Fractured Memories: A story of tolerance, integrity, and talents

Albert John Berge was an affable, honest, and hardworking man. He had a way with animals and with the crops he grew on his farm in eastern North Dakota. He also had an uncanny talent for reading the weather and an innate genius for mechanical issues. But AJ harbored mysterious secrets.

What his daughter Carolyn learned about her father’s childhood only became known to her surreptitiously. He had largely put his memories of growing up in a home where he was mistreated and neglected behind him. But there were other secrets at work within her father’s Norwegian family heritage that would take decades to uncover, secrets that would help explain why AJ was mistreated—and how he nonetheless became the kind, confident, and engaging man he grew up to be.

In Fractured Memories: A Story of Tolerance, Integrity, and Talents, Carolyn Rebholz unravels family mysteries and shares the inspiring story of how her father rose above his difficult childhood to become a beloved family man and valued community member. Providing historical background, reconstructions of events, and fond personal memories of family life in rural North Dakota during the 1950s, Rebholz offers a thought-provoking family memoir with an uplifting message about the sustaining power of love.

Carolyn Rebholz holds a BS in secondary teacher education from Valley City State University in North Dakota and a master’s in guidance and counseling from the University of Wisconsin, with postgraduate work in psychology at Indiana University and the University of Minnesota. She went on to become an educator and academic counselor in Edina, Minnesota.

This background gave her thirty years of experience in understanding the emotional levels of adolescents and young adults. Academic counseling in the US Federal Witness Protection Program has further enhanced her interaction and observation skills in working with students who are emotionally and physically separated from their families and friends as they attempt to build new lives. These insights permeate Fractured Memories.

Rebholz wrote the introduction to the book Eating Life Cereal with a Bigger Spoon Than Most, By Spenser J. Somers.

She currently lives in The Villages, Florida.