Bertha Halvorsdotter Hovland, as told by her great granddaughter Ruth Tweeten Holtan
Bertha, her husband Gulbrand, and their four children left their home in the rural Gran, Hadeland area about 35 miles from Oslo. They emigrated September 17, 1869 on the ship ‘ODER’ with tickets prepaid to Lansing, Iowa. They were third-class passengers and had to provide their own food for the long ocean trip. They first settled in Fillmore County, Minnesota.
Gulbrand was a big man and hard worker but one summer he became ill and Bertha had to take his place in the harvest field. She had a sun stroke and was never well and strong after that.
In 1870 they came to the Fertile, Iowa, area where they lived in a dugout with two other families. On this site, across the field northeast from Bud Petersburg’s buildings, on a steep hillside sloping to the southeast, they used timbers to make a wall for the face of their home. Research shows no possible blood relationship between the Hovlands, Oswalds and Levangs who shared the dugout. Only pioneer circumstances brought them together. Later Gulbrand got a place of his own on the west edge of Goose Lake, a beautiful site with an oak grove and hills which was later passed on to other Hovlands and Gundersons.
There is some question where they lived in 1874 when Bertha Halvorsdotter died, and it seems her burial site will never be known for certain. In about 1974 the author walked in an overgrown cemetery site about two miles from the dugout and was convinced that Bertha was buried there, in what is now the restored Chapel Hill cemetery.
However, now we have better information that no one was buried on Chapel Hill until 1884, so the quest goes on. Little Halvor remembers his dad being gone all day to bury the mother Bertha by Northwood, but the best guess seems to be that she is buried in an unmarked grave at Brush Point cemetery, two miles east of the dugout site. On February 8, 1874 Gulbrand was a charter member of the group to form a church and start a cemetery at Brush Point. Later, when he finally had the funds for a gravestone marker, he found the wooden cross-marker was gone. The stone remained on the Mt. Valley Hovland farm for a while until finally someone kindly buried it.
When Gena Nelson was in her nineties, she still remembered that she had the same birthday as her grandmother Bertha. Olava’s last daughter was named Bertha after her mother.
This death of the mother of the family was an especially desperate circumstance in those days, and there seemed no choice but to give Albert, the baby, to the Murkves, a childless sister of the Oswalds who were moving on to the Northwood, North Dakota area. Albert’s descendants are all Murkves. Olava stayed with the kindly Hans Hovland family, and the girls and Halvor tried to be helpful to their father. Gulbrand was a carpenter by trade and he had to be gone a lot, so this was a survival kind of life for his young family.
A widow in Mt. Valley hired him to add a log addition to her house. When it was time to pay him, she married him instead and joined their families together in the expanded house. Gura Gunderson had 6 children, Gulbrand still had 5, and they eventually had 3 more together. Gulbrand also kindly took Hannah Mausestad’s father to raise for the baby Albert he had given away.
It was a house with room for many extras for two generations of Hovlands. Gulbrand was a good singer and the “klokker” (song leader) at Winnebago Lutheran Church. Olava helped him learn tunes with the ukelin, a simple stringed instrument with a bow. He was a pious family patriarch and father of a pioneer Iowa family of Mt. Valley township. Bertha’ family in Norway was not forgotten either, for Halvor Hanson, son of Bertha Halvorsdotter’s sister, was the janitor for forty years at Winnebago Church. Bertha continues to be a blessing through her many descendants.
Here you can see the family tree of her ancestors: 5 Gen Pedigree Chart for Bertha Halvorsdtr Hovland