train museum) and learned that it is in the parish of Modum. That was a critical discovery because the parish records are available on-line, going back into the 1870s and further back in some places. The on-line baptism records for Modum parish are photocopied from the original book, and the spikey Norwegian letters are very hard to read, but I found that Alma Kristina Ellingsdotter, born in the 1876, and baptized in September of that year. Her parents, Elling Ellingson and his wife Karin are in the record, as are the names of her sponsors. The Ellingson home is listed as Brunes Farm.

It was at about that time that Norwegians began to give up the tradition of using the father’s name as the last name of the children (Ellingson, Ellingsdottir, etc.), and while some chose to keep one family name, like Ellingson (or Anderson, Pederson, Olson, etc. etc. — the ND phone books are full of them!), others chose to use the name of the place they lived, like Brunes Farm.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a death record for Karin, nor a marriage record for Elling and his next wife, or anything about the parents of either of them. We do have a picture of a young Alma and a rather unattractive older woman, and on the back is “Alma and her stepmother.” I don’t know if she was a wicked stepmother or not, but it does seem that Alma was in a hurry to get away from her family and start a life of her own.

She married A.J. Drake around 1898 or 1899, and my grandmother was born in 1900. A.J. had learned the printing trade in Minnesota, where he worked with his father. Either his mother or his grandmother (sorry, can’t find the notes in my heaps of paper…) was named Amy Collins, and some of our Drake cousins have traced her ancestry back to a colonist from England who arrived in North America (Massachusetts, I believe) in the 1600s. A. J. was older than Alma; he died of an apparent heart attack while visiting one of their children in Roundup, MT, in 1932. Alma never remarried. She lived with my grandparents, Evelyn and Bud Scott, for several years, including part of my mother’s childhood, and then moved into a nursing home in Westhope, where she died in her 90s.

So, now I know where she came from, and I would love to visit Vikersund some day and look at their records, see if Brunes Farm still exists, and if I have distant cousins there (I have Orser-side cousins in a different part of Norway, but that’s another story). I want to know more about her mother, and how she died — possibly complications from childbirth? Or was it some other illness? I don’t know. I also want to know about the restaurant in Bottineau, and who Alma’s brother was — did he marry? When did he die? Did my mother know him (she passed away in 1993, so I may never know). I might be able to research some of that after I finish the Spooky South Dakota manuscript.

But at least I know where Alma “Brown” came from, and who her parents were. I’m rewriting the family tree, one leaf at a time. (Giving credit where it’s due, much of this was done by my sister Nancy, although I was the first to find the baptism record!)