Before making the decision to explore your genealogy, take into consideration that if you go back far enough, you more than likely will encounter information that can be disturbing, eventful and surprising.

For me, a surprise discovery is that way out on one of the branches on our family tree, (a twig actually) you find a lady by the name of Gustava Gustavsdotter Berg and the fact that she was noble, a blue blood of royalty.  Her mother was the daughter of the Chief of the Southern Smaland regemente and was the first person to live in the location where Johannes Svensson, my grand father, was born, just north of Hamneda, Sweden, about an hour or so by fast horse.

Out on another twig of our family tree, Lieutenant Paul Eggertz was a Swedish war hero who survived the war at Poltava but spent 13 years as a prisoner of war in Tobelsk, Siberia. The fighting at Poltava, in 1709, was the battle that shook Europe and was the fall of the Swedish Empire, marking the berth of the vast Russian Empire.

It appears one of my favorite uncles, Ralph Dahl, was asked to leave Sweden after he was involved in some friendly, small weapons fire, that gravely injured some of his fellow soldiers.  While I knew him, he was always so proud of his time in service with the Swedish army.  Even at the age of eighty, he kept himself in good physical condition by doing calisthenics every day while striving to perfect his ability to improve his English.

My father arrived in this country in 1887, at the age of four, along with his parents, two older sisters and an older brother, from their little house in the beautiful seaside village of Fiskebackskil,Sweden, to a homestead that was owned, and patented by an uncle, near Ansley Nebraska.  Swedish emigration records (taken from the ship manifest) in Gothenburg, Sweden, show a family by the name of “Svensen”. (I guess they must have decided to remove one S out of their family name between Fiskebackskil and Goteborg).  Later they changed their name to Swanson and the males all changed their first names.  In Sweden my fathers name was Carl.  When he arrived in the U.S. his name was changed to Charlie. Later he named his first son Carl, who is my brother.

The family settled in the appropriately named community, Dry Valley, where there were no lakes, ponds, rivers or streams.

Although Sweden had a famine about the time they emigrated, it appears their quest for religious freedom was their reason for coming to America. However, when grandma Christina Maria took one look at the treeless, barren hills where only a few years earlier, the Souix Indians roamed, her religious vocabulary might have been put to a severe test. In no uncertain terms, Grandpa Johannes surely got the full brunt of how she felt about her new home to be, how she longed for the taste of a spicey pickled herring and what were they thinking when they left the security and comfort of scenic Fiskebackskil, Sweden, where the abundance of seafood never left them hungry.  But things were only to get worse.  With no place to live it appears they spent their first winter living in a  dug out in the clay hills near Dry Valley, where the bitter cold winds chapped their weathered hands and faces.  Without a source for thirst quenching water, snow was quite often melted in their mouths and only wild game, that had to be trapped, provided  nourishment.

We’ve come a long way in one generation.  My father might have lived in a dugout with very little to eat or drink and now I eat food prepared by a chef, off of white cloth covered tables while living in the Grand Lodge.