I received a photo calendar from my sister Marlene for Christmas. One of my favorite childhood photos is of my brother Greg and I sitting by our hand pump that supplied all of the water for our daily needs including drinking, cooking, and washing clothes and for water for our milk cows. This photo taken in 1955 is a favorite, as well.

 
It has the look of homesteaders as in Laura Ingalls Wilder's day. The old door opening into the kitchen with the tablecloth so welcomingly draped over the table, the bib overalls (handed down from one to the next), the dirt-packed yard with patches of weeds… My mother's apron is missing. She always wore a bib apron. The baby in my mother's arms is my sister Rita. My father is holding me. My brother Greg and a sister Mary Ann are missing from the photo and there were three more not yet born (Ron, Rick, and Marlene) when this photo was taken making a total of 12 kids in all. The others in the photo L to R back row in front of my dad and mom are Ken and Bill with David, Darrel, and Cliff L to R front row.  

It's Christmas Eve. Each year my thoughts drift back so very many years ago to my childhood in the 1950s and our tinsel-laden tree. 

The snowflake and icicle are two ornaments (the only ones) that I have from that original tree. 

I'd like to introduce you to Dick's grandmother, Olive Clifton Dullum, who is Dick's mother's mother. I will also unravel her relationship to Thomas Edison's second wife, Mina Miller. In 1914, Olive opened a boarding house eleven miles northeast of Brainerd in the little community of Woodrow, which was named after President Woodrow Wilson. It was near an underground mine first called the Wilcox Mine, then the name was changed to Omaha Mine when a new mining company took over. With capacity to sleep forty-two miners at $1.00 a day, the two-story 24×60-foot hotel building built by Dick's grandfather, John Dullum, had a general store and post office in the front part of the building. (The photo below is the back side of the building facing the barn.) Before moving to Woodrow, the Dullums lived in Wright, Minnesota where Olive was a teacher and John owned sawmills. It's likely that John built the hotel from lumber sawed at his mill. Although the lodging portion of her business would fill one's day, Olive and a hired girl also prepared meals and packed dinner pails for the miners who worked round-the-clock shifts.

In her weekly Farmer's Wife column in the Brainerd Dispatch that she wrote for twenty-five years, Olive stated, "When the mine closed down in 1919 (after the mining company went bankrupt), I had a big empty building, but you can't live on that. Well, we looked around for some land to plant. We had no horses or machinery. The neighbors loaned us their team and we opened up small patches and planted common vegetables. After a time, we could afford a $49 cow and I made butter to sell. We tried chickens and they helped some. There were a few jobs at what you'd now consider very poor pay, but we didn't join the W.P.A gang or go on any relief. In general, when you go broke, use your head. Don't go begging, go to work." I had the privilege of knowing this fiercely independent woman who continued to live in her boarding house after her husband John's death in 1963 until her death in 1973.

Olive, proud of the fact that she was related to Thomas Edison's second wife, Mina Miller, spoke of a family reunion in Wisconsin when she met Thomas Edison as a young girl. So, I set out to discover the relationship. I began by reading a brief biography by John D. Venable titled Mina Miller Edison Daughter, Wife and Mother of Inventors that I had purchased when we recently visited Thomas Edison's home in West Orange, New Jersey. Then, using ancestry.com, I researched the lineage of Mina Miller Edison and Eliza Miller Clifton, who was Olive Dullum's mother.  For three days, from morning to night, I pored over old census records, marriage and death certificates, passport applications, grave records, and family trees created by others doing similar searches. I made copies and took pages of notes. I learned names and lineage. I learned education and job history. I learned where lives took root and the location where the two families intersected (Ohio). But, I was still struggling to connect the two women generationally. Then, a breakthrough. In a box of old family photos, I found this handwritten family tree.

