Genealogy Jottings

Have you ever heard of Godforsakia? I never had until I saw the name used in The Wall Street Journal. In an article on the North Dakota oil boom, they said the locals refer to the western part of the state that way. They have a nickname for eastern North Dakota, too—Outer Minnesota.

Last week I traveled to Godforsakia to visit the site of my husband’s family homestead in Mountrail County. The place his grandfather described as desolate, open prairie now hosts oil wells in every direction. In a way we feel relieved that his family never owned any minerals rights on the homestead, or we would have been chagrined to see all the wealth that could have been ours.

A couple of family members, Conrad and John Christopherson, reportedly died in Mountrail County during the homesteading years, so we looked for their graves. We saw none on the homestead, and we found no record of burials for these people in the three closest cemeteries. So we struck out on that effort and will have to do some further research on these people. The State of North Dakota does have a death record on file for John Christopherson, so we have ordered it to see whether it provides his burial information. We should have done that before we took the trip, but he is a collateral relative, and we did not think of searching for him until the last minute.

We had better luck with our research when we visited what I now like to think of as Outer Godforsakia, or eastern Montana. My family homesteaded there, and cousins still own one of the homesteads today. I visited two homestead sites and two cemeteries in Sheridan and Roosevelt Counties. High points of the trip included seeing the barn my grandfather helped build in 1916 and a drive around Medicine Lake, where my family kept sheep on an island.