A hearty welcome to my fifth Newsletter! As we head into the home stretch you will be glad to hear that writing began in September, right on schedule. The first draft of an early chapter has been completed, and I am very happy with it. What a surprise to discover that Swedes began coming to what is now Canada before the American Revolution! The first Swedish immigrant, Paul Bryzelius, settled in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, as minister of St. John's Anglican church in 1767. He had been ordained three times - first as a Lutheran, then as a Moravian, and finally in London, England, as an Anglican.
Project Deadlines
The gathering of family information has been completed. From now on only updates from previous submissions and spectacular new information can be accepted. If in doubt, send me a query at barr@swedesincanada.ca.
For readers who immigrated after 1945, please fill out our questionnaire (accessible from home page).
Don't miss the chance to have your immigrant ancestor named in the history book, under the Honour the Pioneers program! Check out the "Donations" link on our home page!
Research Assistant
More than a thousand publications have been input into the database with research assistance, but this amount represents less than half of the 24 linear feet of research material on hand. This month another research assistant was hired to input the rest, mostly unpublished material in the form of memoirs, family histories, questionnaires, and the like. I am very happy to welcome Pat Lamminmaki to the team. While writing the chapter mentioned above, I wasted quite a bit of time looking for information that was not yet retrievable. My goal is to stay on schedule.
Remember the dollar bill?
Larry Axelson of Port Coquitlam sent this clipping of a letter-to-the-editor written by his dad in 1954, also a copy of the dollar bill that prompted his letter. "This is Gronlid, Saskatchewan", he wrote. "If you can make out the X, that marks approximately where our farm was. You can dimly see a barn to the right of the elevators, there is a road going due south past it, we would have been about 2 miles down it."
Larry's dad, Thure Axelson (1896-1964), emigrated from Sveg, Haumlrjedalen, and farmed in Saskatchewan until 1957 when he and his wife moved to Vancouver. One of the first things Thure did there was to join Härjedalsgillet. Larry also mentioned a high point in the life of his brother, the late Gunnar Axelson. As president of the Swedish Canadian Rest Home in 1988, he had the honour of greeting King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia during their visit to Vancouver.
A Historical Cookbook, What a Great Idea!
Kitchens have changed a lot since cooking was done on a woodstove, but people still enjoy eating. Sharon Peterson Fitzsimmons of Edmonton hit upon the idea after writing her family history and realizing that it was mainly the story of the male members of the family. She wanted to highlight the women too. What better place than the kitchen, exploring how her family's cooking has changed over five generations! Each recipe is accompanied by family stories and pictures from the past hundred years. In the Preface, she writes:
This book is about families sharing food and fellowship. It is about grandmothers, mothers and daughters (and in recent years fathers and sons) passing down skills, customs, knowledge and traditions. It is about the way western Canadians have learned to live together. It is about the way our family has adapted to many changes in over a century of life in Canada.
Sharon and her daughter Heather making cookies in 1977.
Sharon's Swedish grandparents, Andrew and Ida Peterson, met and married in Chicago. In 1908 they moved to Rich Valley, Alberta, sixty miles northwest of Edmonton, where they homesteaded and raised three sons, Augie, Roy and Enoch. As it turned out, none of the sons married Swedish girls, so each wife brought new and different cooking methods and recipes. Their daughters, in turn, added new ideas, so that by the fifth generation, Andrew and Ida's descendants were eating a very different array of dishes from the ones Ida used to make.
In the early days there was no time for fancy cooking. One of the granddaughters, Dorothy, now 80, writes; "Grandma had three boys to feed so meat and potatoes were the mainstay. Often cabbage soup, and veggies in season ..." Another granddaughter, Violet, 81, remembers oatmeal porridge for breakfast every morning and pancakes on Sunday. There were no cookies but lots of rhubarb and saskatoon sauce.
Potatoes came from the newly broken land. A family story suggests that one reason Augie ran away at the age of fourteen to work on a trapline and railway construction was because he couldn't face another year of potato planting, cultivating and harvesting!
Eventually the family was able to indulge in more fancy cooking and baking. The tiny community was made up of newcomers from many different parts of the world, so neighbours learned from each other. A few dishes remained particularly Swedish, however. One of these was pickled herring (inlagd sill). Descendants of the Swedish immigrants in Rich Valley still make pickled herring for special occasions, like Christmas.
Evelyn Lindstrum's Pickled Herring Recipe
- 5 salt herring canned in brine (ask at your fish market)
- 1 Spanish onion, thinly sliced
- 1/2 dozen whole cloves
- some ground allspice
- a little sugar (optional)
- 3/4 cup white vinegar
- about 2 cups of water
Remove the herring from the brine and soak it overnight in water to get rid of the salt. Drain. Clean and gut the fish. Cut off the tail and fins. Then slice in small pieces. Place in a 2-quart crock. Add one large Spanish onion, thinly sliced, 1/2 dozen whole cloves and some ground allspice. You can also add some sugar (optional). Add 3/4 cup white vinegar and enough water so that the liquid covers the mixture of fish, onions and spices. Leave to marinate 3 to 4 days, then it is ready to eat. Makes 2 quarts.
Sharon Fitzsimmons' book is not for sale, but she is willing to discuss her work with anybody planning to do a similar project for their own family. Her telephone number is 780 432 7357.
