WWI bride from Grantham, Mrs. Hans Petersen

[Yeates]

Thank you, Lesley: Yesterday I tried multiple times to use the "insert image" icon without success. Figuring I was doing something wrong, I did a search on scanning and found a thread from 2013: "Adding Scanned Image" started by andy_b in the "Scanning and Digitizing" forum. I will again try the simple, icon method. If it doesn't work, I suspect it may a shortcoming with the software I am using.---Yeates

[oldblokeat184]

I have nothing but praise and thanks for Yeates's almost instant reply to my post, and the transcription is perfectly adequate for my information, although I do look forward to the scan. I notice that the article says that she "still has an accent". Perhaps from my perspective of still living in Grantham I would have happily noticed a little of her native accent still lingering!

[Lesley Robertson]

If it still doesn't work, please let us know, also your software, and we cask the Admin to see if they can find out why.

[Yeates]

Oh, Lesley....it turns out the problem was my eyesight which is deteriorating. The file was huge---I misread "21 MB" as "2 MB". I have rescanned it at a lower resolution and it works fine. I apologize for wasting your time. However, your post caused me to problem-solve it.---Yeates

[Yeates]

Ok. I think I've solved it. Here is the article scanned in 2 parts:

[Yeates]

so you don't have to stand on you head, here is the text part of the article right-side-up:

[Lesley Robertson]

We aim to please!

[oldblokeat184]

After a little research, a final thought on my relative, dated three months or so after she returned home to the USA.

Quote

From The Grantham Journal, Friday December 10th 1948

In Minneapolis

TWENTY-SIX YEARS ago, Mrs Florence Peterson
left her native town of Grantham for Minneapolis,
in Minnesota U.S.A., and in all that time her parents,
Mr and Mrs H Draper of 2, Barnwell-terrace, Grantham,
have never failed to send her the “Journal” week by
week.
Writing me from her home, 2634, Pleasant-avenue,
Minneapolis, Mrs Peterson says she was very
interested in the recent front page story of the
Grantham lad who dashed out of the hospital and
made for home clad only in his pyjamas.
Incidentally, also living in Minneapolis is another
Granthamian, a G.I. bride formerly Miss Rose
Grover, of Cecil-street.

Unquote

The street names are rendered in rather an old-fashioned way (e.g. Barnwell-terrace instead of Barnwell Terrace), and there is an Americanism in this too. We British would always say "Writing to me", not, as above "Writing me"! I wonder why?

Finally, the story which had taken my relative's interest was singularly lacking in drama, wasn't it? Perhaps Grantham was in a lull between Sir Isaac Newton, who had attended what was to become also my old school three hundred years before, and Margaret Thatcher, who by this time had left the town for Oxford University, seldom to visit us again.

Perhaps it is now time for a Miss Rose Grover thread?!

[oldblokeat184]

Yesterday I had my final say on this thread, or so I thought, but I now find that my transcription skills are so minimal that I missed out a complete paragraph in a very short item.

Insert this between "pyjamas" and "Incidentally".

Imagine her surprise to read
the same story in a recent issue
of the Minneapolis Sunday
paper. As Mrs Peterson remarks
“News from Grantham certainly
gets around.

Perhaps it was a slow news day in Minneapolis.

[Yeates]

Dear Oldbloke: Thank you for the article from the “Grantham Journal.” It is like a book-end as it finishes the story in a satisfying way, doesn’t it. I will add it along with this correspondence to the scrapbook. I remember I offered to send you the original article for your family archive. Let me know if you would like the original if you feel comfortable providing me with your snail-mail address throough private-messaging.

It is interesting there was another lady from Grantham in Minneapolis. My grandmother was in south Minneapolis, also. One wonders if these ladies knew each other. Would there have been a community of British women and a way of meeting each other? My grandparents immigrated to Minneapolis in the early 1920s, also. My grandmother did not visit England again until 1965----my father took her and all of us to visit her family. Nana never lost her accent or relinquished her British citizenship. She was an extremely reserved woman so it has only been since doing genealogy I have learned about extended family. My father (started school in Bromley, Kent---now London---but was 9-years-old when they settled in Minneapolis) did not have an accent, but his vocabulary was studded with Britishcisms (he had occasion to speak at our daughter’s class years ago and instead of saying good-by said “cheerio” which the children didn’t understand….) The irony is that Mrs. Petersen, it seemed, knew my Polish grandmother and not my English grandmother.

The story that attracted your cousin, about the “lad who dashed out of the hospital”, gives insight into her personality. She raised five children so I surmise her maternal instinct was strong; that she was a most empathetic person. I am not sure how large a town Grantham was at that time, but Minneapolis is the largest city in Minnesota---on the Mississippi River; seeming even larger as it is “twinned” or adjacent to the capital city, St. Paul. She must have viewed the story of the frightened or desperate young man as quaint; as a story of an individual in pain as the sort that gets lost or is insignificant in a city the size of Minneapolis. ---although I read now that the Minneapolis paper picked up this human-interest story.

I get self-conscious about my American grammatical upbringing. Most times I am aware of the differences but I would have missed this one: writing to me as opposed to writing me. I tested it out in my mind, and, it is true, both sound correct. “Write me” though, is colloquial, and I would not use it in a formal essay or circumstance. Maybe the journalist had to conserve space and chose “to” as an expendable word.

Besides those family trips decades ago, my husband and I have spent time in Bucks, Kent, and West Sussex---where most of my family were from. I have looked Grantham up on the Internet. We have not visited Lincolnshire. It looks beautiful with many places of interest. For example, I see it is has The National Centre for Craft and Design which would fascinate me to visit. Years ago my brother had me read David Pye and his defense of process and skill as art; bemoaning the loss of such or the danger of such disappearing. (A quest I satisfied on our last visit to Chesham, was to see wooden shovels of the kind my ancestral grandfather and uncles made.) You attended King’s Grammar? I read of this region and experience as I often do pangs of missing England.
Best Regards,
Yeates