Julia Tomina (Thomina) Anderson Lade, B 19 JUL 1887, Hendrum, Norman, MN, Chr. 2 OCT 1887, Halstad, MN, D 7 JUL 1971, Fosston, Polk, MN, age 84, buried 10 JUL 1971, M 29 NOV 1913 to Saebjorn “Burt” Gotfred Lade, B 6 JAN 1886, D 13 MAR1922, age 36.
Julia was the 13th and youngest child of Knute Anderson and Kari Hamre Anderson and was born and grew up on a farm near Hendrum, MN. The family moved to Fosston later in 1900. She was confirmed in the Lutheran Church at age 13 or 14.
Her siblings were:
Anders “Andrew” Anderson, B. 2 or 3 OCT 1860, Rushford, Houston, MN, D. 1938, probably in Alberta, Canada.
Knute Knute Anderson, B 9 SEP 1862 , Rushford, Houston, MN, D APR 1935 in Gonvick, Clearwater, MN.
Louis Christian Anderson [Louis Kristian Anderson], B 17 JAN 1865, Rushford, Houston, MN, D 13 JAN 1942, probably in Fosston, Polk, MN.
Bertha Maria Anderson Nereson, B 9 JUN 1867, Rushford, Houston, MN, D 11 JUL 1897, probably died Plentywood or Westby, MT.
Anton Johan Anderson, B 24 JUN ca. 1870, Rushford, Houston, MN, D. 3 AUG [ca. 1871], Rushford, Houston, MN.
Johan Anton Anderson, B 29 SEP (ca. 1872), Rushford, Houston, MN, D 1872, Rushford, Houston, MN .
Annetta Christina “Christine” Anderson Kvill, B 1 JUN 1873, Rushford, Houston, MN [IGI file says 8 JUN 1873 Preston, Fillmore, MN- could be christening date and nearby town,] Preston, Filmore, MN), D 8 SEP 1930, Metiskow, AB, Canada. 
Karen “Carrie” Adeleida Anderson Wilton, B 12 JUN 1876, Rushford, Houston, MN, 
D 17 MAR 1949, Fosston, Polk, MN.
Magnus Edward, B ___ 1877, Rushford, Houston, MN, D. ___ Died in infancy, Rushford, Houston, MN
Edward (Ed) Magnus Anderson, B 16 SEP 1878, Rushford, Houston, MN, D 23 or 24 JUL 1954, Gonvick, Clearwater, MN.
Henry Severin Anderson, B 18 NOV 1880, Rushford, Houston, MN, D about 1902, probably died in Hendrum, Norman, MN.
Emma Helena Anderson Henrickson, B 29 MAY 1883, Hendrum, Norman, MN, D 19 NOV 1963, Fargo, ND.
Julia Tomina Anderson Lade, B 19 JUL 1887, Hendrum, Norman, MN, baptized in Halstad, MN, 2 OCT 1887, D 7 JUL 1971, Fosston, Polk, MN.
Clara Serena (Severina?) Nereson Kirksether Solberg B 9 AUG 1893, Halstad, Norman, MN, 
D ___JUN 1973 (grand-daughter of Knute and Kari Anderson and child of Peder Nereson and Bertha Anderson Nereson) After Bertha died, Clara was raised by the Knute and Kari Anderson family for a short time, then was adopted by Kirksether family, married Peder Solberg, and moved to Westby, Sheridan, MT. There is a photo of Julia holding Clara who was about 6 years younger than Julia.
Julia's schooling consisted of an eighth grade education which was common in those days. As a young woman she worked as a housemaid.
She was courted by a John Johnson but then broke up with him because he was related through her mother's Hamre relatives. [When Julia's son James moved to Grand Forks, ND, James and his wife Anne became good friends with Ole and Myrtle Helgesen and discovered that both James and Myrtle were cousins of a Doris Pesola who also lived in East Grand Forks. This meant that James Lade and Myrtle Helgesen were also related and that it was John Johnson, Myrtle's father, that had courted Julia.]
