LARSEN & ARROL

 LARSEN, Karl "Charlie", son of LARSEN, Christen & ANDERSEN, Karen Marie.

!Karl Larsen left Tolstrup Denmark about 1911 at the age of 24 and set sail from the port of Aalborg for Canada.  He vowed not to return until he saved enough money to buy the hotel in which he had worked in Tolstrup.  The first news his family heard from him was in a letter in 1915. They were delighted to know he had reached Canada. This was also the last time that they ever heard from him until his daughters  visited Denmark in 1982.

LARSEN, Margaret Ellen, daughter of  LARSEN, Karl "Charlie" & . ARROL, Minnie Alexander.

Margaret's life sketch, by Gordon Hynes. at her memorial in Boise Idaho.

I’m the only one of my siblings here today. The rest will be at her memorial in British Columbia. My Aunt Bernice is here, however, so I hope she’ll forgive me if some of my recollections are sugar coated or inaccurate. 

Margaret was born on a beautiful fall day in September of 1926 in a small town in western Canada. Her father, an immigrant from Denmark worked on the Railroad as a conductor. Her mother, an immigrant from Scotland, stayed at home to raise the children. Margaret was the sixth child to come to Charlie, as they called him, and Minnie. There were four boys older than she and a sister who tragically died when she was struck by a car before mom was born. So that effectively made her the eldest girl in the family. Over the next ten years, three more boys and four more girls were born to Charlie and Minnie. Unfortunately, Minnie died due to complications of child birth when the last was born. This lack of a mother in those pre-teen and teenage years had a profound impact on mom. She had to be the responsible big sister to all those little ones. On top of that, Grandpa Charlie’s job took him out of town for days at time. As a result, I’m sure there was lots of mischief that went on when dad was not at home. The house keeper, Mrs. Castles, obviously did what she could, but in a house full of kids there were always challenges. Mom loved to tell the story of how her older brother, Billie, would sneak out onto the roof of the veranda at night, then stand outside the bedroom window of the girls and make scary noises. She swears that her father, more than a 100 miles away on the railroad could hear the girls screaming for Daddy. 

The great depression began shortly after mom was born and lasted until she was in her early teens. As a result of that and twelve children, their family was poor, but then, so was everyone else. They always had enough to eat and mom loved to tell us that Grandpa Charlie always said that if there was room in the heart there was room at the table for one more guest. Our favorite story about that time is the Christmas when money was really tight and there was barely enough to make ends meet. So Grandpa Charlie explained to the two oldest girls that since times were hard perhaps it would be OK if Santa new dolls to girls who were more needy than they were. Instead, he took their dolls from the prior year, gave them baths, then washed and pressed their doll clothes and put those two old but refreshed dolls under the tree. I guess I’m not as big hearted as my mother, but she swears it was the best gift ever. 

Living in a small town, it seemed that everybody was involved in everything. They all attended the Presbyterian church, sang in choirs, skated on frozen ponds, and played with the neighborhood kids who were a diverse ethnic makeup. Mom was the drum major for the local girls bugle band, which is still an active entity today. A couple of years ago she attended a 75th anniversary reunion for everyone who had been in that band over the years. 

The war came along when mom was a teenager and her older brother went off to Europe to fight in that war. It was a struggle of a time for everyone, but the community pulled together. For a few summers when she was late in her teens, mom worked in a small resort a hundred miles or so from home. It was there that she worked with a girl name Lillian who had two very handsome uncles who happened to be close in age to them. At a community dance, my mother met Tommy Hynes, a handsome young man who was in the military. She did her first year of college through the local high school and then about a year later in august of 1945, she and Tommy were married. Mom was just shy of her 19th birthday but my dad was already 20. They set up their home in Cranbrook where mom had grown up. In February of 1947, Terry, the first of four sons, was born. Not long after they were married they moved to North Vancouver for work and while there, number 2 son Rick was born in 1950. Then it was back to Cranbrook where Dale was born in 1951, then back to north Van again where I was born many years later. 

Just prior to when I was born she was reintroduced to the Mormon church by a woman she worked with – I think this was when she was a telephone switchboard operator. Her sister had joined the church some years before, married a Mormon missionary and moved to northern Utah. So mom studied the gospel through the spring and summer and then after I was born in July, she was baptized in September. Those early years in the church were a struggle for everyone since it was such a small community of saints. My mom was immediately immersed in the church along with her children, but my dad, who was working in another town at this time, did not join the church. 

