John was employed on the Cooper Ranch near Cooperstown, North Dakota. (Cooperstown was named after the Cooper family. Later I have heard that ranch referred to as "the Cooper Brothers Farm.")
From Cooperstown, he took over the Guest farm at Hannaford, North Dakota, where he took care of Aunt Winnie, Aunt Emma, Grandpa Hansen and Grandpa Hansen's second wife. She did not succeed as a step-mother, and went back to Minneapolis. She left and went back to the city. Many years later, after John's marriage, a letter came to my parents notifying them that they were heirs to an Estate. Who has any money to leave us? My parents were suspicious - never thinking about my father's step-mother. So poor that we were, I'm sure my father could have used a little inheritance.
Winnie met a young man at Cooperstown with the same family name as herself "Hansen." They had something else in common, too. They both had step-mothers. Neither of them liked their stepmothers. They cried on each other's shoulders, fell in love and got married. Uncle Alvin's father set Aunt Winnie and Uncle Alvin up with a farm and buildings. Uncle Alvin took all of Aunt Winnie's family in to live with them: Fred, Albert, Harry, John (Grandpa went out to Montana to live with Aunt Thea and Uncle Pete).
John's wife: Henrietta (Baumez) Hansen. School teacher, nurse, dressmaker, horticulturist. She had her eye on the Hansen young folks when she was teaching school in the Hannaford District. The Hansens went to Luverne to Uncle Alvin's farm. Henrietta Baumez went to southern Griggs County, too. She taught the Kent School. She boarded at the Jensen home. The World War I ended, taking two young men from the Luverne address. Harry Hansen (John's brother) and a young Jensen (brother to Anton Jensen, where Miss Baumez boarded).
Miss Baumez boarded at the Alvin Hansen home. John married the school teacher. I used to wonder why my parents mentally tormented each other - so unreasonable. Then I learned my mother was doing it on purpose to get him riled up. She would go to the top story of our three-story house where they spent the first 15 years of their marriage near Hope, North Dakota, and secretly laugh while my father would come in raving mad calling out demands where was she? And she would call down so innocently, "I'm upstairs." And he would rant and rave, "What are you doing up there?" They were playing a game that I didn't understand in my early childhood. I wondered why they stayed together - what was holding that marriage together? Uncle Alvin would come around and laugh. Both him and Aunt Winnie would laugh at them. They had watched the courtship and knew the score. Neighbor women would come and feel so sorry for my mother. After I got older, I pitied my dad more than my father. She seemed so hard and cold toward him. I wondered why they hadn't split up after their five year courtship that they talked about.
Later, after both their deaths, I learned more about their courting game. Every night when she came home from school, after having walked 2 1/2 miles to school, taught school all day, plus playing running games with the children at recesses and noons, and walking home again 2 1/2 miles, my father would play tag with her around the yard before supper. She would go in the house and help Aunt Winnie and Aunt Winnie's two maid servants and Aunt Emma with the cooking. (Did it take five women to cook supper?) Then they would call the men in to eat.
My father chased her around the supper table in the 11 x 22 kitchen - long table - all of Uncle Alvin's help too. How that farm must have prospered to feed and clothe them all. And the energy my mother must have had to fit herself into that family of young folks.
My parents were 36 and 39 when they got married. Somebody else told me that my father had said, "Valley City, that is where I used to go courting that little dickens." So what everybody else thought was my mother aggravating him, was actually his entertainment. Both my grandpas and Aunt Winnie and Aunt Clara all tried to straighten them out and got put in their place. They didn't want anybody interfering in their games. My father continued to dance around the table every night before supper, singing the Danish table grace, up through the middle of the depression of the early '30s. Then he quit and didn't do it anymore. The hardship and struggle for survival was too much for them. It took too much out of their life. My mother and Aunt Winnie continued to cook the five course meals for their families, even though they were both diminished down to one cook in each home before Irene and I were old enough to help in the kitchen. When the depression came, Aunt Winnie and Uncle Alvin were too poor for any more servants.
Grandpa Baumez lived with us and Grandpa Hansen lived with Uncle Fred and Aunt Edith and when we came out there to visit in 1935, he had his home with Aunt Thea and Uncle Pete.