There, near the bottom, in Olive Clifton Dullum's handwriting… "My mother's Uncle Miller in Ohio invented the First Reaper." I know from my online research that she is referring to Lewis Miller 1829-1899, who had eleven children… one named Mina Miller. The crucial words are "my mother's uncle." So, this means that Olive's mother, Eliza Miller Clifton 1837-1923 (Dick's great grandmother), is a first cousin to Mina Miller Edison 1865-1947. Proceeding through the generations, this means that Dick's grandmother Olive Clifton Dullum is a second cousin to Mina Miller Edison and… insert drum roll… Dick is a third cousin to Thomas Edison's second wife Mina Miller. 

(Left Photo) First cousins Mina Miller Edison in her West Orange, New Jersey Glenmont Estate second-floor office in 1929 that she shared with Thomas Edison and (Right Photo) Eliza Miller Clifton at her home in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota that she shared with her husband Edward Clifton.

The Brainerd Public Library's "Brown Bag Summer Author Series" spawned the early beginnings of my efforts to uncover how Dick's grandmother is related to Thomas Edison. I was so excited to attend the series for my very first time on June 9, 2014 that I packed a special lunch the night before… in a brown paper bag, of course. I made a sandwich with thick slices of local, grass-fed, nitrite-free beef summer sausage and freshly harvested, locally grown greens from my CSA share along with hummus and celery for dipping. After scooping a large spoonful of Good Mornin' Apple Crisp into a half-pint mason jar, I was ready. I wondered, "Do people really pack a brown bag lunch or is it just a catchy name for the event?" I decided to tuck my bag lunch deep into my backpack until I could survey the attendees to see what others were doing. You know. The 'ol gotta-fit-in, junior high school mentality.

That particular day, Rhonda Fochs (pronounced Fox) was presenting her book, Minnesota's Lost Towns Northern Edition which includes "lost" towns in thirty-two counties in northern Minnesota. Her definition of a lost town is one that was "once a thriving heart of a community that has little or no population now." What caused the towns to fold? Rhonda shared several reasons… 1)RFD (Rural Free Delivery) In 1893, congress passed legislation to begin delivery of mail in rural areas rather than people coming to the post office to pick up mail. 2)Automobiles Faster modes of transportation meant people could travel further distances to shop for better prices and variety. 3)Railroads Prior to the invention of automobiles, passenger and supply trains made regular stops no farther apart than what a farmer could travel by horse in one day.  With faster modes of transportation, the distance between rail stops increased resulting in a town's residents moving to the railroad hubs. 4)One-Industry Towns If a community is built around a single industry such as timber or mining, when the resources are depleted, the workers move and the town dies. 

She had created a Power Point presentation to show us photos from her book of some lost towns in the Brainerd area. A black and white photo filled the large projection screen next to where she stood at her podium. It was of a woman walking down "Main Street, Woodrow, ca. 1914," the caption read. (See photo in book below.) Rhonda explained the significance of the town of Woodrow to the area's iron ore mining industry. In 1914, a woman named Olive Dullum (pronounced due-lum) and her husband, John, built a boarding house for mine workers in Woodrow northeast of Brainerd. My hand shot up to ask Rhonda if she knew the name of the woman in the photo. She did not.

As Rhonda moved on to the next lost town near Brainerd, I continued to wonder. Could it be? Was the woman in the Woodrow photo Dick's Grandma Dullum? I was well aware of the boarding house that his grandparents built and continued to live in until their deaths… I was inside it when Olive still resided there, but… the photo. Then, recently, one of my grandsons asked to see a photo of Dick and I when we were "hippies" in the early 70s. As I rummaged through some photos, there it was… the same photo as in Rhonda Foch's book, Minnesota's Lost Towns, with a caption typed underneath confirming that it was Dick's Grandma Dullum.

Dick told me that his Grandpa Dullum's hobby was photography. On the second floor… the last room down the hall on the right at the back end of the boarding house facing the barn, he remembers a storage room that held photo supplies and equipment alongside beekeeping boxes and frames. The room had been transformed into a dark room where his Grandpa Dullum developed pictures. This remembrance validates the photo's caption. And, yes, despite only a handful of others eating from bag lunches, I reached deep into my backpack and pulled out my lunch.