Vonda V. Kelning was born in Sweden and arrived in Skagway in 1899. She arrived in America with her brother, Swan P. Magnuson in 1897. In 1902 she moved to Rampart until leaving for Fairbanks in 1907. In 1909 she married A.P. Kelning and was widowed in 1913.
Vonda V. Kelning was born Wendla Victoria Magnusson in Döderhult, Kalmar län in 1858. She was one of five siblings. Her brother Sven Peter Magnusson had emigrated to the US in 1885. He came back to Sweden in 1897, and after their mother had died the same year Wendla joined her brother as he returned to the US. They brought with them their 17 year old niece Ebba. Her mother, their sister Maria Lovisa, had died in 1893.
In 1910 they are all living in Fairbanks. Ebba lives with her uncle, known as Swan.
In the 1920 US census Ebba and Swan are listed as husband and wife.
Swan dies in 1936, 72 years old. Ebba is 56. In 1939 she marries Charles Mayben. It’s his 3rd marriage. The documents show that it’s Ebba’s second marriage, but I have not been able to verify that she and Swan were ever legally married.
Wendla and Sven Peter/Swan were my 3rd cousins 3x removed. Ebba was my 4th cousin twice removed.
I don’t use my kurbits painted made in Sweden clogs very often, but I appreciate how they match the spirit of the floor of our screen porch and entryway.
Alice Maria Bååv Kemp was born in Göteborg in January 1888 and died in Chicago in July of 1970. She had lived in the United States since the spring of 1913, for 57 years.
Alice’s name appears alongside her husband’s on documents between their 1915 wedding and her husband’s death in 1939. After 1939 her son, Walden, born in 1916, is listed as the head of household. Alice is listed as a widow.
I don’t know if Alice ever worked outside the home after she married. The notes for her on the censuses say ‘housework’, or ‘at home’. Before she married she worked at an institution the for developmentally disabled in upstate New York. I have wondered what her time there was like.
Alice was my grandfather Kratz’s first cousin, and she’s one of my closest immigrant relatives. Her life is a mystery. There is very little information.
Through interacting with Swedish-Americans, mostly online, I’ve learned that what is perceived as Swedish in the United States differ widely from what is perceived as Swedish by present-day Swedes. Descendants of Swedish immigrants to the US keep alive traditions that may have died out in Sweden long ago. Swedish immigrants also intermarried with other Scandinavians, and their descendants mix and match between the traditions sometimes unknowingly. One example: All Americans talk about lutefisk, not knowing that is the Norwegian word. (Swedish: lutfisk.) Lefse (a flatbread) is also assumed to be solidly Swedish even tho it’s mainly Norwegian.
Many Swedish American foods and practices remind me of my grandparents, all born at the end of the 1800s and the very early 1900s. Old fashioned cooking principles involved boiling the life out of both meat and vegetables and/or covering them in heavy flour bases sauces. My mother’s generation rebelled against much of this, and for good reason.
Customs or dishes common in Sweden today usually don’t make their way across the Atlantic. If they do, it’s in popularized or bastardized versions. Hygge (a Danish word referring to creating moments and spaces of laidback cosiness) and fika (the Swedish tradition of having coffee and conversation) are two examples.
All this means that the Swedishness of Swedish American culture feels old-fashioned and limited to a Swede of today. There are many possibilities for misunderstandings, contradictory interpretations, and arguments. Both sides feel strongly that their version is the correct one. I surprise myself by being quite invested in the discussions. My own Swedishness comes out more judgmental and argumentative than I’m really willing to admit.
The first year I lived in the California I thought to myself that every single day could have been a summer’s day in Sweden. Summer’s days in Sweden can be hot and sunny, or cold and rainy. But the trees and lawns will be green, and everything is generally pretty.
A California November day, like today: Sunny, 72F or 22C. Perfect Swedish summer. Guy on skateboard included.
This little Swede was my third cousin once removed, born in Standish, Lassen Co., Calif. in 1921. He died in Stockton, Calif. in 2004.
He was of the second generation born in the United States. His great grandfather was Örn Lars Andersson Svedberg, born in Gagnef, Dalarna, in 1844. His grandmother Carolina was born in Stora Tuna, Dalarna, in 1876, and died in Martinez, Calif. in 1960.
These people are relatives on my maternal grandfather’s side. Carolina was his first cousin once removed. My grandfather was a man very proud of his heritage, and one who lived in a constant battle with his curly hair. I can see in online pictures that those same hair genes arrived safe and sound in California.
I was looking for Elna Georgina Nilsson Kratz, my grandfather’s younger half-sister, for a long time. She’s the girl who changed her last name to Nilsson for reasons we will never know.
Elna emigrated from Sweden to the United States, by herself, in the summer of 1896. I was able to trace her until she stepped off the boat at Ellis Island, but after that, nothing. I searched the records endlessly, until I found a marriage record where half the information was inaccurate. But, Elna Georgina are exceptionally unusual given names, and I was sure I had found the right young woman.
It turned out that Elna married Hugo Larsson from Hammarby, Sweden, in Manhattan in 1898. They had three boys: Hugo in 1899, Eric in 1902, and Henry in 1904. Elna’s husband passed away or abandoned the family sometime before 1916. I haven’t been able to determine how, or when, but in the 1916 New York City phonebook Elna is listed as Elma, widow of Hugo. ‘Widow’ may not be true, but it was more socially acceptable than ‘divorced.’
