Can you identify the WDAY Radio musicians in this photo? Carol Schmidt, who found this among family mementoes, would like to have their names. Maybe one of them is a member of her family.
Carol, who now lives outside of Pelican Rapids, Minn., writes that she was born in Valley City, N.D., lived there only six months, then moved with her family to various North Dakota cities.
She says the Rathje and Streck families, who someone in this photo may be related to and who are working with her on identifying the people in it, lived in Barnes County, N.D., and now live in Montana.
While going through old family pictures, of which this musicians’ photo is one, Carol found others which she says “present quite the mysteries.”
For example, she has a picture of a nurse named Olga Goplen.
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Carol did research on her and found she was born in Wisconsin in 1892, graduated from the Lutheran Hospital nursing school in LaCrosse, Wis., was a visiting nurse in Gale, Wis., in 1919 and showed up in the Spokane, Wash., 1935 census. She died in Spokane in 1982, and her name was still Goplen.
“I have absolutely no idea how she is related to our family (either in the Griggs County, N.D., or Barnes County branches),“ Carol writes, “or why her picture showed up in my grandmother’s attic. I am only guessing that one of the Goplens from the Hannaford, N.D., area gave the picture to one of my great-uncles as a matchmaking effort. Too funny,” she adds.
If you have an item of interest for this column, mail it to Neighbors, The Forum, Box 2020, Fargo, ND 58107, fax it to 701-241-5487 or email blind@forumcomm.com.
