A Young Lady from Ainsworth

Today would have been Norma Lindborg Berg's 101st birthday.

Here is a studio portrait showing her around the age of 19.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Norma Lindborg Berg.

She had done her hair carefully and put on her best dress, and traveled up to Gary to sit for this photo; I wonder if it was intended to mark some special occasion … perhaps her going off to college, or coming home for a visit from college?

Norma told me that her parents did not consult her about her career plans. They simply informed her, after her graduation from high school in 1934, that she would be attending Indiana State University at Terre Haute and would become a teacher. Norma was not thrilled about that — she had dreams of pursuing a musical career — but she wasn't ready to disobey her parents. They had scraped together the money to send her off, and off she went.

Unidentified Group #2

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I can guess the same things about this group as I did about the one we've already seen — that it's a church group and probably Swedish.

This group likewise was photographed by August Haase.



This time the photo was taken indoors, in a photo studio, to judge by the painted backdrop.

To me the clergyman in the front row looks a bit like Pastor Moberg of the glass-plate negatives, but then again maybe it's just the eyeglasses.


UPDATE: Paula Isolampi, who is an officer and director of the Hobart Historical Society as well as a historian for Augustana Lutheran Church, points out to me that the clergyman in this photo is the Rev. J.A. Berg (and has a photo to back that ID up). From the church's 100th anniversary booklet, printed in 1962: "In 1905, Hobart and Miller became a joint parish, the Rev. J.A. Berg, pastor." The 75th anniversary booklet printed in 1937 tells us that the Rev. Berg served only a year.

Norma Lindborg Berg, 1916-2015

(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of Norma Lindborg Berg.

The songbird of Ainsworth has flown.

Or maybe that is not a good metaphor — it's true that Norma loved to sing, and retained her sweet soprano even into her nineties; but "songbird" suggests something flighty and elusive, and that wasn't Norma. She was reliable. She was a worker.

Norma Lindborg Berg was one of the first people I talked to when I started my historical research. She was 93 when I met her. I was a stranger asking for her help; she received me graciously, and spent many hours talking with me about her family, her neighbors, and her long life in Ainsworth. In the process, we became friends.

I admired her. She was intelligent and strong-willed, but with a sense of humor; she was kind, conscientious, and tactful, and cheerful in spite of the difficulties of old age and the troubles she had gone through in her life.

But what I think of most when I think of her is this: sometimes, when we went outdoors, whether to work in the yard or to go grocery shopping, she would stop and look up at the sky — and that cost her some effort, as her spine was bent from osteoporosis, and her eyesight was dimming — she would look up and say, in a voice full of wonder, "What beautiful clouds!" Later, lying in her bed at a nursing home, she would gaze out the window, up to the blue sky and those beautiful clouds. At the age of 93, 95, 97, she was still amazed by the everyday beauty of the world — that really struck me, and stays with me.

Now the songbird has flown, or the worker has left the vineyard, but always, when I look up to the sky and think how beautiful the clouds are, I will remember Norma.

Rose and Charlie

Here is Rose and her son, Charles … the second great trouble of her life.


(Click on image to enlarge)
Image courtesy of the Hobart Historical Society and Tom Rainford.

According to the 1900 Census and the WWI Draft Cards, Charlie was born in September 1882, a couple of months before Rose's 20th birthday. Here he looks perhaps as much as a year old, so the photo probably dates to 1883.

Rose's expression strikes me as determined, even defiant, and small wonder: she was facing down convention as a single mother. Around the age of 19, Rose had become romantically involved with a man (name unknown), and she got pregnant. The usual solution to that problem in those days was a quick marriage to the father of the child. But marriage wasn't possible in this case; the father was already married. And with her own father a widower, Rose could not even try to preserve her respectability, as Jennie Ols may have, by letting people believe the child was her new sibling.

Of all the other alternatives, she chose the least unpleasant. She stayed in her home, gave birth, and set about raising her son, without pretense. Her father and her sister stood by her, apparently, but I can only imagine the gossip that went on behind her back — maybe even name-calling to her face — and some degree of ostracism felt by all the Hendrickses. From what I've heard of Rose, she was headstrong, decisive, lean and energetic, and could swear like a sailor; whether those qualities predated her trouble, I don't know. But even with a strong personality, a young woman could still feel, and suffer from, the judgment of others, and then there were her father and sister to consider, too. The social disapproval in Plymouth may have been what drove Rose and her family to leave.

After a blank of 20 years, we find Rose in Hobart in 1900, now the wife of William Ezra Gilpin. They tell the census-taker that they were married circa 1890; I can find no official record of the marriage. Ezra, born and raised on a farm in Adams County, Indiana, had by 1880 joined his sister, Nancy, and her husband, Dr. Charles Rainier, in Center Township, Marshall County — where Rose was living at that time, so they might have married there.

The little Gilpin household in Hobart includes Charlie, now 17 and working as a day laborer, and described to the census-taker simply as Ezra's son. They had no other children.

Living nearby, we find Rose's sister Ida, who had married Edward Berg circa 1895, and their father, Jacob Hendricks, still working as a carpenter at 65 years of age. The Bergs had no children.

Their living situation sounds pleasant and cozy. I'd like to think this was a happy ending to a difficult beginning.