I started this project to collect my thoughts around my experiences as a Swedish immigrant in California. I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for 25 years, but I feel Swedish almost all the time, in one way or other.
I am curious about all the Scandinavian immigrants who came before me. What we might share, and what their lives were like. Up until recently I thought I was the only one in my family who ever emigrated. I have learned that I was wrong.
Part of this project is based on family research. As it turned out, all four of my grandparents had aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings who emigrated to North America. No one, on either side of my family, ever spoke about it.
As a child I once asked an older relative if we had any family in America. It’s an important aspect of Swedish history that twenty percent of the population, one million people, left Sweden for North America between 1850 and 1930. I’m guessing we had been talking about emigration in school. I’m also guessing I was angling for travel, or at least for connecting with relatives.
The look I received made it clear to me I had asked the wrong thing. “No, we don’t have family in America”, she said, “because we were never poor.”
So that’s what I believed. I never asked again.
I have since learned that my DNA was already living in my small California town when I arrived here. And DNA identical to mine had been buried in a cemetery in San Jose, the closest major city, for decades. It had lived in other cities in California, in Monterey, and Salinas, in Washington State, and in Los Angeles. It’s in New York City, in Chicago, all over Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Kansas, in Florida, Rhode Island, Texas, and in New York State. It’s also in central Canada, and in northern Mexico.
Through a third cousin who lives outside Lindsborg, Kansas, I’ve learned that my grandmother, her sisters, and aunts exchanged letters with relatives there from the late 1800s until the 1970s. No one knew, because, apparently, they never told anyone except each other. “Tell me, is my sister still alive?” “I am old and sick, and everyone is dead”, they wrote to each other. How come I never knew? When I ask my mother and older cousins it’s clear they never knew either.
What also has led me to family research is the fact that my paternal grandfather never knew his father. A name, Johan Adolf Abrahamsson från [from] Göteborg, was registered when he was born, but there has been no memories, no stories, no human being, to go with the name. My family has had theories, one more romantic than the next. Growing up I listened to those theories with growing irritation.
My grandfather died in 1933. Apparently he never spoke much about his original family. My father didn’t know much. Tired of the speculations, I decided to start the research with my grandfather’s mother, Johanna Hedberg. At least she had a name, a family, and known origins. I should be able to uncover her stories and give her some overdue recognition.
My American research started with one of my great grandmother’s sisters. Born Maja Christina Hedberg in Skaraborg, Sweden, she died in Iowa as Mary C. Grove.
With the help of DNA tests I’ve found many connections, and uncovered the lives of numerous emigrant family members. In a strange and surprising twist I’ve also learned what it might mean to be an American with roots. I am not a descendant of immigrants, but I have a very, very, broad base of immigrant relatives.
The blogposts are fragments of stories, notes, or short vignettes, that I prepare as I work towards larger presentations. They can be read in any order.