Here’s an important [well, at least important to me and my family] photo that I now have stored at Photobucket.
This is a picture of the Hotel Pauly in downtown Minneapolis. The photo was taken in 1911, but the hotel looked much the same in 1925, by which time it was the oldest operating hotel in the city.
My father was found in a room at the Hotel Pauly on June 6, 1925. He was approximately 2 weeks old. According to the front-page newspaper article in the Minneapolis Journal, there was a note pinned to his “tiny dress”:
“I have four children, my husband is dead and I cannot work. Please find a good home for my baby boy. His heartbroken mother, Mrs. Mattson.”
At the time, there were thousands of visitors in town, all there for the Norwegian Centennial celebration, commemorating 100 years of emigration to the US from Norway. Every hotel room in town was booked. The newspaper article went on to say that “the mother checked out of the hotel earlier that day and mingled with the Centennial throngs”.
My Swedish immigrant grandparents adopted him a few weeks later. He never wanted to know about his birth family, but after his death at the age of 54 my sister and I started searching for clues to who “Mrs. Mattson” was and where she came from. Today, 25 years after my father’s death, we still don’t know.
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