My Parents: Memoirs of New World Icelanders

By: Birna Bjarnadóttir and Finnbogi Guðmundsson

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Synopsis: My Parents: Memoirs of New World Icelanders is a collection of essays written by second-generation Icelandic immigrants in North America, describing the lives of their parents. Originally collected in 1956 by Dr. Finnbogi Gumundsson, the first Chair of Icelandic at the University of Manitoba, seven of the fourteen memoirs are translated here from Icelandic to English. They offer a rare first-hand look into the lives of New World immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readers are invited straight into the heart of these people’s lives, from social evenings spent reading poetry and the sagas, to the daily struggles to prepare the land and build homes. A prevailing sense of community emerges from the writers’ stories, showing how Icelandic culture and tradition sustained the immigrants through hardship, illness, and isolation. My Parents also details some of the genealogy of the New World Icelanders who settled in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Minnesota.