My Ancestry

My family’s history on my father’s paternal side starts in Sweden. There, the Sahlström family farmed for hundreds of years in a rural area called Värmland. Samuel Sahlström immigrated to British Columbia in the early 1900s in search of a better life. In Canada, the family was very poor. However, the two sons Theodore and Elmer decided to make something of themselves. Elmer became a lawyer. Theodore took night classes and worked long hours grinding lenses. Eventually, he became an optometrist.

One evening in the 1930’s, Theodore went to an ice cream parlor. The cute English girl scooping ice cream was his future wife. Theodore Sahlstrom and Marianne Kirk married and had three children: Karen in 1939, James in 1940, and George in 1947. They then moved to Oregon.

Switzerland is the nation of my ancestors on my father’s maternal side. The Swiss Mennonite records date back to the 1500s. When they were persecuted for their beliefs, the Buerge family immigrated to the east coast of America. Present since the founding of the country, the Buerges were farmers and settlers. They lived a harsh, wild world. A story goes that one family refused food to a group of Native Americans. The family hid in the cellar. One Native American saw a woman trying to escape out of the window. The entire family was killed and the house was burned to the groud.

The Buerges migrated to Oregon for the same reasons that my parents migrated to Alaska: they wanted to be in the frontier. It was there that my grandfather George Sahlstrom and my grandmother Rhonda Buerge met. My grandmother’s mother, Clysta, was a strong Mennonite and did not wholly approve of George taking Rhonda to the movie theater in the 1960s and of Rhonda getting her ears pierced. Still, George and Rhonda married and had three boys: Aaron, Christopher, and Theodore. My father, Christopher, married Natalia and had Katriel, Ethan, Evan, and Kiersten (her name a nod to our Swedish heritage).