Mathilda Martinson was my great-great-aunt. She was born 1873 in Saunders County, Nebraska near Swedeburg and died 1946 in Ceresco, Saunders County, Nebraska. In between, she lived a fascinating life…
I am still in the middle of working on the John Martinson Project, but wanted to skip ahead to Mathilda because of some of the interesting information I found about her – her obituary mentioned that she had spent time in the Hawaiian Islands and I just had to figure out what that was all about.
Here is how Mathilda is related to me; she was the sister of my great-grandmother Hulda.
Mathilda was the fifth of seven children born to John (Jöns) and Nilla Martinson.1 She was born February 16, 1873 near Swedeburg. Mathilda was likely born in the sod house on the farm that her father had begun homesteading in 1870. Later a frame house was built, but even that house had dirt floors at first. She was confirmed at the Swedeburg Mission Church on March 4, 1888.
My best guess for the date of the family photo at left is about 1887, when Mathilda would have been 14 years old. The photo at right is dated about 1894, when Mathilda would have been about 21 years old.
In 1897, Mathilda’s next oldest sister Anna died of “brain fever”. Youngest sister Ida wrote a letter to Mathilda describing the circumstances of Anna’s death. I don’t have the envelope for the letter, but apparently Mathilda was living away from home at that time. At one time I thought Mathilda was in Chicago when the letter was written, but then I took a closer look at another photo we have of Mathilda.
This photo (at left) was taken at a portrait studio (“Dames and Dorsaz”) in Oakland, California sometime between 1895 and 1898. In this lovely photo, Mathilda is wearing fine clothes with a corsage and brooch on her neckline. (ChatGPT helped me with all the photo date approximations, using the information about the photographers and the styles of the clothing.)
We also find Mathilda in the 1900 census in Oakland, California. She is listed as a servant living with the Charles M. Cooke family.2
So what’s going on here?
It seems that Mathilda had become a domestic worker – a household maid or nanny or perhaps a combination of the two. At the turn of the century, having a Swedish maid was practically a status symbol among upper-class families. Employment agencies were able to help place Swedish women into well-paying domestic positions. Swedish farm girls from the midwest were especially sought after because they were believed to be hard-working and reliable. Mathilda certainly fit the profile.
And Mathilda had indeed found employment with an upper-class family…very upper-class. Charles M. Cooke was the son of Amos Starr Cooke, who was a missionary and the founder of Castle & Cooke. Castle & Cooke was one of the “big five” agricultural companies founded by missionary families in Territorial Hawaii in the mid-1800s. Castle & Cooke was the predecessor of the Dole Food Company. Just as an aside, in 1985 Castle & Cooke (by then no longer owned by the Cooke family) sold the entire island of Lanai to Oracle Company CEO Larry Ellison for $30 million.
In 1893, Charles Cooke was one of the co-founders of the Bank of Hawaii. He moved to California in 1894, intending to retire there, but in 1898 he returned to Hawaii to take over as president of the Bank of Hawaii.
Charles Cooke is one of those people who appears twice in the 1900 census. He appears in Oakland, California on June 7, 1900 with his wife, two children, and three servants (all Swedish, including Mathilda). He is also listed in Honolulu, Hawaii on June 13 with his son Richard and three Chinese servants.3 I don’t think it was possible at that time to get from Oakland to Honolulu in just 6 days. But this does point to the likely possibility that he and his family may have traveled back and forth between California and Hawaii, and I would guess that Mathilda went with them.
While in Honolulu, the family had a home on Beretania Street. Charles’ wife, Anna Rice Cook, was also a child of missionary parents. She collected quite a lot of fine art from all over the world and much of it was on display in their Honolulu home. She later donated her collection to the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which she founded.
The house was torn down in 1922 to make way for the new museum. But during the years she worked for the family, Mathilda would have stayed at the home shown at left, and would have been surrounded by Anna’s amazing art collection.
The Cooke and Rice families were also important to the history of the Punahoe School in Hawaii. Anna was born there, and the Cooke family donated funds for the school’s library in 1908.
Mathilda’s father, John Martinson, died in January, 1901. Mathilda made a claim against the estate for money she had loaned to her father.4 The probate papers show that a hearing was held to review the merits of her claim. Someday I will have to look around at the Saunders County Court House to see what more I can learn about that. I don’t know if her claim was contested or just overlooked in the initial inventory. In any event, her claim was approved, and she signed various papers associated with probate in March and April of 1901. One of the papers lists her residence as Swedeburg, Nebraska. So apparently her employment with the Cooke family had concluded by then.
I don’t know why she had lent money to her father, but I would assume the money had come from her years of employment with the Cooke family. I will take a closer look at John’s probate file at a later date.
I have looked high and low for Mathilda in the 1910 census and can’t find her anywhere. A small news item appeared in the July 11 Omaha-Posten (a Swedish language newspaper), stating that in Ceresco, “Miss Mathilda Martinson från Chicago har tillbringt sina ferier hos syskon och släktingar här omkrig ett par vekor” which translates as “Miss Mathilda Martinson from Chicago has spent her holidays with siblings and relatives here for a couple of weeks.”5
The Swedeburg church records show that she left their membership in 1918.6 She then appears on the membership rolls of the North Side Mission Church (later known as First Covenant Church) in Chicago.7
We do find her again in the 1920 Census in Chicago, Illinois. She is one of seven servants in the home of James P. Gardner, occupation “manufacturing”.8 James Patterson Gardner was the son of a Pennsylvania railroad engineer, and received degrees from Chicago University and the Union College of Law.9 He held important patents and worked for and owned various manufacturing companies in the Chicago area.
