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Source: Personal Collection of the Author, scanned 2/18/06.
This is my great-grandpa Marinus Hagedorn's Danish Psalm Book. I chose this as a relic of my cultural identity because it meant a lot to my great-grandpa. My grandpa was going to donate it to a Lutheran church along with a whole box of his father's things, but I wanted to keep it. Although I'm not religious myself, and I can't read Danish, I think it is nice to have something that would have been very important to my great-grandpa.
I think the importance of this artifact is that the Church/Temple has been very important to Danish immigrants, whether they were Lutheran, Mormon, Jewish, or Baptist. I know for my great-grandpa, the Church was his whole life. My grandpa wasn't very fond of his father, so he rebelled and became Agnostic. This probably caused some pretty deep tensions. My mother was an Athiest, and I became a Pagan. I consider myself a spiritual person who can see the good in most religions.
Also, although Danes assimilated very quickly, the Danish language was an important way for them to retain some ties with their culture. My great-grandpa gave sermons in Danish and English. My grandpa didn't learn much Danish; he only knew swear words. My mom and I didn't know any.
Source: Personal Collection of the Author, scanned 2/18/06.
My second peice of evidence is the book my great-grandpa wrote. This has always been the most salient piece of my history that I own. The copy I have was given to my mother, as the inscription says, by my great-grandpa and his second wife. The pages tell my grandpa's life story as a Danish-American Lutheran minister in Iowa from the turn of the 20th Century until the 1980s. Thought I never got to know him very well, and my grandpa didn't have much to say about him, I am glad to have his book to refer to as a piece of my cultural history.
Source: Personal Collection of the Author, scanned 2/18/06.
This document was given to me by my father's mother. She had a nephew who was doing geneology work on their family, and he photocopied this and sent it to her. It is an obituary of Mrs. Elizabeth Choler, my grandmother's great-grandmother, born in Ohio in 1839, and who lived to be 76 years old. She was active in the temperance movement, as the paragraph states, "One tribute to her comes from those who have sought to benefit the community by keeping it free from saloons, and it is remembered by them that she was always active in the fight, whenever the fight was on... behalf of better manhood and happier homes." I like this passage, because it shows me a relative who was a type of social change agent, perhaps even a feminist of a sort. It goes on to say that after the death of her husband Levi, she managed a large farm in addition to the household duties and raising her children. She is therefore an ancestor who could relate to what I am doing with my life, and that gives me some connections with my past.