Grandma's sister married a Muggaberg?
The great-uncle I never met who was born on Lake of the Woods
On the way from Minnesota to Michigan for Memorial Day weekend with her husband’s side of the family, my sister, Barb, stopped for a visit here in Wisconsin.
My mid-century modern ranch home reminds her of the house we lived in when we were in grade school in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.
“Didn’t you make this for Grandma Swenson?” Barb asked about the Swedish bell pull I had needlepointed decades ago that hung in the hallway.
“Yup.” I had several things of Grandma’s, including her old kitchen table and a snowman-shaped spoon rest.
Our conversation quickly turned to Swenson family history.
“Did I ever tell you I met Kathryn Joy’s daughter, Kris?” Barb said. “We had lunch in Stillwater a couple of years ago and she asked me over to her house in St. Paul to give me some photos.”
While I have been researching Mom’s side of the family, Barb has been filling in the Swenson side of our family tree.
“Who is Kathryn Joy?” I asked.
“Grandma Swenson had a sister, Kathryn, and her daughter was Kathryn Joy.” Barb said. “Dad’s first cousin.”
I recently wrote about our grandmother, Meta Wolertz Swenson, whose nickname as a girl had been Tomato.
“Did you know Grandma’s sister was married to a Muggaberg?” Barb asked me.
“A Muggaberg?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Barb pulled her cellphone out and showed me a screenshot. “George Allen Muggaberg,” she said.
“A Muggaberg!” I recognized that name.
Researching the family tree of the Thunder family at Buffalo Point First Reserve I had found Tom Thunder’s wife Sarah was the daughter of Mary Ann Muggaberg Begg. Mary Ann and her sister Jemima Muggaberg had married two Begg brothers, the sons of Duncan Finlayson Begg of Warroad.
Could my grandmother’s brother-in-law in the Twin Cities be from the same Muggaberg family I had found on Lake of the Woods?
You betcha!
Turns out this great-uncle I never met is related to Sarah Thunder. He was Sarah’s uncle, her mother’s younger brother.
George Allen Muggaberg was born in Rat Portage (Kenora), Ontario, on October 6, 1894.
Muggaberg was a Norwegian name. George was the grandson of Julius Muggaberg, born in Oslo, Norway, in 1834.
Julius Muggaberg had sailed for Canada in 1857 on a Hudson Bay Company ship. He married Isabella Sinclair in St. Andrews, Manitoba, in 1860.
St. Andrews is where Duncan Finlayson Begg of Warroad had been raised in the Red River colony of mostly Scottish immigrants near Fort Garry (Winnipeg). This place, also known as the Selkirk settlement, is where Duncan Begg and Julius Muggaberg grew up.
St. Andrews is also where Julius’s bride, Isabella, had been baptized and where the church records show her mother to be Cree. Her father, Bailkie Sinclair, came from the Orkney Islands of Scotland in 1821 with the Hudson Bay Company.
Isabella Muggaberg gave birth to eleven children, the first two a pair of twin boys — Julius Jr. and William, born in 1862.
One of the twins, William, grew up and in 1884, he married Louise Telefson at St. Andrews. They lived in Rat Portage on Lake of the Woods and had three sons. George was the one in the middle — born in 1894.
When George Muggaberg was two years old, his family moved to Dunseith, a tiny town about 230 miles due east of Lake of the Woods — halfway across the state of North Dakota at the US-Canada border. He grew up on the family farm there.
George enlisted in the US Army on June 1, 1917, in Mandan, North Dakota, to fight in WWI. Corporal Muggaberg served a year as an Infantryman in France before he took a bullet in his right shoulder. The 1920 Census recorded him in residence as a patient in the Army hospital in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He was honorably discharged with a surgeon’s certificate of 35% disability.
On December 14, 1925, George Muggaberg married Kathryn Wolertz in Minneapolis.
Grandma Swenson was the matron of honor for her sister only six months after her own wedding.
According to the announcement in The Minneapolis Tribune of their nuptials, the newlyweds moved to El Dorado, Arkansas. There they both worked at an accounting firm; Kathryn as a secretary and George as an accountant.
Kathryn and George returned to Minneapolis in 1930. Their daughter, Kathryn Joy Muggaberg, was born in 1933.
George worked as an auditor and examiner for the state of Minnesota in the Capitol Building. On November 2, 1944, he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 50. His daughter Kathryn Joy was only 11 years old.
Great Uncle George is buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis.
Kathryn, my grandmother’s sister, is buried next to him. She died almost forty years later, on August 9, 1983.
Their daughter, Kathyrn Joy, graduated from Minneapolis’ Southwest High School in 1951.
Kathryn married Ralph Hilgendorf, who she met as a student of social work at the University of Minnesota. She volunteered for the Minneapolis Society for the Blind for many years and became a sign language interpreter. She and her husband Ralph raised five children, including an adopted foster child. They gave asylum in their home to a Salvadoran refugee, were foster parents, and involved in peace and social justice causes their entire lives.
Kathryn Joy Muggaberg Hilgendorf died August 7, 2021, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Her eldest daughter, Kris, is who Barb met — which brings me back to where I started this conversation with my sister.
Discovering my father’s uncle is also Sarah Thunder’s uncle connected my father’s side of the family to the place where my mother’s family is from. And I can’t help feeling as though it is one more thread which ties me to this special place on Lake of the Woods.
It’s like a “cosmic coincidence” to have these strands come together! It’s definitely an affirmation for the good work you’ve put in on the Warroad story.
You are apparently my cousin, then. My grandfather was your grandma’s baby bro.