(From the project description. See MPR's Minnesota 150 collection page)
Share your history with us here on Gather! We may point to your self-produced story in our MN150 collection, which is a great way to see the state's history intersect with our personal one. Know I'm especially interested in your video storytelling, whether you simply record a face-to-face interview with your family historian or if you try your hand at a fully-fledged mini-documentary.
Please answer these questions in your story:
- When did you or your ancestors arrive in Minnesota?
- Why did you or your family come to Minnesota? Examples: Did land or employment bring you to the state? Was education or proximity to friends a factor?
- Where (geographically) did you come from and how did you or your ancestors arrive? By plane, car, train, horse, boat, bus? Maybe even on foot?
- If you didn't stay in Minnesota, where did you go?
Participate now!
Join our Minnesota Arrival group on Gather.com. Create and upload a video or publish your own article on how you arrived in Minnesota, and let's share a little history.
________________
Julia Schrenkler
Interactive Producer
Minnesota Public Radio
American Public Media
More resources:
- Get tips on how to record and capture your family history
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Comments: 18
When I got here I saw "help wanted" signs in windows all over the place and I just wept with joy.
I love this city. I live just between uptown and downtown and can walk anywhere I want to shop, if the weather is nice. Otherwise the bus is so handy.
I hated St Louis. It was also way too sprawled out.
Know I realize that in some cases it might be family myth instead of family history, but share what you know!
None of them had much money (most were farmers in the old country), but my dad's grandfather became a physician, and his son (my grandpa) was a surgeon (in Fergus Falls, MN). My grandma (who married the surgeon) was a nurse in WWI. She was ahead of her time and rather independent!
Yeah, my family history is right out of Lake Wobegon, isn't it?
Can't wait to see what Peter, Diana, and Marianne have cooking up on this.
MN= great town to *raise* a family. But the singles scene?..not the best from my experience.
If I ever do, I'd probably end up back here anyway :P
I had no intention when I arrived, an economic refugee from New England, to fritter away a decade plus in the land of 10,000 lakes. My plan was a simple "in & out" guerilla operation. Get some work experience, some city savvy and back to the land with more trees than people and more people than living wage jobs.
Elapse ten years and I'm still squinting across the prairie trying to glimpse the Atlantic.
It started way back with the book the "Places Rated Almanac", the essentials crammed into my '92 Toyota Corolla, and nothing waiting for me in Minneapolis. I had chosen it because it seemed like a good starting point for a rural girl– the training bra of big cities, if you will.
My parents, however, were undone for reasons I couldn't comprehend. Didn't they understand this move was temporary? Perhaps they saw what was coming as soon after I was seduced.
First, by a region of the country so damn friendly that people with no cause whatsoever will talk to you in the grocery store. And then by the State itself, inviting newcomers to join right in and vote - just have that person you met in produce vouch for you.
My home state of Maine doesn't readily take to transplants. One can even be native-born, but if you don't go back 4 generations you're still "from away." The logic goes "if your cat had kittens in the oven, would you call them biscuits?" This can make "Minnesota Nice" an entirely heady experience, especially for a little bread product like me.
But after more than a few seasons and several new lines on my resume, I thought I was done with the middle of the continent when - enter stage left: the unexpected Norwegian. Married at Minneapolis City Hall, I turned in my French surname, (battered from Midwestern attempts at Franco-phonics) for a lifetime of spelling "s-E-n." It was a good trade.
So with a new identity and now two new humans to tend, I'm not the carefree gal who squeezed shut her St. Paul Classic door for a beach junket. With a baby poised on the hip, the older in the umbrella stroller and enough carry-on luggage to daunt a sturdy Sherpa, the obscure flight to Portland -the other Portland- is more Shackleton expedition then its former "hop, skip & a jump." $300 plane tickets are now a multiple of four, add in a rental car and suddenly I'm looking at a metro-area house payment.
We go anyway. I run my family through the gauntlet of relatives, breathe the salty air, marvel in the pines and wonder could I move back? But at the end of the visit, the birthplace of the Pillsbury Doughboy calls back all her wandering biscuits. And we return home to Minnesota.
I like Iowa very much but I like Minnesota even more (except for the University football team). I like the bicycle paths around the lakes in Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I like the Mill City City Museum and Fort Snelling.
I like the Minnesota Historical Society and the Light Rail. I like the Twins and the Vikings. I like the Timberwolves and the Wild. I like the Ordway, The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Minnesota Orchestra.
I like the central Minnesota lakes and the timber forests. I like the corn fields and the soybeans. I like the Minnesota River Valley.
I like that Minnesotans are interested in history and culture, in politics and in people. I like the weather here.
I wouldn't want to live in any other place than Minnesota.
Just posted Part I for "Share your history: How did you arrive in Minnesota?" at:
http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977288405.
Hope you enjoy it! Still working on Part II!
We moved to the Twin Cities where my wife got an MBA at Carlson and opened her own accounting firm. I had 7 years of unemployment to discover that social science PhDs were in no demand. But we liked the Cities and (except for my issues with snow) the climate. It was a wonderful state to raise our boys in and we never wanted to leave.
Eventually I found a spot with a small college where I've been teaching for 15 years. We got a nice house near the Capitol, so things pretty much worked out. And we're not moving, either.
One winter evening when I was twelve the news ended with an amusing feature about my mother's native Minnesota. On the TV was a man in a parka standing atop a snowdrift in a driving horizontal blizzard. He was shoveling at the snow with an absurdly tiny shovel, each scoop of which was blown away by the wind.
Below the level of his feet was a TCF time and temperature sign blinking 9:00 a.m., -20 F, 9:00 a.m., -20 F.
I laughed and laughed to think of my cousins living in that godforsaken bumpkin state, freezing their butts off in the unimaginably cold weather.
Twelve months later I was standing on the roof of our new home in Bethel, Minnesota, up to my neck in snow, instructed to keep the roof from collapsing. Every shovel of snow was blown away in the horizontal wind blowing off the lake.
My father's mother had passed away, and freed of her care my father no longer had any excuse not to let my mother return to her native state, so here I was.
Despite the weather I grew to love the state. After Queens and New Jersey, the rural forests of outstate Minnesota were like moving to Paradise.
One thing bothered me, however. When I would walk down the streets in Minneapolis, I always thought I must have something on my face. I took me a while to realize that the reason I thought this was the case was because walking down the streets in Minneapolis, people would look at me and smile. In Minnesota, that's called being polite: in New York, the only reason someone would smile at your face was if you had a chicken wing from lunch stuck to the side of your mouth. Otherwise everyone kept their heads down, and their eyes forward.
There are downsides to living here, like the absurd weather - you know, snow and sleet the last weekend of April?. And the only thing worse than the taxes are the endless whiny complaints about taxes buy guys who apparently want the government to fund itself on bake sales. And while I don't care for Norm Coleman's politics, he moved to Minnesota at about the same time I did, yet provincialism persists in labeling him a "carpetbagger." Even the credentials of his opponent, native Minnesotan Al Franken, are called into question because of his turncoat years spent in the entertainment industry in New York and California.
But I married a native Minnesotan and I'm raising three native Minnesotans, so I'm sure that at last qualifies me to call myself a Minnesotan, right?
Oh.
Growing up in Minnesota was very typical like the four seasons with occasional storms.
After obtaining my B.A. at the U of MN, I traveled to Paris France. I lived and worked there with my spouse for a couple of years. Then after living in the concrete jungle, we decided to move back to greener MN. And NOW, I am here and will probably reside in MN for a long time. It is home to me and my son...