Julia later married Saejborn Gotfred “Burt” Lade who grew up on a farm in Queen Township near Fosston, MN.
A picture of their wedding party included Ingvald Lade (brother of Saebjorn), Louis Anderson (Julia's brother), Carrie Anderson (Julia's sister), and Clara _____, (Julia's niece, Clara? ).
Children of Julia and Burt: 
One son James Gotfred Lade, B 5 NOV 1914, D 30 MAR 2007, M 15 JUN 1945 to Anne Lavina Christensen, Minneapolis, Hennepin, MN.
Burt had taken training for running an electric plant in Duluth, MN, and had been the operator of the Fosston electric power plant. He had built a home for his family in 1915 which later his widow Julia rented out. When their son James was married and came home from the Army, James' family lived there for about three years until moving to Grand Forks, ND.
Burt was inventive and liked to make mechanical gadgets and once designed and built a washing machine for Julia with a wooden tub, electric motor, and the clothes fit in a slatted bin inside the tub of water. James was interested in saw rigs so Burt made him a toy one using a tin can lid with a crank to turn it. He covered the top of a desk with a glued-on mosaic of small irregular-shaped wood pieces which James Lade brought out to their lake cabin near Bemidji to use as a ham radio desk. I, Judy Stahl, have some letters that he wrote from the Mayo Clinic. It sounded like he went through a lot of misery there with the treatments he endured. His grammar and spelling in the letters was very poor and he avoided punctuation. Julia also never did get very good at writing and spelling English. They both grew up speaking Norwegian and learned English when they went to school.
After Burt died, Julia and her 7 year-old son James moved into her mother Kari Anderson's home to care for her Her two older unmarried sisters Emma and Carrie also lived there. Meanwhile Julia rented rented out the home that Burt had built. Their brother Louis spent the winter as a logger and in the summer came to stay with there with the family and chopped wood for them. There was no room for him to sleep in the house so he slept in the loft in Kari Anderson's barn. He “ate like a lumberjack,” James said, and never learned to read. They had a maid, Lena, who had her own home. She helped take care of Julia's elderly mother, Kari Anderson, and did some cooking and cleaning. She was paid $3/week plus food. It was common for older unmarried ladies to be housekeepers. Lena died of breast cancer.
Throughout the years Julia did some housekeeping for people, and probably worked in such places as the variety store, restaurants, the hospital, as did Emma and Carrie. James congratulated Julia in an Army letter to her on completing her nursing certificate in 1943 so she must have been involved in the Red Cross during WWII or worked as a nurse's aid at the hospital for a while. I, Judy Stahl, have a picture of her with a white uniform with a cross on the hat.
Julia made flatbread, lefse, and other Norwegian foods. They ate a lot of lutefisk which was cheap, only thirteen cents per pound. It was dried cod soaked in lye, then later soaked in water to remove the lye, a traditional Norwegian way of preserving fish before refrigeration. James, her son, remembers Julia making blod klubb. She stirred flour into cow's blood, added spices, and put it into a loaf pan to bake. It was like sausage and was sliced and fried in butter. Also they boiled pigs' feet and pickled them in vinegar and salt. They kept salt pork in the cold cellar (root cellar) as well as garden vegetables all winter. The pork was boiled and fat would rise to the top and harden, making a seal much like wax would be used on top of jelly to preserve it. It had to be boiled again later to get out some of the salt. James says they didn't have an ice box but people who could afford one bought ice from the ice man. The ice obtained from the lakes in winter was kept in an “ice house” and was insulated with sawdust so that it would not melt and would keep to be sold for use all year around. In the winter some foods could be put outside to freeze them but in summer it would have been hard to keep food from spoiling. Summer sausage was a staple in the summer. “Summer complaint” was common and was a food-borne illness causing digestive problems. I suppose we would call it food poisoning now.