Not long after that she decided that in order to support the family she had better go back to school. So taking classes at night and during the summer, over the next few years 

she completed two more years of college and got a teaching certificate. She started teaching school when I was four or five. 

In 1963 Tommy and Marg moved the family to a small town called Kelowna. It was a paradise kind of a place to grow up. She got a job there teaching in a rural school that had grades one through seven in two classrooms. That was an adventure, but they loved her and she loved being there, although sometimes in the winter her car would be the first one plowing the road to get out to the school. 

The summer we moved to Kelowna, another family with kids moved into the LDS branch there and the population of the church literally doubled. There was no meeting house so we rented space in The elks hall, the odd fellows hall, and a little non-denominational church when their services were done. But we were all working towards having our own building. We did all kinds of things to raise funds for that little church building and in the spring of 1965 we broke ground on the first part of a meeting house. It would have a multipurpose room, a small kitchen, about 5 classrooms and a bishops office. Through that summer we went to the construction site every day and worked on building that church along with a half dozen construction service missionaries and other volunteer moms and kids. It was completed the next March and by that time the branch probably had 50 or 60 people attending regularly. 

As you can see, once mom was into the church, it became the central focus of her life. She was truly converted. During her life, I’m pretty sure she served in every calling a woman can have within a ward and many in the stake – except for ward pianist. While doing all that, she worked full time as a school teacher and raised us four boys on her own much of the time. My father worked out of town a lot until the late 1960’s and then passed away in 1975. In 1977 she married for a second time and got to take over raising a daughter who was 14 when they married. That is another story all together. Unfortunately, in 1983 her second husband, Wally Schmidt died in a car accident. Mom kept soldiering on. She worked until they offered her early retirement in 1986 and then planned a quiet life of gardening and visiting grandkids who she loved. I must diverge and let you know that she loved to sew and knit. It seemed like almost every 

year she would make a new dress for Christmas for all of her grand-daughters (only seven by the time she retired). 

In may of 1987 she left for a mission in the Philippines. She was called as a regular proselyting missionary with the addition of welfare service responsibilities. She spend half her mission in the barrios of Quezon City and then half in a refugee camp teaching rudimentary English and American culture to Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees who were age 55 or older or had some handicap. It was the highlite of her life and I’ll share a few thoughts from her on this a little later. 

Upon her return, she began serving in the Seattle temple. To do this, she traveled to Seattle for a week, worked at least four shifts during that time, then drove the 300 miles back home at the end of the week. While working there, she met Sam Rey who lived in Elmer City Washington. You’d think that a woman in her mid sixties might be done with marriage after two husbands worth, but Mom decided to accept Sam’s proposal and they were married in that same Seattle temple in July of 1990. They moved to Elmer City (only a four hour drive away) and continued to work in the temple one week a month until they were reassigned to the Columbia River temple in 2002. Oh yeah, after being married for a year, they left and served for 18 months as temple workers in Santiago Chile, another wonderful missionary experience for both of them. After a few years of serving in That Temple, mom’s health prevented her from continuing that service, but Sam continued to work there as a sealer until 2008. 

In 2010, due to health reasons, they moved to Boise where they have been a tremendous blessing in our life for the last five years. 

In her patriarchal blessing, mom was told that although she did not have daughters of her own, she would be as a mother to many young women. I remember this prophecy being fulfilled over and over again in the years since. Younger women seemed to gravitate towards her and she mentored many of them in the gospel and in the classroom. One woman who started teaching with mom fresh out of college described her as being the second most important woman in her life other than her mother. I can probably, without difficulty, name 10 or 15 women she has had this kind of influence on 

and I know there are many others. I looked though a journal from her mission to the Philippines, where she had the other missionaries and converts write a message to her. Almost without fail they speak of her kindness, love, generosity, sense of fun and her energy. She truly was a remarkable woman who served well and was an example to all about her. She brightened lives and lifted spirits up. She was and is and always will be a shining example of the gospel and enduring to the end. 

 Written by her son,  Gordon William Hynes



Larsen Family Book PDF