Holger and Cecilia Peterson

They came to this country in 1891 as part of an L.D.S. immigration project. I do not know how they came or where they landed. Their two daughters Adele and Carolina came with them. My mother showed me the house in Grantsville where they lived and where she grew up. Some time in the 1920s they moved to the house on Main Street where my sister Irene lived. They had a son who I think was named Randolf who died before they came to this country. Perhaps if we look into the the records of Ramdala we can find his birth and/or death record.

They had saved a little money; my mother once told me it was about $1000, which was in the Grantsville Deseret bank, and in 1929, when the Depression started, they lost it all. I do not know whether they eventually recovered any of it.

In about 1930, when my parents were rebuilding their house, I lived with my grandparents for at least part of the winter. Their house was across the street from the Grantsville Junior High school, and I could go to their house for lunch, so I ate three meals a day with them. They had some chickens, and a truck garden, and I think they grew or raised nearly all of their food. The garden was about 100 ft by 50 ft. (It was in the area where my parent's house was reerected in 1941 after it was moved there from its site on Cooley's Lane), and it contained potatoes and many of the other common garden vegetables. About half of it was a raspberry patch from which they sold the berries by the peck. Breakfast consisted of eggs, lunch was mashed potatoes with white gravy and dinner was the same plus any other vegetable they could grow and store for the winter.

I don't remember any animals besides the chickens, but they had a small barn and about 2 acres of alfalfa, so they may have had cow earlier.

Shortly thereafter, they moved in with us [their son-in-law Paul Edward Wrathall and family]. Holger was about 90 at the time and Cecilia about 80. He never learned English, but she could speak it brokenly. They always conversed with my mother [Anna Carolina Peterson] in Swedish. Holger didn't smoke or drink, but he kept a box of snuff beside his bed.

At some point in the 1920s they became disenchanted with the L.D.S. church, and became affiliated with what I think was the 7th Day Adventist church..

Holger was a tall slender man with a large mustache, handy with all sorts of tools, and very good at getting plants to grow. He always seemed rather quiet and reserved. but this may have been because he couldn't speak English. He wore grey work-clothes.

Cecilia, on the other hand, was short, fat, jolly and loved to visit and gossip. She wove throw rugs from discarded scraps of cloth, using a loom Holger had built from scratch. These rugs were about 3 feet wide and up to 10 feet long, and she sold them to help with their finances. She was still able to thread a needle at 96.

Aunt Della, my mother's older sister, grew up in Granstville, married a man named Freeman Durfee, and moved with him to Richfield, Idaho in about 1910. This was supposed to be a rich agricultural area, but somehow they never became prosperous in the same way their Grantsville relatives did. Freeman died in the late 1940s and Della sold their house, moved back to Grantsville, and lived with my parents. She died a few years later of complications associated with Parkinson's disease. She was always a cheerful friendly woman, and loved to bake cakes. I ate more cakes in 1946 than I had in my whole life.

---