They did buy “wash ice” which was stacked outside in the back yard in winter by the clothesline. They bought it from men who cut up chunks of ice from frozen lakes during the winter. A large barrel stood in the kitchen for rain water which was used for washing in the summer and in the winter they melted ice in it to use for washing. Drinking water was carried from the neighbor’s. James carried three pails morning, noon, and night, I believe he said. They raised a garden by a nearby church and James raised chickens in their back yard. He had at least two dogs (there are pictures) and a cat or two.
James Lade said that they had a large loom on the wall (probably made by driving nails in a wood frame) and that it was his job to weave rag rugs in his spare time. They saved old clothing and cut them into strips to use for rugs. String was strung up and down to form the warp and the crosswise strips of cloth formed the woof. Strips of old clothing were also crocheted into rag rugs. At one time the family purchased a knitting machine to make socks. Tube socks could be cranked out in no time with it.
Julia began working at Bratland Café probably from the 1920s or 30s and continued as a cook there until she retired. The Bratland Cafe was sort of a darkish dingy greasy spoon type of place. It was a wide hall-like place with a counter and row of stools on one side with a soda fountain. The other side had booths. Sheets of pressed tin with a design in them covered the high ceiling and the walls were plastered with a big collection of calendars. Our family often ate there when we came to visit her and usually had hot beef sandwiches on whole wheat bread (beef and gravy on bread). Goldfish were kept in a bowl in the kitchen and grew to an enormous size as they were well fed. Julia would save old grease from deep fat frying which James would collect and use to make homemade soap. The cafe was only a block or two away from where she lived so she could easily walk to work.
By 1932 Julia had saved enough money working at Bratland Cafe to buy it. She had in mind that James could take care of the business end of it while she cooked and hired two waitresses. James didn't agree as he wanted to go to college and become a teacher.
In a letter to Anne Christensen from the Army of 19 NOV 1944 James said, “Had a letter from Mom today - she doesn't say so very much and always explains that she is in a great hurry and is just dashing off a few lines etc. She is ambition personified - never a dull moment if she can help it.”
In the fall of 1932 Julia and James moved to Moorhead, MN, where he went to college at Moorhead State College for two years. Julia went along and they rented a place together while she kept house. After that James began teaching in rural schools near Fosston and Julia went back to working at the restaurant.
In the summers when James was in college Julia Lade got a job in the summers cooking at Star Island on Cass Lake. It was a resort owned by Truman Rickard, a composer who entertained there. He wrote the Minnesota state song. James came along and did some odd jobs around the lodge such as cleaning kerosene lanterns, trimming wicks, etc. At Star Island she met a man who became her boyfriend, Michael Braaten. James said that he had a drinking problem so perhaps it was best that she broke up with him and remained a widow for the rest of her life.
1934 was the low point in the Depression and jobs and money were scarce commodities. James needed to find a job after two years of college in Moorhead, MN, so that he could finish his degree. Carrie owned the old house she inherited from her mother Kari. Carrie and Willie Wilton later moved into a better house and sold the old house to Julia after having some modernization done. After James graduated from Moorhead State College in the spring of 1934 Julia and James returned to Fosston and rented an apartment with James uptown above Mark's Drug Store. The apartment was small but it would do nicely until they found work and could afford more. There were probably three or four apartments there and everyone used a common bathroom down the hall. Carrie lived in an apartment across the hall after Willie died and Mark's widow (probably the landlady) lived in Carrie's apartment after Carrie died. Julia lived in that apartment the rest of her life until she went to the nursing home. From the street level in front there was an two story stairway to the apartments upstairs. Julia's apartment had a living room, a step or two down was the bedroom and adjoining kitchen. The floors were not very level. She had a dish cabinet in the kitchen and inside the door she would measure her grandchildren and mark how tall they were. Burt Lade still has this cabinet. There was a door out the end of the kitchen onto a second story deck wide oxidized gray boards with perhaps inch-wide gaps between them. This is where she hung out clothes. My brother Burt and I used to go “fishing” through the gaps with a wire to see if we could retrieve some of the items like clothespins, coins, and other small items that had dropped down there. Then there was a rickety steep gray wood stairway down from the deck to the ground. It was a rather strange place to live but it was uptown and handy for her needs. A letter to Julia at Thanksgiving 1944 from her son James who was in the Army at Camp Crowder, MO, said “--I was thinking of you and the huge dinners that were no doubt served at Lundmarks restaurant today. There must have been quite a lot of stuff to cook and roast.” [She must have worked at Lundmarks too.] Another letter to Julia indicates Julia had to get up 4 AM to make breakfast for the duck hunters.
