Volume 6, Part 2: Grandparents, Washing Day, and Etiquette
June 29, 1908
I forgot to finish this letter and here it is Monday but I’ll send it anyway. You see it is a sort of (can’t think of the word but you know anyway).
Violet got our mail sunday and the mail man gave her A letter and said that the two usually went to gether. You better not think of coming home within 6 weeks (no 5 wks) or else you may be disappointed. We had a big wash to day and just about noon Grandpa came up for dinner. He was working down on 24th St. and ran up the hill for dinner. We had Mr. Porter for dinner yesterday (Sunday) We had dinner at 2 o’clock and sat at the table till 4. Then we had supper at seven and sat till eight. Alma came up a little last night so I had to take your place. I guess she would rather have had you because you do it better. I let her fall at the bottom of the step and I took the inside of the sidewalk but I corrected myself. Oh I made a good many mistakes only I didn’t stay. I said goodbye and ran up the hill.
I think this letter will do until next week. I will try and write a longer one next time but news is rather scarce and I’m sure this is a little longer than yours.
Well when you come home we will have a better time because then I won’t tease you.
Goodbye
Lillian
“Grandpa,” a.k.a. Carl Alfred Johnson, was born in Ekeby, Sweden, on 24 July 1840 as Karl Alfrid Johansson. On 1 April 1864, at the age of 24, he married Johanna Andersdotter, who was nearly eleven years his senior and previously married. We know almost nothing about Johanna or Carl’s early lives outside of these few basic facts, but the record is solid once they married. Three months after their wedding daughter Ida Matilda Carlson, a.k.a. ‘Ma’, was born in Strå, Sweden. Son Johan Wilhelm (Ida’s brother William) was born two and a half years later, on 18 December 1866, in St. Pers, Sweden.
In 1870, the family relocated from St. Pers (or Sankt Per) parish to Mjölby, where they remained in some capacity for the next 15 years. Karl was a “worker” who may have worked for the state at some point, and the family is found living in different farms and crofts through the 1870s and 1880s. It is possible he was a laborer, as that was consistently his trade once he emigrated from Sweden. Officially, the family departed Sweden (i.e. left the parish) on 2 June 1885 for “North Amerika,” though the reality was somewhat more complicated. Ida disappears from the Swedish parish surveys by the 1880s and we know she immigrated to the United States first, alone, in 1882. Karl followed in April 1883. Johanna stayed behind until 1886. We don’t know when William arrived; it may have been with his mother or sometime earlier, but he was in Omaha by 1888 when he signed as witness “John W. Carlson” on his sister Ida’s marriage certificate.
Like many immigrants at the time, Karl (and the rest of his family) anglicized his name on arrival to the United States, changing the spelling and solidifying the patronymic surname, so that Karl Alfrid Johansson became Carl Alfred Johnson, married to Johanna Johnson, and father to Ida and William Carlson. When Lillian wrote about his dinner visit in 1908, Carl was a few years shy of 70 years old and working as a laborer doing “street work.”[1] He owned his house at 2027 Center Court, about 3.5 miles south of Ida and her family. The house may have been with the aid of his daughter and son-in-law, as family legend claims that Nels provided the funds to bring Ida’s family over from Sweden. We know that Nels began buying property as soon as he arrived in Omaha in the early 1880s, and even deeded property to Ida the day before their wedding in 1888. What is certain is that Carl and Johanna lived out their lives within a few miles of their daughter and were living with Ida and Nels by 1916.
Grandpa came to “dinner” a little before noon, but of course we would consider that the lunch meal today. Clearly, the Parsons followed a model of mid-afternoon dinners followed by a late[r] supper, which feels like a bygone era in a world where arriving to your office to start the workday by 7am is normal, or even considered late. Also part of that bygone era (arguably for the best) is Lillian’s “big wash” on a Sunday morning, which was probably laundry, and was no easy feat in 1908. The first commercial electric washer wasn’t invented until 1908, so the Parsons would likely have been using a hand-powered contraption of some sort, a lot of hot water, strong soap (laundry soap also wasn’t invented until 1908), and up to four hours of manual labor per load of laundry, not to mention the drying and ironing.[2]
And then there is Lillian’s attempt to take her brother Harry’s place with Alma, “correcting” herself by walking on the outside of the sidewalk instead of the inside (as the inside of the walk was considered the correct side for ladies). Why Lillian, at 15 (days away from sixteen, when she finished this letter), felt the need or was tasked to fill in for her older brother to escort Alma and show deference to her is a mystery, but an interesting one to ponder.
Want to read more?
Volume 1: Lillian and her Letters
Volume 2: November 4th, 1907
Volume 3: Sweethearts or Sisters and…Candy!
Volume 4: School Stories
Volume 5: Falling Outs, Senior Fairs, Faith, and Uncle William
Volume 6, Part 1: Wandering Omaha
[1] 1910 U.S. census, Omaha, Ward 2, Nebraska, population schedule, enumeration district (ED) 13, page 225 (stamped), sheet 11-A, house number 2027, family 211, Karl A. Johnson; NARA microfilm publication T624, roll 843.
[2] Carol McGarry, “How Laundry Day Disappeared,” blog, (https://blog.sense.com/how-laundry-day-disappeared/ : accessed 14 December 2023), 9 March 2020. Also, Lauren Cabral, “The History of Washing Machines,” blog, (https://www.backthenhistory.com/articles/the-history-of-washing-machines : accessed 14 December 2023), 13 January 2021.