Mormor's Story

Mormor means mother's mother in Swedish, and my mother's Mormor was a Swede.

Mormor first heard about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or the Mormon's, when she was a in her twenties. Her friend thought it would be interesting to go listen to the Mormon missionaries preach, and as soon as Mormor heard them she knew they were speaking the truth.

Mormor decided to be baptized into this new faith, even though her husband and friends tried to discourage her. They thought she'd been hoodwinked, and ostracized her for her decision, but Mormor was baptized anyway. It took time, but gradually she won her friends back as they realized she was still the same good, Christian woman she had always been, and ten years later her husband joined the church, too.

Mormor was a compassionate woman, and over the years she cared for numerous foster children in need of a home. Her husband's sister had two little girls she could not raise, so Mormor took them in and raised them as her own daughters. My grandmother, Edith, was the same age as little Gertrude , and Greta was two years older.

About the time that Gertude and Edith were five years old a new Lutheran minister moved into their parish. Although Swedes could join other churches if they wished, the Lutheran Church was the State Church of Sweden, and everyone belonged to it as well.

“I will stop this nonsense,” the new Pastor swore when he found out there was a Mormon family in his parish. He paid a visit to the Johnson home and tried to reason with them, but Mormor and Morfar were fixed in their devotion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When the pastor realized that reasoning and arguing with them wouldn't work, he finally gave them an ultimatum.

“Either you denounce the Mormon church, or I will take your two little foster daughters away from you,” he threatened. “They deserve to be brought up in good, Christian homes, and I will see to it that they are.”

Poor Mormor and Morfar. What could they do? They knew their church was true, and they knew that God knew that they knew it. They plead with the pastor, but he wouldn't listen. Their friends and neighbors tried to reason with him, but he turned a deaf ear. Even Morfar's employer, the most influential man in their parish wrote a letter in their behalf, but to no avail. The government said it was a “church” matter, and the church upheld the minister. Finally, despite all they could do, Greta and Gertrude were taken from Mormor's home and sent to live in a far away fishing village, to be servants for families there.

Mormor and Morfar worked and worked until they were able to earn enough money for Mormor to travel to the village to see “her” girls. She was horrified when she saw the terrible conditions they were living in. Their foster families were Lutheran in name only, attending only the required church meetings, and not teaching the girls the gospel or taking good care of them.

“What are you so upset about?” one of the foster mother's belligerently asked when Mormor took her to task for the shape her little girl was in. “It's only Easter time, and I personally washed her hair at Christmas,” the woman declared.

Seeing the girls in such shape caused Mormor so much heartache that she was sick for a year after the visit, and she was never able to visit them again. They did correspond with each other, though, always calling Mormor their “little mother” in their letters.

Even before this tragedy, my great-grandparents wanted to move to America so they could associate with other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and go to a Temple of God to be sealed as a family for eternity. After the little girls were taken from them, this became their main goal.

They were not able to immigrate until 1919, by which time the girls were grown and married. Mormor never saw them again, but as soon as she could she went to the Temple to be sealed to Morfar and her children. Much later, after Greta and Gertrude died, my grandmother, Edith, took their names to the temple and they were vicariously sealed to Mormor and Morfar.

I grew up on this story. Mormor's faith and determination always amazed me, but I've got to admit a little part of me wondered if she couldn't have figured out another way to save her girls. Couldn't she, perhaps, have just pretended to denounce the gospel? If she'd just told the minister they would come back to his church she could have continued living the gospel in the privacy of her own home, couldn't she? I knew that wasn't right, but it broke my heart to think about these little girls growing up in such a hard way. Poor little things.

Then, almost a hundred years later, my Aunt Ejvor told me the rest of the story.

Aunt Ejvor is our family historian and genealogist. One day when she was looking through some records she discovered that not all of the Temple work had been done for Greta. Although she had been sealed to Mormor and Morfar, she had not been sealed to her husband. To do his Temple work we needed to know his full name, where and when he was born, and where and when he died. Greta had been dead for many years by this time, and my grandmother, Edith, was in her nineties. Even Greta's son had passed away, so grandma wrote to his wife, asking if she had any information about her husband's family. The wife wrote back that she didn't know anything about them.

Grandma, Edith, died in 2000 without being able to seal Greta to her husband. In December of that same year, Aunt Ejvor was working at the family history library one day when a Swedish couple came in. Because she knew Swedish they got to visiting, and she discovered that the man had lived in Vestervik, Kalmar when he was a little boy, the same town Greta lived in.

“I should ask him if he ever knew any of our family,” Aunt Ejvor thought, but she worried she might offend him when she explained the story, since he wasn't a member of our church and she'd have to explain how the Lutheran church had persecuted her family.

The couple came to the library for a couple of weeks, and each time she met with them Aunt Ejvor thought about bringing up her relatives, but she held back. When the couple left to go back to Sweden they exchanged e-mail addresses, but that was all.

Later that month Aunt Ejvor received an e-mail from this man, thanking her for her help at the library. As she typed her reply the thought came to her again that maybe he could help find her lost relatives, so she asked if he knew of a genealogist she could hire to find her cousins. Then the thought came, “Type their names and birth dates,” so she got out her records and typed in the names and dates for Greta's children. The next morning she received an e-mail:

“December 30, 2000. Subject: Unbelievable Coincidence!

Surprise ---- surprise! I know them all PERSONALLY,....how about that!”

It turned out that this man had known Greta's son in school, and spent every Saturday afternoon at her house. He gave Aunt Ejor the names of our lost cousins, and she was able to contact them and exchange family pictures, and best of all, the Temple work was done for Greta and her husband.

“I could just imagine Mother and Greta up in heaven, hitting me over the head that day at the family history center, saying 'ask him, ask him',” Aunt Ejvor told me with a laugh.

I could, too And now I know something I didn't understand when I was small. Yes, Mormor could have lied to the Lutheran pastor and told him she would stop being a Mormon, intending to continue practicing her religion at home, in secret. If she had, she would have kept Gertrude and Greta for another fifteen years or so, and they would have known each other throughout their lifetime. But if she had, she would never have felt the urgency to leave Sweden and come to America, and my family would not be here. Much more than that, though, they would not have gone to the Temple, Mormor and Morfar would not have been sealed to each other or to their children, and they would have lost those two little girls for eternity, not just for this life.

How proud I am of my great-grandmother, and how thankful I am for her courage and foresight. Eternity is a lot longer than a lifetime.