In a letter of AUG 1942 from James while he was in the Army he mentions that he was worried about her tonsillectomy. According to letters from James when he was in the Army, between Nov. and Dec. of 1943 (age 56) she had teeth pulled and got dentures. She seemed to have no trouble with wearing dentures. Her natural front teeth stuck out quite a bit so the dentures may have improved her appearance somewhat. In a letter dated 28 DEC 1943 James says, “Good you got your teeth – Remember when Carrie got her first full set? Funniest thing I ever saw – she looked 99% teeth and 1% Carrie.”
In a letter from James to Julia of 3 MAR 1943 he says that Julia had recently gotten a nursing certificate.
In a letter to his mother Julia from the Army of DEC 1944, James says, “I kept thinking about how we used to cram a tall skinny tree by the cupboard in that small space but what a nice one we used to have anyway in spite of the inconvenience.”
In a letter of 10 SEP 1945 from James to his mother while in the the Army he says, “What a lightening [lightning] you must have had! It must have stricken close by to give you a shock that way. It so happened to me at the [ham radio] shack once and a bolt came down the antenna and made me weak all over. I don’t think one has any bad effects from it however if one survives to know what happened at all. We were glad to hear that the lightning had no bad effects on your arm.”
In a letter of 3 MAR 1946 from Carthage, MO, by James to Julia he says, “Your accident with the gas oven sounds serious. Just where did you get burned? Please explain a bit better you didn't make it very clear. One has to be sure the gas is either lighted or entirely turned off or of course it leaks out and is potentially explosive when one does try to light it. Like you we seem to think that electric stoves are better in several ways and a lot safer but of course not as fast heat. Certainly hope your burns are not serious - did you singe your eyebrows? Ann says her dad did that once when lighting the oven in their house.” He continues in a letter of 20 MAR 1946, “You certainly seem to have been burned worse than we had thought but it was well that it was possible to heal without leaving any scars. You will have to hurry and sprout some new eyebrows - or do you paint them on with a crayon these days. You too will need a long lighting pole for the oven I think.”
Julia liked to crochet and do crafts. She made such things as granny square pillow tops, a footstool made of seven tomato juice cans covered with fabric, pillowcases with fancy crocheted trim, extremely durable rugs crocheted from old nylon stockings, etc. She made a bathrobe for me out of old neckties in a crazy quilt design with embroidery between the pieces, and worked on a large white crocheted bedspread made of hexagons that never got finished. It would have been a huge project for anyone to tackle. She used to crochet while watching TV and it seemed that she hardly needed to look at what she was doing.
When our family visited she would often make sirloin steak for a special treat.
In her older years Julia would always look for dresses that buttoned all the way down the front. I don't know if this was because she had trouble with putting dresses over her head and zipping up a back zipper or if she just liked the style. She was short, probably about 5 ft. 2 in. and wore size 4 or 5 shoes, although perhaps she tried to wear too small of a shoe size as she had a lot of trouble with corns. She no doubt spent a lot of time on her feet while cooking at the cafe. As she aged she must have had osteoporosis as her legs seemed to splay out at the hips, changing her gait somewhat.
