On the Mark: Companionship of cousins is a blessing

I feel lucky to belong to a huge extended family on both my parents' sides. I'm an "only girl" with two brothers. Our first, second and third cousins have made up for that.

I just spent part of a Sunday afternoon with my third cousin, Beth Wilson, the former music director at Cloquet High School. She's most recently completed a massive scanning of her father's photos, sending me a flash drive I am replicating for the dozens and dozens of cousins we have all over the U.S. (and even Guam!). I led Beth through some yoga poses, and she's helping me find my singing voice (all masked and distanced, of course).

Others were frequent childhood companions, such as second cousin Judy Grundman, the daughter of my Faribault mother's first cousin, Don. Her parents owned a small summer cabin near Center City, and we'd often be invited to spend the weekend there. Judy and I would fish for sunfish off the dock and swim to the raft. Her older brother, Donnie, taught us to water ski. Judy (now Peterson), a retired school teacher, lives in Grand Marais. We usually have a lovely evening with them once a year, along the North Shore.

On my mother's side, I have many cousins from the Irish Dillon family, some fifth-generation farmers in Faribault. Recently, on a trip home from the Mayo Clinic, I visited the lovely hillside cemetery where my mother's family are buried. I remembered it poised on a west-facing hill one can see from I-35. I contacted a third cousin I'd never met before, Debbie Gillon, whose family still farms on the land our immigrant ancestors bought in the 1830s. She met me at the cemetery, and afterwards we spent time together at her kitchen table, poring over our photo albums, gifts from our mothers.

Mother's two sisters never had children. But they lived a mile from us in Minneapolis and were what I happily call "my other two mothers." One was a classy women's clothing manager at Donaldsons - she included me in fashion shows as the token kid and paid me a whopping $5 for each show. The other was a terrific homemaker and great cook, and gifted me her beautiful baby grand piano when she departed for retirement life in Florida.

My father had only one sibling, Sidney Markusen, who lived in Esko, close to their Cromwell home where both boys grew up. Sid and his wife Laurel had four children, my only first cousins. We would periodically climb into our Plymouth and drive up to visit Grandpa and Sid's family.

The older girls, Martha and RuthAnn Markusen - though nine and 13 years younger than me - have become wonderful lifelong companions. When they were still finishing high school, we went on our first Boundary Waters canoe trip together; we have many funny stories about that! RuthAnn lived with me and my son David for several years in the 1980s, our "nanny" while I supported her completion of a master's degree in drug and alcohol abuse prevention. Martha has become an important character in my yearly life, as she and her husband arrive for a long summer, living in our grandparents' home (which is also my office), and sharing gardening, bike riding, political discussions and projects.

And then there are the surprise cousins. Our grandfather, Marinus "Renus" Markusen, had a sister named Bertha who moved to Los Angeles with her husband and three kids. She subsequently stopped writing, which distressed Renus greatly. Voilà! Several years ago, a California woman wrote that she thought her grandmother Bertha was our grandfather Renus' sister. "Wow!" I thought, immediately sad that he was no longer with us (nor was Bertha). When Grampa was still living, I had written to Jellinge in Denmark, where the local pastor wrote me back confirming my great-grandmother's burial site. My sister-in-law, an economic historian, did some research and found the Ellis Island records detailing the family's arrival.

On a conference trip to Salt Lake City, where one of Bertha's two daughters now lives, my two "found" second cousins entertained us at their home. For seven hours we pored over old letters, photos, stories, and speculations. Why had Bertha stopped writing to Renus? Well, said Susie, her husband had become abusive and threw one of their small boys down a flight of stairs. Bertha packed up an old jalopy, tied a milk cow behind it, and drove herself and her three boys to northern California. She became a teacher, never remarried (I'm not sure they divorced) and raised her boys to be the musicians that her father and brother had been, fathers to my two second cousins. What a joy!

A year or two later, the two women came to Minnesota. We toured Stillwater, where my grandmother grew up and where my father and his brother went to high school for several years while their dad, Renus, recovered from tuberculosis. We then drove to the Pine City area, where Renus and Bertha had lived in a rude cabin with their stepmother while their father, Hans, worked as a skilled carpenter in Minneapolis (and, to the farm's detriment and his wife's distress, drank up most of his wages). In the nearby Grasston cemetery, we found the impressive stone marking the graves of Danish immigrant Hans and his third wife, Elise.

And there's my cousin Heron, one of my dearest, whom I first encountered at one of the five year Wilson-Lee reunions we had. We've had many adventures together, and one summer. She came up to redo our Markusen house bathroom.

For me, it's been wonderful to share time with cousins, reminiscing, telling stories, gazing at photos, and experiencing the traits - both hereditary and acquired - handed down to us by our ancestors.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell.

Walli.