In 1930, Mathilda is a boarder in the home the Gust Poppas, a shoe repairman and head of a family of Greek immigrants. Mathilda’s occupation is listed as servant for a “private family”.10 So apparently she no longer has a live-in position.
We have a picture of Mathilda taken in 1933. The inscription around the edge of the photo says, “A Century of Progress 1833 1933”. This means the photo was a commemorative souvenir from the Century of Progress World’s Fair. Gosh I would love to travel back in time and see this art-deco themed event – complete with the arrival of Zeppelin airship and the very first All-Star Baseball Game which was held at Comiskey Park.
Mathilda, now 60 years old, got all dressed up for what looks like a hot summer day. She looks pretty hip and put-together considering it was during the depth of the Great Depression.
She is also missing from the 1940 census. I believe she was still living in Chicago at that time.
Searching in the Ceresco News for “Mathilda Martinson” from 1920 onward, we see that she returned home almost on an annual basis to visit friends and family. In 1938, she spent the whole summer in the Ceresco area, apparently rotating between the homes of her sisters Ellen, Hulda and Ida.
In August of 1940, she spent a week with Lawrence and Clarinda Rudeen (my grandparents) and family.
Her visits were so numerous, I couldn’t begin to catalog them all. But of course the Ceresco News was on top of it. Here’s a typical new item from January 3, 1945:11
I bet that was a delicious dinner and I can almost taste Grandma’s Swedish rye bread which was no doubt on the menu. I imagine my eight-year-old dad would have enjoyed playing with cousin Charles Nelson that afternoon, a welcome reward after Sunday dinner with the grown-ups.
The last picture I have for “Aunt Tillie” is from 1943. She is about 70 years old, holding her great-nephew Richard Ahlquist. Richard was the son of Zeth and Frances (Hanson) Ahlquist. The photo was probably taken in Chicago, where Frances and Zeth lived. I believe she was still working as a domestic at the time.
I don’t know what kind of savings she could have accumulated in her later years. Social Security was a new-fangled thing and I can’t find any evidence that she applied for benefits. I imagine she worked for as long as she was physically able.
She returned to Ceresco for good in late 1945 and moved in with Joe and Ruth (Mostrom) Nelson. Ruth was her niece, the daughter of Ida (Martinson) Mostrom.
She is listed in almost every edition of the Ceresco News from that point forward – a busy social calendar, calling on friends and family and accepting dinner and luncheon invitations.
She died unexpectedly on May 21, 1946.12
Newspaper legal notices show that she left a will with her nephew Carl Mostrom named as Executor. Wills from this period are not available online, so I will have to pay a visit to the Saunders County Court House sometime to see what kinds of assets she had and who inherited them.
This was fun to research, especially the connection to the missionary families in Hawaii Territory. I wish I had asked my great-aunt Esther and my aunt Florence about Mathilda – many stories now left untold, I’m afraid.
1 Swedeburg Mission Church (Saunders County, Nebraska, USA), U.S. Evangelical Covenant Church Member Records, 1868-1970, p. 15 (image 21 of 169), “Jöns Mårtensson family”; digital image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 15 March 2024).
2 1900 U.S. Census, Oakland Ward 5, District 0373, Page A 10, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7602/records/3218764.
3 1900 U.S. Census, Honolulu District, Hawaii Territory, Enumeration District 9, Sheet 14, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7602/records/74669666
4 Probate of John Martinson, “Saunders, Nebraska, United States records,” images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QHV-9Q7F-J36M : Jul 6, 2025), image 1 of 59; . Image Group Number: 108491414
5 Omaha-Posten, Wed, Jul 19, 1911 Page 2
6 Swedeburg Mission Church, ibid.
7 Ancestry.com. U.S., Evangelical Covenant Church, Swedish American Church Records, 1868-1970 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2017. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/61586/records/149595
8 1920 U.S. Census, Chicago Ward 6, Cook (Chicago), Illinois; Roll: T625_309; Page: 7A; Enumeration District: 304, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6061/records/72612857
9 Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, http://livinghistoryofillinois.com/pdf_files/Historical%20Encyclopedia%20of%20Illinois,%20with%20Commemorative%20Biographies,%20Vol%202,%201926.pdf, p. 685
10 1930 U.S. Census, Chicago, Cook, Illinois; Page: 23B; Enumeration District: 1706; FHL microfilm: 2340223, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6224/records/84751641
11 Ceresco News, Thu, Jan 03, 1946 Page 5, https://www.newspapers.com/image/693712602/
12 Ceresco News, Thu, May 30, 1946 Page 1, https://www.newspapers.com/image/693713781/
Very well done! Thank you!
I remember sleep-overs with Charles Nelson when “Aunt Tillie” was visiting from Chicago.