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A little late for such deep cultural things. But I got a call yesterday from my cousin in Sodertalia(sp) whom I visited in March. His son is visiting from Goteborg today. I did get to Karsstad but missed Goteborg this trip. Last time(2001 toured Volvo where that young cousin lives. I love my Swedish family and Sweden where I try to visited when I go to other cultures in EU.Merry Christmas to you ans all who stayed behind when my FarMor came in 1900

Thank you for these words, Fellow Freeper!

Your grandmother was a brave woman.

She was not the only European who took part in making the US the great nation that it is today, but that doesn’t make her less of an heroine.

There are certain bonds that never will break. Sweden and USA have a special relation that belongs to eternity.

This goes for all of Europe’s very special ties to USA.

Americans and Europeans are more than friends, we are brothers and sisters. Although we sometimes disagree, nothing will ever turn this around.

Merry Christmas!

Just about all of my ancestors arrived in America at such an early time that virtually all of their knowledge of where they'd come from was lost ~ just a couple of words left over to give a clue ~ brogalis and amaroosia.

Through the generations they flipped flopped from speaking whatever language they'd arrived with to German to French to English and back to German ~ lucky we could spell their names although most of them end up having been reported under a variety of spellings.

So when folks started having "mystery diseases", and the internet was invented, I was able to track them down by their genes.

That's where I ran into numerous Scandinavians of every variety and that vast peninsula to the North of Europe became, in my mind, not a blur of blue-eyed blonds with bland, Socialist politics, but a remnant, instead, of what served as a place to which Europeans from every country and Scots migrated in the 1500s and 1600s for religious liberty and to make a buck or two.

After several years of research I'm pretty near to fitting things to gether to bring yet another tribe out of the darkness of a murky history much as Joseph Winchester recovered his own folks, the Michigan Kickapoo decades ago.

He told me this was very difficult work and there'd be little thanks for it, but in these modern times there was no excuse for leaving the record blank.