In 1900, after they were married, Elna and her husband Hugo lived on 135th street in the Bronx among immigrants from Sweden, Ireland, Italy, and Germany. In 1905 they lived on 246 East 125th street in Harlem on a block with immigrants from northern and eastern Europe, Finland, Norway, Russia, Germany. Hugo is listed as a carpenter, and their neighbors are housewives, laborers, dock builders, seamen, and book keepers. One woman is listed as having a profession, a dressmaker. Later the Larsons moved to #305 on the same street.
New York State Census, 1905.
Elna’s oldest son Hugo stayed with her until his early 30s, when he married. Anna, his wife, and Hugo never had children of their own, but they took in their niece Frances when Henry’s wife, also named Frances, died in the late 1930s.
Eric married Alice Youngson, and had two children, George and Alice, born in 1927 and 1929.
182 East 122nd street in Manhattan on Google street view.
In 1940 Elna lived by herself on 182 East 122nd street. Everyone on her block was white. Many were born in the United States, but there were also many European immigrants. Among her closest neighbors were people from Germany, Finland, and Canada.
In 1940 Elna was 65 years old, and listed as a laundress. It seems she started working, at least officially, when her oldest son Hugo got married in 1933.
Elna lived her whole life, as a wife, widow, and mother, on East 122nd and 125th streets in East Harlem. 125th street is now Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. The buildings where Elna lived on that street are not there anymore.
In the last couple of minutes of that interview John Oliver tells host Terri Gross about working in the US, on The Daily Show, before he had a green card. Terri Gross incorrectly assumes that means John Oliver had been working on TV, right under everyone’s noses, while being undocumented.
So, John Oliver explains to Terri Gross the difference between a working visa and a green card.
In my experience, however many views Americans have on immigration, very few understand what visas (the right to cross a border during a certain time period, sometimes also the right to work in the foreign country), green cards (the right to live and work permanently in the US), and citizenship (the right to vote, and various duties to serve), really mean.
One of my colleagues became an American citizen some years ago, and to celebrate that event there was a little lunch-time party for him. Everyone was asked to bring a small “typically American” gift. My friend and I wrapped a box of Twinkies since the new American was something of a food snob. Someone else gave away one of his own pay stubs, adding, “Well, I guess it’s time for you to start paying taxes!”.
Really? You think people who are not citizens pay no tax, when they have regular jobs? If that was the case there would be fewer new citizens, I’d imagine.
In the radio interview John Oliver talks about traveling to London to renew his visa at the American embassy every year. One year the person interviewing him made a joke, stone faced, asking him for one reason why he should be let back into the US if all he was going to do was continue criticizing the country?
The point of this entire story is that at that moment, John Oliver said, his blood froze.
As an immigrant, or a foreigner, you are incredibly vulnerable. Even if you crack jokes for a living, there are times you’ll find jokes highly inappropriate, and your fear just takes over. Even if you are highly educated, or highly successful, you are still vulnerable. Someone behind a glass window gets to make the decision whether or not to stamp your passport, and there is very little you can do about it.
I did my interview for my green card at the American embassy in Stockholm. When I was done I was going to meet a friend for lunch. My sense of direction is poor under any circumstances, but even I know the difference between walking towards the city center, and walking away from the city, out onto a picturesque island. I had walked a mile in the wrong direction before I realized my mistake.
Skeppstake from Skultuna brassworks. This candleholder was made for use on ships. Sitting on a table, or hanging on a wall, the part holding the candle will swivel to keep vertical should the ship move.
I’ve never brought a lot of things with me from Sweden, but I find that I can buy what want and need in the US. Buying used stuff second-hand I end up adopting what Swedes of previous generations have brought with them to America. Sometimes I feel like I am saving, rescuing even, the objects. I understand them. They will be safe with me.
I’ve taught at Santa Clara University, in Santa Clara, Calif., for almost 20 years. Recently I’ve learned that when I started teaching there, someone I am related to (4th cousin once removed, if you want to keep track) was enrolled as a student. And it seems, according to Facebook, that he is still good friends with one of my colleagues.
Johannes Theodor Rudin, 1865-1920
Our relative-in-common is this guy, Johannes Theodor Rudin, who was born Sept. 10, 1865 in Oskarshamn, Sweden and died May 13, 1920 in Miflin, Alabama. He left Sweden in 1885, aged 19, and became a US citizen in Chicago in 1890.
Theodor was my great grandmother’s first cousin, and he must have made quite an impression on someone at some point. I remember hearing his name when I was growing up even tho by then everyone involved had been dead for decades.
Theodor worked for a while for the British corporation Mazapil Copper in Concepcion del Oro, Zacatecas, Mexico. Here the British Vice-Consul in charge of American Interests, who’s signature we can’t decipher, has basically sworn that Theodor was a good guy. Theodor was applying for a new American passport.
We also learn how to sign our letters when we really want to make an impression:
I am, Sir,
Your obedient servant,
xxx
The fact that Theodor (who my family apparently talked about in the 1960s or 1970s) had emigrated in 1885, and they STILL didn’t talk about emigration, is baffling to me.
It seems Theodor had a reasonably successful life. He traveled, worked in different places, got married, twice, and had British Vice-consuls sign themselves ‘obedient servants’ on his behalf. But my family didn’t talk about emigration, at least not in front of the children, when I was a child. Shame is the only explanation that comes to mind.
