52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 4 "Education"

Esther Louise Johnson in about 1920

 On the 1940 US Census, they asked for each person's Highest Grade of School Completed. For my maternal grandmother, Esther Louise (Johnson) Ogden (1902-1984) the entry is "H3" meaning that she only completed three years of high school. You might wonder why she did not finish high school with only one year to go. Luckily I don't have to wonder because my mother shared her mother's story with me.

In the summer of 1920, after Esther's junior year of high school in Gordon, Sheridan County, Nebraska, her parents, Swedish immigrant Gustav Johnson (1867-1941) and Rosabell (Strayer) Johnson (1872-1955), decided to move their family from Gordon to Henning, Otter Tail County, Minnesota. When my grandmother went to register for high school in Henning, she was told that she would have to complete two years of high school there rather than just the one. Something about a difference in education standards between where she came from and Henning. My grandmother said nuts to that and never enrolled in her new high school.

Several years later she went back to Sheridan County to visit her cousins. A young man there named Emery Ogden was dating one of her cousins. After meeting Esther and getting to know her, he dropped the cousin and began courting Esther. There were married in Rushville, Sheridan County, Nebraska on 19 March 1929. 

Their first daughter Ardis Rosemary Ogden was born in Sheridan County on 20 September 1930. She died only two days later. My grandmother was so frightened by that experience that when it came time for my mom, Shirley Ann Ogden (1931-2014) to be born, Esther went to back to Henning to be with her mother for the birth. That is why my mother was born in Minnesota and not Nebraska where her parents were living.