4Each year millions of people search for clues about where they came from and who they are. That's where his story begins. Urged on by his mother's advancing Alzheimer's, he turned to her aging siblings for the family stories only they knew, before they too faded into the firmament. Over hours of shared laughter, tears, and dark coffee, he learned that his mother was the personification of the classic American myth: a child of Swedish immigrants, born in a log cabin, delivered by a midwife, she walked two miles through the snow to a one room school. Her parents struggled as homesteaders in the decimated forests of Minnesota's far north and on the unforgiving plains of northeastern Montana. They faced the threats of poverty, drought, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, and the Great Depression with stoic courage. Theirs is an American story of hope, hardship, and determination that spans the first half of the twentieth century, an era that rewove the fabric of our country. For him, it was a personal journey of heartache, inspiration, and the discovery of what it means to be family.