Astrid (Swanson) Family Tree
NOTE: The information of my mother's Swedish roots was collected partly through the assistance of Henrik Larsson and Inge Svensson of Sweden. I found Henrik through an Internet search of Tvååker, Sweden, my mother's parents home town. The story of my meeting with Henrik and Inge during my 1997 trip to Sweden, and the resulting discovery of many Swedish and American cousins is discussed in my travel report.
My mother always claimed that she did not have any relatives beyond her immediate family. She may have simply excluded anyone as distant as second cousins. Or, it may be that because her father died when she was only 7 years old, and her mother was an orphan when she came to the United States, that she did not have a chance to learn much about her roots.
During our first trip to Sweden in 1997 we parked our husbil in Inge's backyard. One evening Inge had invited Anders Andersson over for coffee. Anders took out a piece of paper that had a name at the top, a row of names, and columns of names below each... a genealogy chart. One of the names had a note 'left for America' and the column was empty. This was my mother's father.
I was able to fill in the column from my own records. Anders then mentioneed that there were family reunions of the relatives alternating between Sweden and the US every three years and that the next reunion would be the following summer. He invirted us to attend, and that resulted in my second trip in 1998, when I met many previously unknown Swedish and American cousins.
I have made a link here to a PDF file that has information back 32 generations. The information about my mother's ancestry is not as extensive as that of my father. The reason is that unfortunately in the aera where my mother's parents were from records were lost in a fire. The ancestory information is presented in the ahnentafel format commonly used by genealogy researchers.
