May Larson, my high school speech teacher taught us that a good speech contained three parts; a short description of the speech, the body of the speech and an ending or conclusion.  I believe the same is true of writing a story.  Therefore, here is what I hope to accomplish with these documents.  This is a family history of my ancestors going back to my great grandparents, the migration of my grandparents to Minnesota and their descendants.  My stories normally contain two parts.  The first part are facts about their lives from research of official records (birth, marriage, death, newspaper stories, obituaries, etc.).  The second part of their stories is my memories of them which I’ve called “Les Bakke Remembers”.  As with all families, we had good things that happened and not so good things.  I’ve chosen to emphasis the good and not the not so good.  For instance, a cousin of mine then a 30 something married man had an affair with a high school senior woman.  Of course, my family blamed the woman, but I believe any affair has two willing participants.  No, I will not reveal their names nor my story source.  I will include some embarrassing stories, mostly about myself.  See the chapter titled My Favorite Niece.  Also, one of my uncles went to western Canada to mine for gold.  According to my source he spent too much time in the saloons and too little in the gold field.  He returned broke.  I take full responsibility for any errors.

Now for the structure of the story of the Bakke and Gast families.  Each person has his or her own chapter; some are very short and some longer.  My own section is very long, because I know my own story the best.  Happy reading.