Follow
My grandfather, Herman Tofte was born on the Sunndalsfjord on the west coast of Norway in 1873. His name was taken (probably assigned at Ellis Island) from the family farm (Tofte bruk nr. 2) which had been in his family (according to the Norwegian farm books) since the mid-1500s. He immigrated to Minnesota, and then South Dakota, in the early 1880s. In 1897, he crossed the Chilkoot Pass and spent the next 11 years in Alaska where the town of Tofty, named for him, still exists.
My grandfather next traveled to South America where he mined gold and diamonds before meeting and marrying my grandmother, Caroline Menese, in British Guiana. He died of jungle fever in 1922 is is buried in Bartica, Guyana. My mother, Alma, was the eldest of his four children.