Background is important. So are parents.

Today I chose a new blog page background -- old books. I have read many old books in this adventure, and they deserve a lot of credit for everything I now know about my ancestors.

And I chose a new profile photo -- my parents. They are also my blog page background. Because of them, the stories I tell are mine to tell.

My father's father was a Baptist minister who was the son of Swedish immigrants. My father's mother was his second wife and married late in life. She came (primarily) from Puritan stock.  She was apparently quite formal and proper. On the other hand, her minister husband didn't even make his sons go to church, and he loved camping and playing practical jokes. Both of these grandparents were gone before I was born.

My mother's mother was the daughter of Norwegian immigrants. She was a lively 1920s flapper who worked as a sales clerk until she was an octogenarian. My mother's father was the son of German immigrants. He was a farmer-banker who turned to drink in the depression when he had to foreclose on his neighbors' farms. Their marriage failed, a fact that had a lasting effect on my mother in more ways than one. I knew my grandmother well. My grandfather was never mentioned.

My parents were very different from one another. They disagreed about many things when my sister and I were growing up. They didn't share the same views on politics. Or religion. Indeed, they debated religion every Sunday morning and debated politics every election cycle. But they did share views on parenting and family. And they loved each other. In fact, only recently I found -- buried in papers I was going to throw out -- 24 love letters written by my father to my mother when they were courting just after World War II. The letters went into a corner in my study when my father died in 1995, in a sealed metal box I thought contained only old bank statements. Anyone who knows me knows why it took almost 20 years for me to get to that old box!

Here is a sample letter, from a 27 year-old veteran going to school in Minneapolis on the GI bill to an 18 year old college freshman at St. Cloud State.

My mother was very clear about when she fell in love with my father. She was a child living in a small town and fell in love with the dashing young man who blew lovely smoke rings. My father's family teased him about this young girl who mooned over him. "Be nice to her," his uncles would say. Then he got engaged to someone else, went off to war, got a "Dear Jud" letter, came back a vet, and started dating my mother. He used to kid that he dated her so he could meet the other girls in the dorm. But if you read these letters, you get a much different story. He was quite smitten!

If you could read the second page of this letter, you would see that "Bill" was my dad's competition. I never ever heard about Bill. But clearly he lost out, my parents married, and my sister and I were born. That's how we inherited all of our fascinating dead relatives. Including mom and dad.You can visit them here in my family tree, searchable by name.