2. 2007 American Family

24

Certificate for Anna

Partial Passenger list

Passenger ship Teutonic

Map of SE Sweden - Veddige hometown

Volborg, Deanna, Carl, Ellen, Ruth and Selma 1943 - Surviving children of Anna Peterson

1941, left to right Allen Families: Betty, Harry, Virginia holding James, Bill, Ruth, Bonnie, Frank, Sonny, Isabel, Wanda and Roger

1937 - Harry, Wanda, Sonny, Bonnie, Betty and Roger

Harry and Ruth Allen’s first home - picture1937 est

Afterwards It’s predominately when young, that we have the chance to see with clarity, hopefully, through the clouds of personal bias, to people and relationships that last a lifetime. I’ve made sacrifices for the facts of our history, but nothing comes closer to the truth than subjective memory, as literature. All the history of legal records, birth and death dates, can not take the place of my memories. I’ve given little in this story to my mother’s sisters; my aunts, Selma and Ellen. Nothing in my memory is stronger than those times when they brought me out of my world into a new larger one, with special times just for me, hard to get in a large family. Trips to Spokane for movies, soda fountains and the exploration and wonder of downtown structures and bus rides around the city. Nothing in this world, that exists now, can retell and communicate, the voice of my father, his brother and sisters, their tone and speech, that carried the past of America on their words, nor of my Grandfather Peterson and his brother Ole. Their language resonated to the roots of American, across the 19th century and carried along the inflection, of the 18th and 17th century, from whence they came. Few, have any remembrance of them now, but it is their memory, more than anything else, that is the catalyst for this story. James Allen