A pioneer's story comes to life

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on translating a family history for my father's family who all came to America, most came here to Port Wing, all from Sweden.  It was written by Ingabritt's (cousin from yesterday's post) father, John, and consists of many pages of typed text interspersed with pictures, followed by a family tree that begins in the early 1800's and goes to about 1980 when he finished writing it.  But it's in Swedish.  So this is where my discovery of Google Translate, Bing Translate, multiple online Swedish dictionaries, use of cognates from my knowledge of German, and sheer curiosity about what it says, all came together to me producing a translation of this document.  And, boy, have I learned a lot! All of a sudden those tenant farmers mentioned from time to time in Downton Abbey all make sense!  I can see why possible opportunities in America looked a whole lot better than their reality in Sweden, at least for their own family.  But more about that in future posts.

Lämås, where my grandfather lived with his parents and 7 siblings before coming to America.
That's my dad in the picture.

This afternoon I translated the part about my grandfather coming to America in 1881.  He came through the port of Gothenburg (Göteborg) and his destination on the shipping logs was listed as Ortonville (MN).  There must have been some other relatives or friends living there because I've heard of other mentions of Ortonville through the years.

He eventually got to Minneapolis and somehow ended up in Canada working on constructing the Canadian Pacific Railroad system.  There he learned English from his Irish co-workers!  And then I got to where he moved to Duluth and here I'm going to include the full text as I translated it...so it might not flow very smoothly, but you'll get the idea.

After a few years Fredrik lived in Duluth, Minnesota, and supported himself with carpentry. In 1889 he married  Regina Charlotta Petersson from Dädesjö in Småland (a state in Sweden). She had come to America in 1884, one of seven siblings who all emigrated, and eventually their mother also came. 

In the early 1890s, there were bad times in Duluth and Fredrik considered acquiring a farm. When there was an opportunity to buy land in Wisconsin along the great Lake Superior, Frederick, along with Smålander Peter Braf, made a reconnaissance trip to the area. Both families decided to take on the adventure of becoming settlers, and in 1891 Frederick sold the house in Duluth (which had 11 rooms), and his family, consisting now of mother and father, son Frederick and the twins Herbert and Hedwig, stepped on a steamer which brought them level with the countryside they had decided to conquer.  There, they got into a rowboat and came ashore with the small amount of household goods they could bring.

A simple log house became their first home. In the forests Indians still roamed but there was never any hostility between them and the Swedish settlers. On the contrary, says the descendants of Frederick and Regina, that it was the Indians' good advice, especially when it came to using deer skins to make moccasins and clothing, which helped the settlers over hard times in the new, difficult conditions.

And that's just another Passage that I feel blessed to be able to tell, and then think about as I sit up here in Port Wing, with snow blowing in the cold winds outside, and I'm in my warm, cozy house.

Wow!