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Well known as is the Dutch heritage of New York City — the former New Amsterdam — fewer realize that the Low Countries’ writ in the New World for a brief time ran far down what is today styled the Mid-Atlantic coast, all the way to the lower Delaware River separating present-day New Jersey and Pennsylvania. “New Netherland” had swiped it just a few years before the events in this post from “New Sweden”. Before it all went over to the Anglosphere the aspirant imperial rival got a few executions in on these distant shores — as we see in...

The oldest standing log cabin the US - including George Washington-era artifacts - has been put on sale for $2.9 million. Nothnagle Log House was built around 1640 by Finnish settlers in the New Sweden Colony along the Delaware. The territory was taken over by the Dutch in 1655, but the magnificent 375-year-old oak cabin still stands in what is now New Jersey. It is owned and operated as a tour site by Harry Rink, 88, and his wife Doris, 75, of Greenwich Township. They are now looking for a buyer willing to accept their unique demands. The new owner...

The memory of John Morton has faded even more than his signature on the original Declaration of Indepedence. He was the first of the signers to die, and since then his name has been largely been forgotten. I'll be visiting the National Archives in Washington, DC in April and would like any recommendations on how to best research pre-1776 documents kept there. John Morton is my relative and I'm trying to do research on why he changed his mind at the last minute and decided to vote in favor of independence; even though he was sent by his Tory constituents...

King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden were greeted by hundreds of Delawareans as they celebrated the 375th anniversary of the New Sweden Colony, known today as the city of Wilmington. The Swedish royals, along with Finland's Speaker of the Parliament Eero Heinäluoma, began their day in Delaware with a luncheon at the Bunea Vista Mansion in New Castle with Governor Jack Markell.

Source: University of Pennsylvania Date: April 23, 2007 Historian Discovers Evidence Documenting First European Voyage Up The Delaware Science Daily — A University of Pennsylvania scholar has pinpointed 1616 as the year of the first European voyage up the Delaware River. Jaap Jacobs, a senior fellow at Penn's McNeil Center for Early American Studies, detailed his findings in a paper, "Truffle Hunting with an Iron Hog: The First Dutch Voyage up the Delaware River," recently presented as part of the McNeil Center Seminar Series. Scholarly discoveries tend to be the outcome of a deliberate process, but serendipity played an important...

STOCKHOLM: US President George W Bush has Swedish ancestry, the daily Svenska Dagbladet reported on Monday, quoting Swedish genealogists in the United States. “George W Bush and his family are extremely interested in this research. This represents their oldest known European roots,” David Emmi of the Swedish Colonial Society told the paper. Researchers traced Bush family ancestry through 10 generations to the 17th century, to a Maans Andersson, the society said. Andersson is believed to have left Gothenburg, in southwestern Sweden, in October 1639, arriving in the colony of New Sweden in Delaware a few months later, according to the...