Julia read the local newspaper called the “Thirteen Towns” which reported on happenings in thirteen small area towns. Due to her Norwegian background she would call it the “Tirteen Towns” and would say “two tirdy” for two thirty. She also talked about “trading” at such and such a store instead of “shopping.” She was involved to some extent with the Republican Party in Fosston. When Fosston had their centennial celebration she dressed up in a pioneer dress and bonnet she made. I (Judy Stahl) have the outfit. She belonged to the Lutheran Church and women's church circle. I don't recall that she ever owned a car but vaguely recall my father James Lade talking about her driving so maybe she drove in the past.
In later years Julia often came to see us in Grand Forks, ND, sometimes by bus, and also came to see us in Valley City. She would bring both my brother Burt and I (Judy Stahl) gifts on our birthdays to prevent sibling rivalry or favoritism. She come at Christmas and at other times and we would visit her in Fosston also.
She would visit at our lake cabin on Lake Beltrami. When she was probably in her 70s he developed a benign inoperable tumor behind her ear which was treated with radiation in Fargo which resulted in her losing some hair. It had caused ringing in the ear and problems with balance. This wasn't entirely successful and she had trouble with balance from then on or possibly balance problems were due to a slight stroke which hospitalized her for about a week in June 1962 at age 75. She entered rest home in Fosston, MN, in 1962 and was there 9 years. On 4 JUL1963 at age 76 she was using a cane and possibly had been using one since the stroke. Fosston's old hospital had by then been converted into a rest home and could be seen across the street out the window in the back of her old apartment. We would visit Julia in her small room in the rest home and she would refer to “the old lady who was in the room across the hall” who was probably younger than she was. I don't recall that she was ever in a wheel chair, at least not at first, but toward the end she became bedridden. [My brother Burt had been born at that hospital (now rest home) and perhaps my father James also. One of my earliest memories (age 3) is looking out the window at the hospital when Grandma Julia was taking care of me as my mother was in the hospital giving birth to him.]
At times James and Anne Lade would take her out of the rest home to their lake cottage at Lake Beltrami near Bemidji, MN. On her 80th birthday my dad James Lade was going to give her a boat ride but due to being unstable on her feet she fell off the dock into the water. Luckily the water was as warm as bathwater by the shore and not very deep and James was able to rescue her. She may never have gotten a boat ride after all as she had to put on some dry clothes and was somewhat traumatized by the accident but she probably had quite an adventure to tell her friends back in Fosston.
James and Anne Lade took her for a ride to Lengby Lake near Fosston, MN, for a picnic which was one of the last times she was able to get out for a car ride. By that time she was quite frail but could still walk and was able sit at the picnic table. [I, Judy Stahl, have a few pictures of her on that day.]
Julia was in bedridden by the time my daughter Rosie was under six months old but was happy to see her great-granddaughter for the first (and last) time when my parents, Rosie and I visited her. She said something like,”This is my dream.” According to her death certificate she died at the Fosston Nursing Home of chronic congestive heart lesion (1 mo.) due to active sclerotic heart disease (many years) due to generalized arteriosclerosis and also was senile. She died while my folks were on a trip to Norway and I was on a trip to Hawaii with Rosie as my husband Duane was in Vietnam and had an R & R trip to Hawaii and having not seen Rosie who was six months old then. When I arrived home to my parent's home in Valley City where I was staying while Duane was in Vietnam, there was a letter or a note there saying that Grandma Julia had died and that her funeral had already been taken care of by the funeral home.
Funeral: 10 AM, 10 JUL 1971, Peterson Funeral Chapel, Fosston, MN, Bur. Hope Lutheran Cemetery, Fosston, MN, next to her husband, Burt, by a lilac tree, no markers. Sad to say, her close family members were not able to attend. [other info says Lanstad Cemetery which may be right as she went to Lanstad Church].