There are two mysteries in my family that has led me to family research: An unknown great grandfather, and the fact that all four of my grandparents had aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings who emigrated to North America, but 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 somehow.
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 left Sweden in 1995. Since then I have lived in the same California town for almost 23 years. Up until recently I thought I was the only one in my family to ever emigrate.
It turns out my DNA was already living in my small town when I got here. And it had been buried in a cemetery in San Jose, the closest major city, for decades. My DNA was in Monterey, in Salinas, in Washington State, and in Los Angeles. It’s in New York City, in Chicago, all over Iowa, Minnesota, and Kansas, in Florida, Rhode Island, 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 Emma 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.
The second mystery that 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 entered when he was born, but there has been no person, no memories, no stories, to go with the name. My family has had theories, one more romantic than the next. I’ve listened to those theories with growing irritation.
My grandfather died in 1933, and apparently 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. At least she had a name, a family, and known origins. I should be able to uncover her stories. After all, she was the one left with raising the children. She had been there.
The blog is devoted to stories of my family’s lives in Sweden and north America starting around 1810. The stories are not complete, nor are they always connected. They are based on archival research, old photos, letters, postcards, and documents.
In a strange and surprising twist I am also learning what it might mean to be an American with roots, as I’m uncovering the lives of my emigrant family members.
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The blog posts aren’t chronological, and can be read in any order. Uncovering the stories has been, and is, overwhelming. A certain level of confusion is unavoidable.
If you want to start reading the blog from the beginning, the first post is here: http://heythere.charlottakratz.com/2018/03/12/july-10-1871/. You’ll find a link for the following post (in red) at the bottom right corner of each page.