Remembering Grandma Wallin

My paternal grandmother was Sara Elizabeth Peterson Wallin, whose father, Carl Peterson, I will write about in another post.  It was Grandma Wallin who gave me my love of genealogy (and some of my Swedish genes).

Grandma was born in Nebraska on November 8, 1894 and died nearly 100 years later in Aurora, Illinois, in 1986.  She grew up at a time when girls, especially daughters of immigrants on the Nebraska prairie, didn’t think about much except getting married and having a family.  But Grandma was smarter than most, and more ambitious than most.  She managed, after graduating eighth grade, to attend a nearby co-ed ‘college’ (as the word was used then), Luther College, and then she get a job at a local bank called the Hordville Bank.  She did well there—well enough that when the owner/president of the bank needed to be out of town, Sara ran the bank.  But when WWI ended and her sweetheart came home from France, she gladly gave that up and settled down.  She and Sture Nels Wallin were married in 1920 after a seven-year-long courtship.  They settled down on a farm in Hordville, Nebraska; then Aurora, Nebraska; then after one too many summer draughts, they came to Illinois.

When I knew her, half a century later, she and Grandpa Wallin lived on a piece of land along Route 31 in Oswego, Illinois.  She was quite interested in genealogy, and it rubbed off on me.  I spent a few happy afternoons in my childhood walking around an old local cemetery with her, reading each gravestone and imagining the lives of those they described.  I still remember her handwritten charts showing her Peterson ancestry and Grandpa’s Wallin ancestry.  I ended up with that information in later years, and it became the basis of a family tree that now has nearly 10,000 people on it. 

But what I remember most about Grandma Wallin was her insistence that all her grandchildren, girls included, should try to get an education.  (That, and the lutefisk I avoided like the plague every Christmastime.)

Sara Elizabeth Peterson, otherwise known as my Grandma Wallin...  You are gone but not forgotten!