A Lutheran pastor heard a soothing sound after traveling through farm country to check on newly widowed Anna Lindquist Knock in the summer of 1893. Her husband had died of pneumonia at 47, leaving her to raise 10 children alone on their Iowa farm.

"Her pastor often drove out the three miles to see how she was getting along, and would find her singing at the top of her voice," Knock's daughter, Selma Youngquist, wrote in a 1970 family history. "He said he came away more comforted than when he arrived."

It wasn't Anna's first bout of grief. She was just 5 when her mother died back in Sweden in 1853. Forty years and a journey across the sea later, Anna Knock leaned on prayer and song to get by — and she passed that love of music down to her kids.

One son, Carl, had a beautiful tenor voice and organized choirs for men and women at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., where eight Knock children eventually enrolled. Granddaughter Eunice became a popular soprano soloist and church organist in California, and many of Anna's descendants were trained in music.

It was a pity, Selma wrote, that their mother "was never given the chance to study voice. It is no wonder that all her children took their turn at singing solos and in choruses and choirs."

I learned about Anna Knock from her great-granddaughter, Louise Udden Burton, a New Hope architect who was almost apologetic about sharing Anna's story and what she calls the "mostly accurate, somewhat saccharine" family history penned by her great-aunt Selma, the second youngest of Anna's children. Burton's father, the late Lutheran pastor Laurel Udden, once told her she was named Louise because that was Anna Knock's middle name.

"Maybe true, maybe not," said Burton, 69, whose great-grandmother died in 1925 at 77 — a quarter-century before Burton was born and when the family's stories began to fade. "I am well aware that a family of pastors has considerable less cachet with the typical Star Tribune readers than a family of lawyers and teachers!" But history belongs as much to song-filled immigrant mothers as prominent lawyers.

Born in 1848 in the Swedish village of Linneback, Anna Louise Ericksdotter was the second youngest of 11 children. According to Selma's account, Anna was walking — and singing — in the woods near Linneback in June 1869, when she sat down to map out her future. She'd been passed among older siblings since her mother died.

Her widowed father hoped she would marry a local fellow named Nels. But emigrating to Chicago, her brother Erick predicted, could mean up to $8 a month sewing button holes in men's suits. She'd earned only enough that year for material for one dress, catching blood in a plate for an elderly neighbor during the medicinal practice of "koppning" or bloodletting.

"That is something I will never have to do if I go to Chicago," Selma quoted Anna as saying. "If my mother had not died when I was 5 years old my life would have been different." Admiring her mother's "spunk," Anna decided at age 21 to go with brothers Erick and Olaf to Chicago, where they took the name Lindquist and she found work in a tailor shop.

On Jan. 23, 1875 — nearly six years after her arrival — she married Carl Gustaf Knock in Evanston, Ill. He also had emigrated from Sweden in 1869, working on farms and in coal mines before moving to Chicago to work as a carpenter.

After their first child Hannah was born, the family moved to Iowa, where Carl farmed and became a respected Clay Township clerk in Webster County.

His early death "was a great shock to mother," Selma wrote, with Anna suddenly in charge of 10 kids and 160 acres of farm fields. "Her faith carried her through."

Anna was "rather Puritanical on some scores," Selma noted. She required her children to kneel at their chairs during morning and evening prayers, which came "as regular as meals." She banned the use of scissors and sewing on Sundays, preferring instead to read sermons to the children and sing.

"Mother had a good voice and loved to sing," wrote Selma. "Even after father's death mother would find comfort in her singing."

But Anna Knock also made sure the children had fun between prayers. In winter she'd often have dinner ready at 4:30 p.m. so the kids could eat early, leaving plenty of time for pond ice skating until dusk.

After attending her son Gustaf's 1905 Gustavus graduation, Anna sold her livestock and machinery at a public auction and moved to St. Peter, Minn., in January 1906 just before she turned 58. Knock spent most of her last 20 years in St. Peter. When she died in 1925, the Gustavian yearbook called her "a splendid Christian character, a mother wrapped in her faith and in her family.

"That her children might have the opportunity to obtain an education, she sold her farm," the Gustavian said. "Love kept her family together as one."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.