My great-grandparents, like practically everybody else’s in that town, had come to Minnesota as part of a mass emigration from Norway that began in about 1880. And like everybody else in my hometown, this is pretty much all that I knew about my ancestors. I suspected that they hadn’t relocated to the coldest place on Earth and then taken up disemboweling pigs because things were going well in Europe, but it had never occurred to me to ask for the story.
