Requiem [COMPLETED]

The Government Done Fucked Up Real Bad This Time

That same spring I was taking an undergraduate fieldwork course for archeology. The site a northeast Plains Village site dating to 1400-1500 A.D. was located an hour away in eastern North Dakota, on a bluff overlooking the Maple River. It was a great site to be a student on because it was rich in lithics, food and pottery; we had a multitude of evidence to work with.

Despite this feeling of excitement, the passion I felt about studying the past in this new way, I began to stumble academically. I lost interest in further geology; partly perhaps due to the fact that my fellow geology students never made much effort to open their group, but also because I just didn't find it as compelling as my archaeology courses. I didn't complete all my homework; my grades started to slide down when I couldn't be bothered to finish a three hour weekly physics report that didn't seem to entail enough points to be bothered over, or the structural geology lab when I was tired after work one night. I became lazy at the restaurant. I was a manager and I still fulfilled all my duties, but I just didn't care to hold everyone to giving 100%. I stopped nagging people to get all their cleaning done. As soon as we'd closed for the night, I'd go relax in the office and play online solitaire until people wanted me to check their list and clock them out. I was getting burned out working fulltime through school. I was so ready to just be able to do one or the other; but I wasn't sure how much longer I could keep up doing both. Luckily it was finals week and then I'd have all summer with only work.

Next fall I'd have to do an undergraduate thesis on something. I could chose whether to do it for archeology or geology, and I'd already decided I would way more enjoy doing another excavation rather than go intern at a mining company. The only roadblock was that I couldn't think of a good project. I was suppose to meet with my advisor Rita in September to discuss my preliminary idea, and I hadn't a clue yet.

To be honest, I was already occupied; every day I either had work and school or school and field school. And on my one day off a week, I'd been working on the 'healing project' I had come up with my counselor to help my progress: I was studying my family history.

Every Saturday I'd go digging in our school library's old newspaper archives, or call up different government offices. I had several manila folders of photocopied articles: the announcement of grandpa Per and grandma Vivian Trosvig's wedding, the birth of each of their children. I had found an article about one of grandpa's older brothers who was killed in the war, executed for committing war crimes. I looked up the Trosvig genealogy in census reports; Per and his two brothers Ole and Loren were listed under Lars and Severn Trosvig in Wolverton in 1920 along with a sister who was listed dead from tuberculosis—another Birgit. Vivian was there too, listed as an infant under Stafford and Marie Leitch living practically next door. Stafford I could trace back to Iowa, where his parents (Stafford Sr. and Lillian) had settled after coming over from Ballymena, Ireland, with their eight children. Most of those Leitch kids had migrated west by adulthood, except for Stafford. I knew nothing about Marie; I needed to see if I could get any information from grandma about her.

Severn's last name I couldn't recall, nor could Sven, but we knew her parents had come from Oslo and settled in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, which seemed good enough. The trail seemed to be disjointed for Lars though; Lars and Severn were listed as married with two children in 1910, but there was simply no Trosvig any earlier. There were a dozen Lars Trosviks that emigrated from Norway between 1850 and 1890, most settling in Iowa or Minnesota, but they all seemed accounted for by later census data that showed them still in the same place—which wasn't Wolverton—with wives and children. A couple had even died duing that time, but none of it was helpful. Great grandpa appeared to have conjured himself from thin air. And what's more, there was no headstone for him in either of the cemetaries for Brethren members; only for Severn, Loren, and Birgit—who except for mom I'd never realized was family. Like my other investigations, this one was just bringing up more questions.