Logging in Newfoundland
Amanda Gellman of Windsor sent this photo of her grandfather, O.G. Johnson, holding up a snowshoe used to outfit horses for hauling logs during the winter. He was born in Sandviken, Jämtland, and in 1900 immigrated to Newfoundland with 60 other Swedish loggers and their families, to work in the lumber industry in Millertown. It was O.G. Johnson who introduced the Swedish concept of snowshoes for horses and showed Newfoundlanders how to make them.
A Poet with Something to Say
Signe Olson Peterson was a major contributor to Swedish literature in the American midwest until 1950, always signing her poems "Signe". More than eighty of them were written in Canada between 1911-18, when she worked as a domestic for a widow in one of Port Arthur's grand homes (now part of Thunder Bay, Ontario). A major theme was her deep Christian faith as an active member of the Swedish Baptist church, but she also wrote about the immigrant experience. The stanza below, from "The Letter Started On" (published in Svenska Standaret, December 1915), is about a young Swedish woman who died alone in hospital after trying to earn money to send back home. It likely reflects Signe's own early years as a domestic.
Her road was the coldest she had ever known,
Barren and empty was the world she saw,
For all her trials she had to bear alone,
There was no place where comfort she could draw.
When at last she reached the goal that she had set,
And had done her best then it was she heard,
What many poor people in their lives have met,
They would be repaid with but a cruel word.
- Translated from the Swedish by Tom Coleman, printed with the permission of Bill Carlson, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Signe was born in Övre Ullerud, Värmland. After moving to Minnesota she married Rev. E.B. Peterson and raised six children. In 1997 her grandson, Bill Carlson, discovered her poetry while writing a history of Bethel College. He eventually collected over 300 published and unpublished poems and essays. Many were found in Swedish newspapers and journals located at the Baptist General Conference History Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Bill can be contacted at carwil@bethel.edu.
Students in Sweden to Learn about Canada
My friend Jane Mattisson is a frontrunner in the teaching field. In January 2006 she introduces a new course about Canada at Kristianstad University in southern Sweden, which I understand is a first for the entire country. The course will focus on Swedish immigration to Vancouver, "the largest Swedish city in Canada", where she spent two months last summer gathering material. One of the themes is the change in Swedish immigrants over the past hundred years in terms of education, social status and aspirations, which I find fascinating. The literary component.will include Irene Howard’s history Vancouver’s Svenskar as well as novels by Frederick Philip Grove. Jane welcomes questions, comments and contributions in the form of written/pictorial documentation, and can be contacted at jane.mattisson@husa.hkr.se.
Jane Mattisson
From Reindeer Keeper to Choreographer
Sven Johansson came to Arctic Canada in 1962 because his home in Sweden’s north, the largest wilderness area in Europe, was being flooded for a power project. He stayed ahead of civilization until 1972, long enough to reorganize Canada’s reindeer industry for the Inuit (five years) and to work with the Geological Survey of Canada on a survey of the Arctic Polar Shelf with his boat, "North Star". When the oil companies moved in Sven and his boat moved out, Sven returning in the 1980s to skipper "Belvedere", the first private vessel to sail through the Northwest Passage from Pacific to Atlantic.
Meanwhile he hit upon an idea to add a new dimension to the art of the dance, a groundbreaking concept that catapulted him into an entirely different career. His innovative style and technique allows performers to flout gravity and to dance in midair! It is not done with mirrors, but with his ES Dance Instrument, a long pole on a wheeled fulcrum run by a trained operator. With proper stage lighting none of the equipment is seen, only the dancer.
Sven credits his parents for his interest in the theatre. His upbringing included amateur theatre, music, lively discussion in which the children participated, and a large home library.
As artistic director of Discovery Dance, Sven has choreographed many performances since 1992 including the closing ceremonies at the Commonwealth Games in Victoria, commissions for Bravo!FACT TV, and Estates Theatre Prague where he won the Prague International Dance Festival 1999 and 2000 Awards in choreography and production. He is in demand for performances of "Peter Pan" and "Fiddler on the Roof", of course, and has choreographed a pilot project in airborne water dance called "Aqua Ballet".
Sven also pioneered dance for the disabled in 1994. "The ES Dance Instrument compensates for lack of balance, blindness and muscular inability," he says, "giving freedom of movement to persons who would not otherwise be able to dance for enjoyment or artistic expression." The same year he was invested in the Order of Canada. Sven Johansson can be contacted at svenbj@shaw.ca.
Thank you!
- To the Genealogical Society of Sweden for choosing the Swedes in Canada Project to receive the Arvid Lundbäck Award in 2004 and 2005.
- To Larry Axelson, Bill Carlson, Sharon Fitzsimmons, Sven Johansson and Jane Mattison for checking their articles above for accuracy.
- To all those who answered the call for family histories over the past three years.
- To my cousin, Per Ersson, Skärholmen, Sweden, for surprising me with the address label he drew on an envelope, below.
Next Newsletter
Look for more interesting items from the files as we sort through the material! Your comments are welcome, in fact they help shape the content of these newsletters, so don't be shy.
Best wishes to you all for a Happy Holiday Season,
and a New Year full of pleasant surprises!
