stories
hear stories that come from all over the world
The Union Worker
by Mae Munkeby – published Sep 28, 2021
My family on my dad’s side immigrated from Norway in the early 1900s. My grandpa was adopted into the Munkeby family when he was a baby. The Munkeby name has very old roots in Norway, dating back to the 1100s when Munkeby Abbey was one of the northern most monasteries in the word. You can still go today to visit the ruins, see the new monastery, and some of my further relatives still live there.
Elling Munkeby came to the USA from his farm in Trondheim, Norway because he had a hard relationship with his father and went straight to Duluth, MN in 1902 when he was only 19. When his father fell sick, he went back to Norway, only to immigrate back to the USA for good in 1913.
He had a hard time finding work in the beginning and was a house painter for many years, which caused him to go blind for 2 years due to the chemicals that were used in the paint. This was when he began his activism for the worker unions in Duluth, which he would do for the rest of his career. He eventually became president of the Central Labor Body of Duluth and was in charge of the Hawthorn Project, which was trying to gain rights for the workers and making their needs heard.
angle inlet
by Meaghan Carlson – published Sep 30, 2021
Fritz Carlson was 17 years old when he left his family and home in Norway to find new prospects in the new land, the United States of America. The year was 1912 the dawning of the new century and beginning of the modern age. Using all the money he had Fritz decided to leave his family whom he often quarreled with and take his chances as a homesteader in the new world. He was to cross the vast ocean to America on the Titanic! Fortunately he missed his first ship to England and so was forced to take a different boat.
Fritz knew no one in this new country and barely spoke any English so he did what many immigrants did in his time, he went where he would be most comfortable. Where he would find people like him and land like his home. That place for him was Minnesota. Fritz traveled North first to the Iron range, Where he lived and worked with Gundafor a few years. There he heard of a place local Minnesotans called “the sea of a thousand islands, America’s last frontier!”
This was the place of his dreams, a quiet private place he could homestead and raise his family. It was here he first saw Lake of the woods. The future home of his family for generations to come.
