A stranger in a strange land

I found this note in my family history records.

"My great-grandmother, Tilla Morud, told me that Betsy [her mother] came to the US by herself, to marry a man she had never met. They both didn't speak the same language and she felt very lonely. She would cry and cry for her homeland."

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What must 1880s Norwegian life have felt like to compel a young woman to travel across the seas to a foreign land all alone to marry a stranger?

When my great-grandmother told me this story, I could feel Betsy's lonely sadness living out in the Deuel, South Dakota prairie, hanging laundry, surviving the bitter cold, bearing 6 children out-of-duty.

What areas of Norway did she and he come from such that they did not speak the same language? Betsy lived in the US for 30 years before records show that she learned to speak English.

How did they communicate? I shiver imaging the mental isolation she must have endured.

Such an enormous gap, it seems impossible to think that was only 150 years ago, 4 generations of my family.

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