![]() A person by that name appears in an immigration list from Ontario, Canada in 1871. He was born in Norway in 1850 and reported that he immigrated to the US in 1870. George himself is still a bit of a mystery. Canning quickly became a major industry, and the population grew from just a few hundred souls to a “metropolitan” city of 6,000. This fish was especially adapted to canning, a critical factor in its popularity in the age of little refrigeration. In about 1875, as the Thompsons were on the East Coast, Astoria fisherman discovered that the royal chinook salmon, which frequented the fresh waters of the Columbia River, was one of the best food fishes in the world. What happened in the four years between the farm in Ohio and the home in Astoria is still a mystery! Although no marriage record has been found yet, George and Thora report in the 1900 census that they have been married for 16 years – since 1884. ![]() He disappears from Thora’s life and she and the girls are next found in Astoria Oregon, living with George Pearson, a light (buoy) tender. The various spellings and common name complicate finding any other record of the family – or at least finding Thorkild. The name used there is Thomasen and they were born in “Prussia”, likely due to an enumerator’s error. The last we know of the family as a unit is in the 1880 Federal Census where they are enumerated near Warrensville, now a suburb of Cleveland, in Cuyahoga County. Their second daughter, Sophia, Grandpa Harry’s mother, was born in November 1876 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where the family settled to farm. As the family then moved from place to place, Mathilda was baptized in New York City at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in March of 1874. We’re not sure if the Thomassen couple (later Thompson), came through Canada to the US, but the first indication that they had arrived is the birth of their older daughter, Mathilda, in Connecticut in November of 1872. For example, the 1850 Federal Population Census records about 1,800 persons in the USA of Scandinavian birth – in 1880 there were over 440,000, nearly 250 times larger. ![]() These years saw Norway lose many of their population, especially the younger generation, to the United States. Prior to the emigration of this couple, Norway had suffered from serious food shortages, and it was clear that the land available to farm was limited. Feel free to email if you’d like what information we do have. We visited again a few years later and copied down the information about the tombstones and did our best to create a family tree for the people buried there, but that may not appear on the cemetery page. Cousin John Kimbrough agreed to maintain the site. Once it was cleared I agreed to help document what we found.īob Kimbrough, (Landon’s father) and his cousin Ben Kimbrough of Clarksville, Tennessee, paid to have the site cleared and the tombstones replaced in their original positions as much as possible. When I saw it, I worried about snakes, myself. “I was really excited to find something my father’s family knew nothing about, but the task at hand was daunting: the gravestones were knocked over, covered with brush and rabbit warrens made walking hazardous.” In the early 1990’s while visiting Guthrie, Landon came upon the old Kimbrough Family Graveyard, located on the tobacco plantation owned by various Kimbroughs until the early 1900s when it was sold out of the family.
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