As much of a time suck as it can be, Facebook has its virtues. Recently I was invited into the Renli Family group, a pretty exclusive hoity-toity group of Norwegian-rooted South Dakota ag families who have sprawled out over time.
It must be part of getting old when you start paying attention to ancestorial family tree type stuff, because I know I never used to care when my dad would explain to me about some great aunt who was the cousin of a fella who played baseball for the Triple A Mudcats of the Yankton League in 1927. Yet, now it seems somewhat more interesting and Dad isn't around to re-tell the story to a pair of re-interested ears. My bad.
So I'm in this club from the other side of my family now. My mother's maiden name was Renli. Her dad was Clayton. His dad was Olaf. His dad was Ole. Somebody in the Renli group recently posted a picture of Ole and his wife, Anne, from when they homesteaded in South Dakota in the 1860s, almost three decades before S.D. statehood. Olaf was a handsome, fully-bearded fellow. Anne, unfortunately, was also a handome, fully-bearded felllow; or maybe the politically correct term is that she was a "sturdy woman." My son looked at the picture and first thing he said of her was: "Is that a unabrow?" Yup. And he better watch it, because I'm pretty sure that unabrow could come back and kick his scrawny teenage butt to kingdom-come.
According to my calculations, that makes me a fifth-generation South Dakota, and better yet makes my kids sixth-generation South Dakotans. And fortunately, for my girls, the five generations in between managed to dilute the unabrow gene pool and replace the sturdiness factor with long, slender legs. Hopefully, though, they will be just as tough as their great-great-great grandma had to be.
