A Book a Week 2014: Made, Altered, Repaired. Week 13

Week of 31 March

I wanted to do a little research on my grandma and make a scrapbook of some of the memorabilia my mom kept of her. There is a large collection of letters of the time when Clara was in high school and college, diplomas, and diaries, both Clara's and her mother's during the same year. I wanted the scrapbook to be looked at and fiddled with, so I didn't want to include the originals. So I archived the originals and made copies of the things I wanted to include. I made the scrapbook in a standard 12 x 12 size and covered it in leather.

Clara Grunhuvd Froiland.

My maternal grandmother was the daughter of a tobacco farmer (Knut Grunhuvd) in Orfordville Wisconsin.

I even have a pad of Knut's receipts:

Clara and her family loved to play games.

and Clara did well in school.

Clara was an avid reader.

I have a book that belonged to her, House of the Seven Gables.

I made a color photocopy of the book

 I also photopied a couple of pages, and bound them with a pink silk ribbon, making an origami fold out of the pages.

Clara was given this book by her teacher, "For good work in spelling"

My mom used to tell me that I was like her mother, in that I could easily find 4 leaf clovers.

One time, I decided to actually read House of the Seven Gables. There, in between the pages, I found a pressed and dried 4 leaf clover that my grandma had saved. Here's a photocopy of it:

Clara's father, Knut, was a stickler for good penmanship, and taught the Palmer method. My mother told me that when she went to college, she would write her grandpa Knut letters. However, she was never sure if she would get her own letter sent back to her, corrected.

Here is an excerpt from both Clara and her mom's (Randy) diary about the time of Clara's confirmation. The diaries talk about buying the fabric and who was going to sew it.

It was decided that Clara should go to St. Olaf Academy for high school, and then continue at St. Olaf through college. St. Olaf, in Northfield, Minnesota, is about 300 miles from her home in Orfordville, Wisconsin. Naturally, she would take the train. Here I found maps of her route, and made them interactive. I also found postcards she wrote (or were written to her), one from the Orfordville train station, and one of the bridge the train would have crossed.

See how you can use the little train to follow her path up to Northfield?

Here's a couple of photocopies of my grandma's class notes!

Here's Clara and a friend. They lived in Ladies' Hall at St. Olaf.

In the St. Olaf archives, there was a scrapbook from one of Clara's classmates. I made replicas of a couple of the things.

Letters, of course, were the main form of communication. My mom still has quite a stash of letters between Clara and her parents. Here I made color photocopies, and "antiqued" them.

And there's Knut's letterhead, and a sample of his perfect Palmer method penmanship. How sweet is this? Knut really misses his daughter.

I found Clara's Academy graduation program in the archives. Here's a picture of the gals, there's a circle around Clara's head:

 There's her name:

and her diploma:

Clara was a member of Delta Chi

She sang and participated in concerts and recitals

"Miss Grunhuvd possesses a voice of exceptional quality and sang with excellent taste the varied numbers on her program"

Tag Day, May 17, 1911. May 17 is Norwegian Independence Day. Tag Day was the same day, and it had something to do with raising money to expand the Ladies Hall dorm. I think students "tagged" people with yellow squares of paper. I need to research this a bit more.

Clara's college graduation program, grades and diploma.

She graduated with a music teacher's certificate