Elsie was born in the boondocks -- in Skibo Township, Up North, kind of halfway between Duluth and Ely. And when she was born, in the spring of 1891, few places in the Minnesota Arrowhead were, well, boondockier.
And that's important -- the Minnesota part, not so much the boondocks part -- because it set up a whole series of cascading events that ultimately ended with Elsie dying a woman without a country, an involuntary expatriate in the land of her birth.
But before the end, there was a beginning, and that beginning started when the 59th Congress of the United States passed a really bad law (even by congressional standards): The Expatriation Act of 1907.
One provision of the law was this: If an American-born woman, a native-born U.S. citizen, married a legal immigrant, well, then, that woman lost her American citizenship. Poof. Gone. Kaput. Vanished into thin air. Congress, in all its wisdom, didn't trust a woman to be both a good wife to an immigrant husband and a good citizen of the country in which she was born.
Enter Carl, autumn 1911, a Swede just off the trans-Atlantic steamer Princess of Ireland, disembarking at the Port of New York and heading across the Great Lakes to find his future wife in the small Scandinavian fishing village of Two Harbors.
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