Emma Trueblood Anderson
Sometimes, you come across a person whose story is so tragic that it seems almost unbelievable. In Ephraim’s history, one such figure is a woman named Emma Alfredette Trueblood Anderson.
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Emma was born on February 14, 1878, to Ingeborg “Emma” Goodletson Trueblood and Silas Trueblood. Her mother was a daughter of Thomas and Kjesten Goodletson (of the Goodletson Cabin). Six months after the birth of Emma and her twin brother, Thomas Alfred, their mother died of a stroke complicated by sunstroke and diabetes. Emma, Thomas, and her two older siblings, George and Louisa, were all sent to live with other Ephraim families. Thomas and George lived with their maternal grandparents, Louisa moved in with a maternal aunt, and Emma was sent to live with Andrew and Mattie (Mary) Johnson.
When Emma was 19 years old, she became pregnant by Frank Valentine. Frank, married, was age forty-two. (In the 1880s, Frank and Anna Valentine rented rooms in the Iverson House at the same time as Moravian Pastor Anders Petterson and Anna, his wife.) Church records report a confession by Frank Valentine. Emma and Frank’s son, Andrew, was born in 1898 and adopted by the Johnsons (Emma’s adoptive parents).
In 1900, Emma married Nel Anderson and the couple had five children. Tragedy struck her life again in 1908 her son Andrew drowned off the Anderson Dock at the age of ten. He is buried in the Ephraim Moravian Cemetery and is one of a number of young boys who drowned at the Anderson Dock. They include a son of Thomas and Kjesten Goodletson, Emma's maternal grandparents and a son of Greta and Aslag Anderson. Then, just a year later, Emma’s father, Silas Trueblood, drowned off a dock in Mackinac, MI.
In 1918, at the age of forty, Emma contracted flu in Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918. She died, leaving behind her husband and five remaining children, one of an estimated 50 million people killed worldwide. Emma and her son Andrew are buried in the Ephraim Moravian Cemetery.
Submitted by Curator and Marketing Coordinator Emily Irwin in 2018.
