Tuesday

American "spirit of adventure"

My husband and I spent last week vacationing with my brother and his wife. They live in Texas and we in Illinois. We compromised and each traveled half way. We rented a cabin on a lake in Missouri. We were told the week previous was beautiful and this week also promises to be nice in Missouri, but last week? Not so nice. It rained every day and I mean RAIN. Flooding, rock slides and the topper was the tail end of hurricane Bill smacked us also. We still had a good time, good food, a little fishing, and boating. Most importantly we all got to be together and catch up on each others events.

Thinking how spread out we all are it got me to thinking. Perhaps a trait of those that left everything and everyone behind to begin anew in America was the desire for adventure and travel. Seeing new things, meeting new people, going to new places, a "spirit of adventure". My grandmother Lydia was one of nine children. Six remained in Sweden. Admittedly, I don't know a whole lot about those family members that remained in Sweden nor their descendants. What I do know is that the majority of those folk seem to have remained in Sweden. Sweden is a wonderful place to live today, not the poor and crowded country of a century ago so that is a hugh factor I am sure. Lydia and her sisters, Ruth and Anna, chose to emigrate to America. I am thinking that one possible trait that may have set them apart from their siblings was their "spirit of adventure". An inward personal quality that along with the "push and pull" of those European immigration years prompted them to be the ones to leave.

The descendants of Lydia, Ruth and Anna Abrahamson now number in the hundreds.  The sisters started out in Rock Island, Illinois. Children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great-great grandchildren have lived all across this country. Illinois, Texas, Wisconsin, Montana, Florida, California, Washington, Iowa, Connecticut, Arizona, Ohio and Michigan are the places I am aware of. There may be more and I almost forgot a cousin now in Canada.

The new emphasis on DNA, being the latest way to look at your family history, makes we wonder. Is the "spirit of adventure" inherited? Has America, the nation of immigrants and the children of immigrants, inherited that spirit of adventure? After all, doesn't that "spirit of adventure" seem to be a very American quality?

Just a thought,
-Ranae

                                    **clicking on photos or documents will enlarge them for easier viewing*

Monday

TRUTH or Family legend?

Every family has stories or legends about their ancestors. The family is descended from an Indian princess or related to someone famous, or better yet infamous. Our family story has persisted and been repeated for over 150 years .

My Dad loved a good laugh and loved to tease us kids. "Why is your teachers name Mrs. White, her hair is black, her name should be Mrs. Black?" It seems, and is, silly now but you have no idea how crazy this made me in the first grade. We kids had a great way, or so we thought, to tease him back. Shopping in the grocery store we would hold up a red can of King Oscar Norway sardines. "Hey look Dad, its grandpa!" This would irritate him so. He was really mad at my mother for telling us the family "secret". He told us never to mention it to grandma Lydia because she was ashamed. He told us that Edvard Julius Abrahamsson was the adoptive father of Lydia's father, Robert Albin.  When Edvard Julius Abrahamsson married Charlotta Majholm she was already at that time pregnant with another mans child. That man, said Charlotta, was Oscar Frederik Bernadotte. Robert Albin was truly the illegitimate son of the King of Sweden, Oscar II. 
One of the first questions I was asked by a second cousin in Sweden who had just been introduced to me through email was "Tell me the story of our great grandfather as you heard it". So I told him the story my father had told me. Claiming Oscar was almost proof of being related to the family! The ticket, so to say, to the Abrahamsson clan. One of my cousins collects pictures of Oscar. Several descendants claimed that an article from one of Oscars palaces had been a family possession. Oddly, no one knew where those items are now. Hmmm.
                                                                               
Looking at Oscar (left) and Robert Albin (right) I have to say there is a resemblance. Then again I have a brother in law who you would swear was the twin of Chevy Chase. I looked again at the documentation that I had found on our family. I studied up on Oscar a bit. He did get around with the ladies it seemed. Bottom line was that the story of Oscar did not seem logical to my "get the source and citation" mind of a genealogist. I proudly, and a little arrogantly, presented my theory of non-relationship to a cousin. I sensed by his reply........... he did NOT want to hear that. I had to get over myself and do some serious thinking. After all, I could not prove he was our ancestor but I could not prove he wasn't either.

