Lögberg-Heimskringla - 14.01.2005, Qupperneq 8

8 • Lögberg-Heimskringla • Friday 14 January 2005
PHOTO: STEINÞÓR GUÐBJARTSSON
Steini and Runa Palsson at their farm close to Lundar. His parents emigrated from
Iceland and homesteaded there and this is where Steini was born.
About a century ago, Jóhann Hjörtur Pálsson and his
wife Kristín Þorsteinsdóttir homesteaded by Stone Lake,
about 4 miles east of Lundar, Manitoba. Their youngest
son Thorstein (Steini) was born in 1920 at the farm and
lives there with his wife Runa. Steinþór Guðbjartsson
paid them a visit.
Hard winter conditions
can make it difficult to
get to Steini’s farm, and
one can only imagine how it
was before Highway No. 6 and
road 419 were built. But noth-
ing stopped the Palssons in the
past and they are happy where
they are now. “We have good
neighbours who look after us
like their own, and they make
sure that everything is in order,”
Steini says.
Love and hardship
Hjörtur Pálsson was born
in Hólasveit in Iceland in 1873.
After his father Páll Jónasson
died, his möther Sigurbjörg Hel-
gadóttirremarried Skarp-héðinn
Isleifsson. She was left a widow
again with three children from
the first marriage and two from
the second one. In 1898 Hjörtur
emigrated from Iceland to Win-
nipeg with his mother and his
younger halfbrother.
Two years later, Sigur-
björg’s other two sons followed
them but the only daughter
stayed behind. Later in 1900
Hjörtur went back to Iceland
and lived there for a year be-
fore he retumed with his future
bride, Kristín Þorsteinsdóttir
from Húsafell in Borgarfjörður.
Three years later, at the end of
1904, they moved to Lundar.
They followed the railway line
to its end. The roughly 100 km
joumey from Winnipeg to Oak
Point, in a wagon pulled by a
team of oxen, took three days in
bitterly cold weather. After that
their only guide was to follow
the North Star, according to Ev-
elyn K. Thorvaldson’s book My
Amma and Me.
Runa’s matemal grand-
parents, Ólafur and Sigþrúður
Magnússon, emigrated from
Iceland with her mother Guðrún
in 1905. Runa was bom in Win-
nipeg in 1927, the youngest of
10 children. Steini’s parents had
11 children, four boys and sev-
en girls. He was born in 1920
and is the only one left.
WWII united them
In 1941 Steini joined the
Canadian Armed Forces and
was stationed in England and
France. “It went very good,” he
says, until his mission was cut
short. “I was wounded twice
there, the first time just slightly
but the second time knocked me
right out of it just before the war
ended in 1945.”
Steini and Runa had met
briefly before the war, but the
war brought them together and
they got married on October
12, 1945. “I was still in school
when he went to the war,” Rúna
recalls, and describes how she
got to know her husband-to-be.
“The names of the soldiers in
the area were put in a hat. Each
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