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"Obama's constitutional eligibility is probably the least important issue in the United States right now..."
-Michele Bachmann

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Many politicans do it, and some get caught at it, but to me it's so childish, when the tiniest bit of knowledge or research proves them false, just as you said.

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Michele Bachmann Lies About Her Own Family History To Sound More Iowan

Here's the transcript:

"...I don't know how many of you know, but I was born in Iowa. I was born in Waterloo, Iowa, and grew up in Waterloo. I grew up in Cedar Falls. And actually, I'm not just an Iowan, I'm a very special kind of Iowan. I'm an 'Iwegian.' Now, who knows what an Iwegian is? Okay, there's a few of those. I'm actually even more than just an Iowan. I'm a 7th generation Iowan. Our family goes back to the 1850s to the first pioneers that came to Iowa from Sognfjord, Norway, where it was about two percent of the land was tillable. And these were not dumb Norwegians. They were very smart. They heard about Iowa, and they said, 'It's about a hundred percent fertile land there. Let's go to Iowa.'

"So they came to Iowa, and they literally felled the trees and built wagons and they plowed the fields. And they were godly people, because there were about eighty Norwegians that went ahead of them, and they got a letter back. It was called the Muskego manifesto, and in the Muskego manifesto it said, 'We find in America that we have civil and religious liberty, and here we can choose whatever profession we want, and noone tells us what profession we go in. This we consider more wonderful than riches.' And my great-great-great grandfather, Melchior and Martha Munson, read those words, along with other people in their valley, and they said, 'This is it. This is our ticket.' And they got in their mind and in their heart what we all now know as the American dream. And so they sold everything they had -- the farm, the land , the cattle, the livestock -- everything that they had. They were in their late forties. I looked up the family history. Their parents lived to be just about five years older than they were when they sold everything and took their five children and bought boat tickets to come to Iowa. Isn't this an amazing story? This is your story, too. It isn't just my story. This is the story of America.

"And so they literally had the clothes on their backs, a couple of belongings that they could hold. Thirteen weeks it took to get across the ocean, to get to Quebec. But once they got to Quebec, they took almost half as long again to make it overland to finally get to Iowa, where they encountered the worst winter in fifty years. Then the next year -- you had a winter like that -- the worst flooding in forty-two years. The next winter after that, they had the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded. Now, this is Iowa? They thought this was the land of milk and honey. Then, the year after that, locusts came and ate everything that was their crop. But they kept going, and they persevered, and they were people of faith, and they lived and cried and laughed, and started the first Lutheran church in their area, and they were wonderful, godly men and women of faith, and I am so proud of these people of whom I am descended from. And I'm so thankful for the faith that they faithfully brought down through the family, and now to the seventh generation here in the United States."


Since Bachmann said her great-great-great grandparents, whose names she provided, emigrated from Norway to Iowa in the 1850s, I searched the 1860 federal census for them. I started by searching for a Melchior Munson in Iowa, but came up empty. But, since unfamiliar foreign first names like Melchior were often misspelled or Americanized when written down by census workers, I didn't think it was unusual not to find him on the first shot. So I tried Martha Munson, Melchior's wife, since Martha was a common name that wouldn't be misspelled. Still nothing. So I broadened my search to include sound-alike last names for Munson, in case it was their last name that was misspelled. Still nothing. Giving my search one last shot, I removed all search parameters except the first name Martha and the last name Munson, including any sound-alike last names. It was only then that I found Melchior and Martha -- but not in Iowa. They were in Wisconsin.(1) So, there went that part of Bachmann's 'Iowanizing' of her family history. Her great-great-great grandparents hadn't gone from Quebec to Iowa. They had settled in Wisconsin.

And what about all those hardships that Bachmann says her ancestors persevered through during their first few years in Iowa -- the worst winter in fifty years, the worst flooding in forty-two years, the worst drought that anyone had ever recorded, and a plague of locusts to boot? Well, obviously, none of this happened in Iowa, because her ancestors weren't in Iowa. And it didn't happen in Wisconsin either. This all happened in the Dakota Territory. That's where Melchoir and Martha Munson and their children were from 1861 to 1864.(2) Like many Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Wisconsin, the Munsons set out for the Dakota Territory once Congress made it a territory in 1861.

A number of early histories of the Dakota Territory document that the winter of 1861-1862 was a bad one, which led to flooding when the ice in the Missouri River broke up and blocked the river in the spring of 1862; that the summer of 1863 was very dry, but the settlers still had a good harvest; and that 1864 was the year of the severe drought and the year that grasshoppers came.

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