Minneapolis to California

                   Minneapolis to California

When my maternal grandparents split up in 1928, my grandmother and her three children took the train from Minneapolis to California. They moved in with her sister (my great aunt) and brother-in-law (my great-uncle) in the abandoned Vallemar train station in what was then Rockaway Beach but is now Pacifica. My great-uncle built a small addition - in the back, I think - to house the four of them.

 Other than that, the station today, now a restaurant, is mostly original. My mother was four when they moved there, the youngest of the children in the photo. (The tallest child is a cousin.) My grandmother and her sister are the adults in the second photo. There was mostly vacant land all around the station. 

They would live there for four years, eventually ending up in San Carlos where my grandmother lived for the rest of her life. P.S. I just added a 1976 photo of the four who took the train from Minneapolis. My mother is on the left. The three children all survived and thrived in California and produced a total of ten children.