The Lindgren Family
as told by Nels
Nels Lindgren was born in Osterlund, Province of Jamtland, Sweden. His father was a railroad engineer. Nels was the youngest of five children, three boys and two girls.
One of his sisters, Fannie, married Evert Lundberg and came to Canada in 1925to the Bull River area when it was a booming town. He was a blacksmith and later got work at the mine in Kimberley. They had two daughters, Eva and Doris. Eva was born in Sweden and Doris was born in Kimberley. Eva married Alf Johannsen, a well known skier in the area, and they had one son Michael. He is a heavy duty mechanic for the C.N.R. shops in Vancouver. Doris married Dick Schritt of Burns Lake. They had two children, Carla and Ricky.
In the mid twenties, Nels' mother passed away. A depression hit Sweden and jobs were impossible to get so he came to Kimberley, where he stayed with his sister for a short time. He moved into the Townsite bunkhouses where he lived from 1927to 1931.His first job was with the electrical crew on the line gang, with Red Kirby his boss. When he began work in the Electric shop, a fellow countryman, Ole Lindquist, helped him learn English.
Nels tells a story about the Chinese laundryman that did his wash. When Nels tried to coax him into mending his socks, the reply was "little hole no matter, big hole no good" and shrugged it off.
Nels became ill and spent two years in the Sanitarium at Tranquille. He married a nurse, Dagmar Anderson, in 1934. She had trained in Cranbrook and was nursing in Kimberley. They have one daughter, Anne Marie, who also became a nurse. She married Frank Keely who owns a sporting goods store in Invermere. She still works part time as a nurse in the Invermere hospital. They have three children: Kim, Linda and David. Dagmar died in 1943 and in 1952 Nels married Anna Moberg, a widow from Creston.
Nels was on the Workmans Co-op Committee when Harry Nicholson was the chairman and he was the first representative from the Electric shop. He worked in the Electric shop at the Mine until he retired in 1967. His speciality was rewinding armatures and repairing electric motors.
He is a member of the Masonic Lodge and his hobbies are curling in winter and golf and gardening in the summer.
