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*
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
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. 
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.