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Saga of Stephanie and Frank:
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Family
Jacobina Johnson (December 1939)
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GeneologyThe Icelanders are fanatical about their geneology. If you go back far enough, the Johnson clan in America is no doubt related to everyone in Iceland. At the Emigrant Museum in Hosfos, the Canadian curator and historian there, Nelson Gerrard (to whom we are also related!), was familiar with our family history (and had even written about it--see link below). He also (for a small fee) generated the Johnson Icelandic family tree from one of geneological databases available there, with lines (or greins) of our family tracing back to the original settlers of Iceland from Norway and Sweden--and this was just in the first five pages of a 50-plus page record!!!! See "A note about Icelandic naming conventions..." Isak (Jónsson) JohnsonStephanie's grandfather on her father's side was born in 1865/66 in Fögrukinn, Iceland, in the far northeast of the country. He apprenticed and trained as a carpenter In Iceland, and studied architectural drawing in Denmark. In 1889, he constructed a traditional-style church in Sauðanes, one of the quests of this saga. In 1892, he emigrated to Canada, where he later met and married Jacobina Sigurbjörnsdóttir in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where among other things, Isak fashioned the stunning dark-wood paneling in the famous Empress Hotel, and his first sons, Kari and Ingolfur, were born. The family then moved to Seattle, where Konrad, Harold, Marie, Johann (Stephanie's father), and Stephen were born. Isak died in 1949, a few months after Stephanie was born. Jakobína (Sigurbjörnsdóttir) JohnsonJakobina was born in Holmavað, Iceland, in 1883. She emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 6. She was a poet, translator, literary scholar, and scion of the Icelandic community in the Northwest, and was honored by the Icelandic government for her literary achievements. Her father was a well-known regional skald (poet) in his own time, and both his poetry and that of Jakobina are still recognized and read in the area of Iceland where they were from. She was a very special grandmother, who gave me books every birthday and Christmas. She died in Seattle in 1977. For more history of Jakobina's family, see an extract from The Icelandic Heritage by Nelson S. Gerrard. See also August 2005 article "A Remembrance" in the Iceland Club newsletter. And a brief autobiography penned by herself. More Photos
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