Grandpa Baumez died in 1937. After his death, my mother took suddenly sick, not expected to live and was rushed into major surgery. That took more of her strength and made my father more sad. I couldn't understand why he was so unreasonable with her, making her work so hard. I see it now. He was desperate to make her live. Aunt Winnie was a good nurse.
Aunt Winnie devoted much of her life to nursing her friends in the neighborhood. Today the hospitals get a person out of bed from surgery the first or second day. Aunt Winnie and my father knew what they were doing.
Two daughters, Augusta Marie and Charlotte Lois were born. Augusta Marie was named after the two grandmothers Augusta Baumez and Dorthea Marie Nelsen Hansen. The Lois was taken from Grandpa Lewis. Irene, Evyln and Augusta all received the middle name Marie. My father, Aunt Winnie and Aunt Emma all thought so very much of their mother. Augusta died in infancy, a very short time after birth. My father said she had yellow natural curly hair very close resemblance to the Hansens. The funeral was at the Methodist Church in Valley City, and her burial is in the Hillside Cemetery very close to where my parents are both laid to rest.
Grandpa died January 1937. My mother had her surgery May 1937. The following fall our family moved back to the Alvin Hansen farm where my parents had earlier courted.
I had some challenges in my elementary education through all of my parents moving. Four years in a rural school. One year in a town school. That was Steele County where children were not taught geography, history, hygiene or language or agriculture until the sixth grade. Then they moved me into Griggs County where children received a start of all this training in grade four. The other children all had a two-year basis of these things that I didn't have when I entered their rural school at grade six.
My high school was broke up, too. One year in a small high school of about 25 pupils. Two more years in a higher grade high school, and graduated in Cooperstown, North Dakota. It was a challenge for me getting acquainted with all the different school systems. The first high school the teachers worked very hard preparing us for State Examinations, just like seventh and eighth elementary grades. The next school was a commercial school. When I got there, the other children all had a year of Jr. Business basis for their bookkeeping, etc., that I didn't have. My junior year, I counted up my credits from the two schools and discovered I had enough credits to graduate. My mother often pulled some of the same high strung stunts on me that she did my father. She sounded like a crime was being committed. All my life I had to struggle to grow up. She wanted to keep me little. This meant that I would be ready for college a year earlier than she had anticipated. She blessed me with a year of high school in another larger town where young folks were receiving social training. I have always thanked her for it. Two days before graduation, I was offered a job in a photographer studio. She wasn't ready to part with me for that maturity either.
World War II was going on at that time - going strong. A young pretty service woman was brought into the classroom. She gave a good pep talk. The papers were passed around for our names and addresses. I signed up. Why not? I would be 18 pretty soon, something that all us little girls had been looking forward to since we were six - the day when we would be of age (to do as we pleased - we thought). My cousin in Canada, two years older than myself followed her brother into the Air Force. I had been taught to admire my cousin, Major Gordon A. Utke, and looking forward to when he would come home to be with his wife and be a civilian medical doctor. Military patriotism was strong in my mother's family. Army Colonels Frank and Roland Pinger. I came home happy. My father was sad. My mother knew better than to believe the nonsense. All the military service had from we high school undergraduates was a sheet of typing paper with all our names on it. We hadn't signed any legal forms. The war ended and we girls heard no more from the U. S. Service.
My parents moved from the Irene Hansen farm at Luverne to my father's farm at Hannaford. His life was backtracking. When they retired, they purchased a home in Cooperstown. She thought she knew their future, but the Lord had planned it for my father's life to backtrack over the places where he had lived when he was a young man.
One living daughter, Charlotte Loise. Musician, school teacher, legal secretary, nurse, artist.
My mother born November 4, 1888, died April 7, 1969. She raised the Burbon red turkeys for many years.
She would plant an acre of garden for most of our everyday living, baked her own bread, would raise 100 turkeys and 400 chickens every year to sell. She kept a variety of poultry - chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, guineas. They kept a variety of meat on the table. Beef, pork, mutton and poultry. Plus my father often hunted wild small game. My mother was a dietician cook.
Source: Hannaford Area History North Dakota Centennial 1889 - 1989 Page 126