Publisher's Synopsis
Erling E. Boe, the adopted son of Emmads E. Boe and Minda Hjermstad Boe, grew up in Finley, North Dakota, certain of his Norwegian roots and contented with the good fortune that life had bestowed on him. Then, after retiring from the Ivy League university where he worked for nearly fifty years, he began a search to learn about his birth parents and the circumstances that led them to give him up for adoption.Erling's Journey reveals the absorbing immigrant sagas of the family that he knew from childhood and the sagas of the new family that he discovered late in life. It also tells his own saga, from the small Midwestern town where he started out, through his college and Navy years, to his successful career at the University of Pennsylvania, including the impact of his surprise discovery that he was actually born a Meier, and descended from German roots.The sagas highlight the dreams, hardships, and accomplishment of immigrants from Europe to America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of these inspiring stories are narrated by the hardy women who were part of the mass migration that settled in North Dakota and helped build the American Dream.
