Reuniting the Sons of Two Continents

To put a spin on a quote from Garrison Keillor of Prairie Home Companion Fame (NPR) - "It's been a BUSY week here in Lake Woebegone".  Since meeting our cousin Kent Svanholm we have been on the run - meeting more and more cousins and seeing more and more sites of historical, cultural or kinship interest. Kent has felt like family since our first phone conversation, and his welcome as we arrived at his family's lakeside home near Linkoping in south central Sweden couldn't have been warmer. Much of that area, known as Smaland (SMO-land) is very like the USA upper Midwest in topography and feel - large forested areas and rather flat, with many, many lakes. The land is hopelessly stony, which was a big part of why many Swedes left when other opportunities opened up. Some areas we saw looked like rock quarries with a little soil sprinkled in for good measure. Here and there there were small-ish fields, cleared long ago by bone-wracking labor.

We spent these first days in Smaland visiting both with Kent's father Gunnar Svanholm, and with Kent's daughter Ingela and her fiance Robert. We had  lovely coffee times in the mornings and afternoons - Swedes love their coffee and cakes! Extra vanilla sauce (custard) on the apple pie, please. Gunnar Svanholm was the oldest cousin we were to meet in Sweden, observing his 89th birthday that very week. He is widowed and lives in the same apartment he has for years, independent and active, looking much younger than his years. He is a retired Swedish Air Force officer - military service runs strong in the Svanholm branch of the family. Earlier in the day we had visited the Saab Air Museum, which included a new extensive wing devoted to Sweden's role as a key Western ally in the Cold War. The main exhibit is a DC-3 intelligence gathering airplane that had been shot down by the Soviets, and much later retrieved. It was presented as found, in a ghostly bottom-of-the-sea preservation chamber that provided a haunting reminder of those days of nuclear nightmare. At Gunnar's apartment we looked at old maps and photographs together, and at a book that had belonged to his grandfather, Carl August (Johannesson) Svanholm, who was brother to my immigrant ancestor Johan Gustaf Johannesson. In this book he had practised writing his name change to Svanholm; the law had changed at that time allowing name changes and Swedes had begun to take less common names to help sort them out from the masses.  Gunnar had never heard from his father or grandfather of an American connection, so all of this was quite an eye opener to him. We found this to be the norm; many Swedes  we met were aware of only one or two close cousins and more distant ones had receded into the category of unidentified photos in old scrap books.

This dis-connection from family links seems to go hand-in-hand with another Swedish charachteristic - a disconnection from religious activity. As a country Swedes are very secular and nonreligious in terms of church attendance or most other measures of religiosity. Both of these factors are most likely due to the rise of the social system here of cradle to grave care by the state. The Swedes have historically accepted a scandalous rate of taxation by American standards for the assurance that their every basic need would be met. Many feel, who needs God or family in this situation? In the developing world these are the two most important parts of life; in this most socially engineered society, the least imporant. At the same time, very many Swedes are actively interested in family history and sorting out their ancestry, using technology and their famously thorough historical records to find their way far into the past. We visited the Swedish headquarters of just such a society known by its Swedish acronym DIS, of which I am a member, and learned more about resources available in our continuing ancestor and cousin search.

Friday included a boat tour of the lovely lake near Kent's cabin, commonly known as a "spare-time home" when translated from Swedish. The Swedes love their country retreats, some of them going back to ancestral homes while others repair old available cottages or build new. Some are rustic and spartan, even without water or electricity, while some are year-round capable like Kents' and even a few are quite luxurious. Swedes as a people aim for the middle - in a social safety net system, few are poor and even fewer are truly wealthy. Those who are often prefer not to show off their riches, as the prevailing opinion is that all should be equal. Human nature being what it is, envy is never very far away. Hard as it is for Americans to imagine, Swedes can learn the income of virtually anyone in the country with the click of a mouse - it is all public information. With this kind of social structure and pressure, it is not surprising that most Swedes opt for more time off to enjoy life rather than increased salary when presented the choice.

Our only full weekend in Sweden Included being graciously hosted by more new relatives, and also a central reason for my trip - a visit to the home village where it all started so long ago. What shall we find in Lake Woebegone - or rather, in Ryssby?