Individual Details

Adoption

"I know my mother was legally adopted, but I don't know the whereabouts of the others... John, for instance. Aili came back north to work as a domestic and she got Saima out a little later to do similar work. We have Aunt Sylvia's notes about visiting Aili and Charlie in Cloquet. I know Arnold and Sylvia did not have a nice home life with the Harps. And Jonas did not like his life in Wells and ran away at age 14. Some of their loss, their pain, and anger has sifted down through the years and I have talked about these things with my cousins!"

There were really only 9 girls. I don't think Miss Jean Young was ever adopted and news of her dwindled with the years. I have written about the adoption of Martha in my blue "Finn" book, but to hear it Aunt Saima tell it with the emotion she had against Muriel Moore for taking the baby sister to an adopted home... Muriel's gloating remarks to the Finn sisters and brothers remain in my memories. Then, this year, to get a copy of what Aunt Saima wrote me as she hand-wrote family birthdays: "Martha in a cottage. Rudy and Arnold in a brick building together. Sylvia in a brick building with 70 girls. (all ate in a large dining room). Muriel, Reiffs took Martha & ? ... saw them leave in a 2 horse drawn carriage... we all saw them leave."

At my Aunt Saima Salo's house in the 1970s, I saw pictures of the Owatonna orphanage, many two or three storied brick dormitories amid landscaped yards... Saima showed them to me as if they were the family home... which they were for a short time!

About the Reiff family:
Mitzi, of Miss Ernest Reiff, got her record when she became an army nurse in WWII. She also saw Aunt Dorothea Weber's (or Mouse as we called her) records and asked Dor if she wanted to know about her family. Dor said NO, the Reiffs were her family (not sure).

The small premature twins, Margaret and Elizabeth, were taken into the home at the request of the hospital personnel as the mother had died and the tiny babies needed round the clock feeding, which this family of the older girls and "Nursie" could provide.

A family story, "Nursie" got her well-deserved vacation and was sent on a trip out West.... into Montana where she met a large poor family and brought their second youngest child back to the Reiff home. (They did not want to part with the youngest in a family of 16 children). Later she changed her name legally to Tana and she is Mrs. Ernst Zintl... met her husband in Germany and brought her war husband back with her! He only served a few days in the German Army when he was captured and then sat out the war in a prison camp in Texas... he had stories too!

My most favorite aunt was Pinkie who lived next to the Reiff home... always cheery and smiling, with rich laughter, but I really loved all these adopted sisters of my mother who helped shape my life.

Minna was the one who mothered my mother, but I always thought "Aunt Etta" looked like the proper grandmother. She lived into her 80s and died about 1962.