The children’s story moved the Swedish community of Providence. By Saturday a mass meeting had been called for Monday night at the Swedish Methodist Church on Friendship Street to find them a home.
Transcription
The text is copied as printed. Words in [square brackets] are my corrections of printer’s errors.
MASS MEETING TO CONSIDER LITTLE STOWAWAYS’ PLIGHT
Swedish Residents to Act in Behalf of Benson Children.A mass meeting, to consider a way to assise [assist] Bertha and John Benson, the Swedish immigrant children now detained at Ellis Island, to make their home in this city, has been called at the Swedish Methodist Church on Friendship street for Monday evening.
This action has been taken by Swedish residents of Providence after the discovery that Carl Benson, the children’s uncle, died here last June. Upon their arrival in New York several days ago as stowaways on a steamer from Gothenburg, Sweden, the youngsters, 15 and 13 years old, respectively, said that they had gone to Sweden with their mother when their father died in Worcester about a year ago.
The mother, they claimed, had failed to find support in Sweden and had been placed in an asylum, but they had decided to return to America.
It is hoped that at the mass meeting there will be present representatives of every Swedish church and society in the city and also persons not of Swedish affiliations who are interested in the plight of the little stowaways.
The Evening Bulletin, Saturday, December 27, 1919, page 5
Notes
The meeting never took place. By Monday two Swedish families had offered homes, and it was cancelled.
When did their father die?
This story says the children went to Sweden “when their father died in Worcester about a year ago.” That is wrong. His Massachusetts death certificate shows that John Peter Benson died on February 26, 1915, nearly five years before, as the Bulletin of December 22 and 23, the New York Evening World and the Boston Post said. The reporter may have confused the father’s death with the mother’s last voyage to Sweden early in 1919.