While searching the 'net for something else, I ran across this blurb about my maternal grandfather. I knew from oral family history that he had been a very active member of the local Holstein-Friesian Association (later the Holstein Association). He would have been 31 years old at the time of this story - the archetypal "Norwegian bachelor farmer" joked about so often by Garrison Keillor.
Losing 30 of 40 cattle to tuberculosis would have been a major financial blow, and may be one reason why it was another 6 years before at age 37 he would be able to marry my grandmother. These early-generation immigrant Norwegians were a resilient lot, and I was not surprised to see a report further down in the same dairy newspaper that at a subsequent meeting of the Goodhue County Farmers' Progressive Association, grandpa Finseth had presented a paper entitled "My Experience with Tuberculosis."
Perhaps it's from him that I inherited my gene for teaching.
Wikipedia has a good entry on bovine tuberculosis.
