Swedish Branch of Family Tree

Background

At age 10, I read the story of my ancestor Halfward Bryngelsson who spied on the Norwegian army over 300 years ago. He managed to escape capture, return to the Swedish lines and present the key information to Charles XII which allowed him to defeat the Norwegian army. The grateful warrior-king rewarded my ancestor with 500,000 acres in Dalsland, a very picturesque area of Sweden on the border with Norway. This fired my youthful imagination.

In 1977, I met my distant cousins on my grandmother's mother side (Clara Christina SVENSDØTTER) during a visit to Sweden. In 1987 a distant cousin, Maja Eriksson, sent me a letter with a copy of a page from a recently published 800 page family history book titled Den Sägenomspunna Släkten which identified the family of Otto PETERSON, my grandmother's father. I started a dialog via regular mail with the author and sixth cousin, Jan Vegelius, a professor of statistics at Uppsala University. Jan convinced me to trace all of their descendants in America. This took me 3 years to complete because there were 122 descendants.

In 1997, I returned for a memorable second visit. There was a dinner party in my honor with 35 cousins on the SVENSDØTTER branch. The next day I met 115 6th and 7th cousins on the PETERSON branch of the Swedish tree. I have had 3 articles published in the family association magazine,Håbolssläktens Härold. It's fun to see my article in English in the middle of 40 pages of articles in Swedish.

In 2010, I did research in Kansas and succeeded in finding exactly where my grandmother Victoria Peterson was born. This research was included in an updated version of my article on her parents, Otto and Clara Peterson published in the Håbolssläktens Härold. Anyone interested in Swedish immigration will want to read this article on Otto and Clara.

Swedish Ancestors

My grandmother, Clara Victoria Peterson, was born in Kansas to immigrants from Sweden. You can see her ancestors family group by family group by clicking on her name. You can explore her tree for surnames of interest by clicking. The best way to start is to click on Big Picture which provides you an overall diagram, introductory material and an index of all names in her tree.

Victoria was an accomplished person. She spoke 4 languages, played the guitar and was a checkers champion. As a child, I remember her skill in occasionally losing to me, my brother or one of my cousins in a way that we thought we had actually beaten her. She would have been able to be a teacher if she could have completed one more year of high school, but she had to leave school to help her parents. Victoria had a great sense of humour.