Family History Update

I recently attended the Midwest Scrapbook Association convention in St. Paul. One of the workshops I took was on making heritage pages since I really want to put together a heritage scrapbook to share with my family. This is a page I made using the wedding photo of my grandparents Lillian and Sam Ege. They were married on February 20, 1925. According to a handwritten book my Grandmother gave me, it wasn't a big wedding. They went to Moorhead, MN and only their 2 attendants were present. She wore a "beautiful blue dress" and "We has very little money so spent two days in Fargo. We ate at nice eating places, went to movies, drove around and saw interesting places which to us was very special. We hadn't been to Fargo before so to us it was exciting."

I have been doing a lot of family research the past 9 months. Yesterday I met with a distant cousin for the first time. His grandfather and my great-grandfather were brothers. My great-grandfather, Hans Ege, immigrated to the US in 1893. Reinert, whom I met with yesterday, came to the US when he was 11 years old; he's now 87. His father, Sam, had immigrated a few years earlier. Reinert was aware that there was a relative who was a "farmer in North Dakota" but he'd never met him; he'd only met Gustav, the brother who had settled in Duluth. He wasn't even aware that Hans had another brother, Tonnes, who settled in western North Dakota or a sister, Martina, who married and eventually settled in the Monterey, CA, area. He did have lots of wonderful photographs of family members in Norway, including one of the family patriarch, Sem, on the family farm in 1907. There were several photos he had gotten from cousins in Norway and he asked me if I could identify any of them. By process of elimination, I think we figured out that one of them was Tonnes Ege who none of us had ever seen. Reinert is still in touch with cousins in Norway and will be contacting them for more information. I am hoping that I can get some names and addresses of some of these cousins in Norway to further my research.

At the same time, I've been contacted by another distanct cousin in Wisconsin who is related through my Irish great-grandparents. My great-grandfather and her grand-mother were brother and sister. I knew very little about this side of my family since my parents divorced when I was small. I never knew many on my father's side. In fact, until starting this research I never knew I was 25% Irish or that my great-grandmother, Elizabeth Hogan Delaney, was born and raised about 10 miles from where I presently live.