Statistically we should carry about 6.25% DNA from a great x2 grandfather, but human genetics doesn't work that way. It is also possible that we have no DNA from a great x2 grandfather. I read on the internet (and we know of course that everything on the internet is true) that worldwide it is only 85% certain that your mothers husband was indeed your father. I have my family tree documented back to the mid 1600's. Do I know for a fact there were no "non-paternal" events in my family? Were there no adoptions? And if there were does that mean that those involved are not a part of my family? Heck no! Every one of our ancestors has a story, a story that contributed to the greater story of our family, what our family stood for, believed, was, and is today........what I am.

The story of the Abrahamsson family includes the story of Oscar. Whether it is fact or fiction really doesn't matter. What matters is that we believed it for 150 years and it shaped how we felt about ourselves. We were a little more special, a little more royal. Although the descendants of Robert Albins nine children are scattered across Scandinavia and North America, the story also brought us together again. Does it really matter anymore if we truly have Oscars DNA or if we in effect have adopted Oscar? The Story of Oscar II, King of Sweden and Norway, paramour of Charlotta, and father of Robert Albin which has persisted for 5 and 6 generations is part of the Abrahamsson family story. 
It is part of who we are. And that is the TRUTH.


'There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his." 
                                                                                                                     --- Helen Keller

your cousin, princess

Wednesday

Lydia, on her tiptoes, peeks over the crowd

This photo of the children of Robert Albin and Anna Karolina Abrahamsson again seems to confirm that, financially anyway, life was not too shabby for their family. None of my other three Scandinavian grandparents have any professional portraits of them as children. Lydia's future husband Rikard never posed for a picture until he came to America. Professional photographs were expensive. That's why we have those creepy post mortem photos from the Victorian era. That was the only remembrance of a child who died. I have been studying the pic, particularly my grandmother. There she is second from right, peeking out between her oldest and her youngest sister. Maybe on her tippy toes? I became hooked on the BBC show "Downton Abbey". The English countryside, the costumes...beautiful. It is a real insight into the lives of Western European women during the Victorian era. The era that Lydia was born into. There was really no other future for women but that of wife and mother. Not that Robert Albin didn't love all his children but, how valued was a female child in this society and in this time? Let alone one of seven daughters? Maybe Lydia is standing on her toes to be noticed. "Hey I'm back here, the short one with the choppy haircut and the buck teeth, look at me too, I'm here too." A ticket to America was a ticket to the unknown for sure but a ticket to something different or maybe a chance to be someone different.  

Just a thought,
-Ranae

                            

                                        **clicking on photos or documents will enlarge them for easier viewing*

Monday

My first contact with Sweden

    I am Norwegian on my mothers side and Swedish on my fathers. As a child I never really knew much of anything about my Swedish roots. I was very close to my maternal grandparents, particularly my grandmother. She used to say, tongue in cheek, "just tell people you are Norwegian like me, that's the best thing to be". I had visited Norway three times and fell in love with the beautiful country and people. An added bonus was that many of the extended family were redheaded like me! Grandma told me wonderful stories of her life in Norway, her emigration to America, her life in Chicago and her eventual return to her beloved Norway. After her death a cousin sent all her personal papers and photos to me, as grandma had wished. Back home the local librarian recommended  checking out a family tree program to organize the items Grandma had left me. My love of family history and genealogy was born.
    Fast forward to 2002, the wedding of a niece in another state. I was seated across from a cousin who I had not seen for many many years. Small talk took me to what was now my passion, genealogy. She mentioned that maybe two years ago she received an email from someone in Sweden who claimed to be a relative. He was working on finding the descendants of his great grandfather, the descendants of the three daughters who had emigrated to America. She was not sure how he got her email address and was too embarassed to answer at this late date. Wow! Forward it to me! I remembered a paper hand typed by my grandmother that I had found among my Dad's things after his death. She had typed out family names. Her fathers name was Albin Abrahamsson. 
    My cousin did forward the email to me and I immediately emailed the gentleman in Sweden. He responded to me almost equally as quickly. "Robert Albin Abrahamsson of Östra Frölunda is my great grandfather", he wrote, attaching the photo of the family that I posted a few days ago. This was my second cousin! I recognized my grandmother in the photo, young as she was, and for the first time wished I had really known her.