@schuth Heartbreaking. All of those children, and the only one to make it to adulthood was killed in action only 6 days before the Armistice.

The Mikkelson parents were contemporaries of my great-great-grandparents, and it makes me realize how exceedingly lucky they all were to have only 4 children out of 45 (across the 8 families) who didn’t make it beyond 2 years.

Thanks for sharing this.

@smokey Our great-great grandparents were contemporaries.

When my grandfather died (in his sixties), my great-grandmother (in her nineties) said, “No parent should outlive their child.” To outlive seven...

The twin girls’ dates were tough enough to confront, but when I saw the date of death on Clarence’s headstone, that gutted me. I cannot imagine Ever’s & Betsy’s strength to keep going a decade (and more) after Clarence’s death.

@schuth

I cannot imagine Ever’s & Betsy’s strength to keep going a decade (and more) after Clarence’s death.

I thought exactly the same thing. And I don’t know how quickly notifications of deaths vs news travelled in those days, but it’s conceivable they learned of the Armistice, hoped it meant that their only living child would be on his way home soon, and then a few days or more later learned he had died just before the Armistice. I suppose they had support from (possibly large) extended families, but still, those years must have been crushing.

@smokey I think the scenario you describe is entirely possible. I don’t know much about casualty notification during that time, but I’d be surprised if they knew much before the armistice was signed. I would have been consumed by bitterness, were I in their position. The Norwegian inscriptions on Ever’s & Betsy’s headstones really is apt. I hope their extended family kept their names & memories alive.

@schuth It was the inscriptions that prompted me to hope that the extended families had looked after them, because those words did seem like something that a friend or relative would choose to commemorate a friend/aunt-and-uncle in circumstances like this where there were no descendants in whom they would live on directly…. (At the same time, it’s probably also a pretty generic phrase associated with the departed, so who knows.)

@smokey I hope you’re right about the inscriptions. For what it’s worth, the cemetery is in the churchyard of an old, rural church serving a small, friendly congregation. I suspect it was pretty tight-knit a century ago. I hope they were surrounded with love.