We had a two-fold reason to visit Sweden. First of all, Sam´s mother´s family was from Sweden and the other reason is that his niece and her family live in Stockholm. A very good reason in itself. Staffan and Lea and their girls, Madeline and Charlotte have welcomed us freely into their home and we have so enjoyed our visit with them. We arrived on Monday and then on Tuesday, Lea kindly took us to the Vasa Museum.
If you haven´t heard of it, this ship went down on it´s maiden voyage in 1628 and was underwater for 333 years when it was brought up in 1961. Over the years, it´s been preserved and reconstructed to it´s original condition. It was a fascinating sight and was a huge undertaking. I couldn´t get pictures because part of the preservation is to keep the light off it. So....needless to say, my pictures didn´t come out. But I did get a picture of a smaller recreation.
Here´s a cool website for more information and pictures. Vasa Museum
And here´s the model
From the museum we walked out and saw the Stockholm harbor with Stockholm in the background - am sure it´s not the best view, but it was really neat to see!
This was Tuesday the 12th. That evening Staffan helped Sam rent a car - here it is. Our first (and I´m positive) ONLY Mercedes Benz!!
It´s a five speed and drives really nice. Lots of round abouts in Sweden - just don´t ask me about them!! I always manage to off on the wrong "exit". We won´t get into that tonight!!
As I said before, we wanted to see the place where Sam´s ancestors are from, so we rented the car and drove about 200 km (please note I´m using kilometers Trevor!!). Sam and Dan had visited this area last July and had literally "paved the way" for us. They wrote out the directions on how to find everything and we DID!!
First we stayed in a little city called Skara (we can refer back to my note about round abouts) This little town has tons of them and there is no rhyme or reason to any of them. We DID get lost here!! No sun out that day and we were SO confused. We even found the church with the two big spires and still couldn´t find our way out of town. We had a good laugh that in a town that small we could actually be lost!!
After about 30 minutes we found the road number we were trying to find and made our way out to Norra Lundby (I believe Lea said it means "North Land").
And here´s the home where Sam´s Great Great Grandfather, Johannes Nilsson (later changed to Nelson when he immigrated to the US) was born and raised. This would be his mother´s father´s father´s father. It´s called Dortebo. It was actually moved off the original land because it was too close to the church, but it´s the same house (cost 90 Crowns back in 1848 to move it). The owners today have welcomed our family into their home and shared it´s history with us. Tord and Kaisa Christensen live there and have since 1980. When they moved in, it needed extensive remodeling, which they have done. Parts of the ceiling and original flooring are still in it. What a treasure!
From there we saw the place where Johannes´wife, Maria Ulricha, was born
Something we noticed is that most of the homes are either red or yellow. I must ask Staffan about that. They are all so neat!!
From there we saw other places, which I won´t bore you with, but one interesting place Sam and Dan told us about (not family related) is a farm which has graves from as old as 400 AD. They are big rocks placed in circles and even ship shapes. Here are some pictures - and these overlook the valley where Sam´s ancesters lived. As Sam Jr. said, think of our ancesters being here and these graves being very old THEN!!
All very interesting. The land looks prosperous today, but back in teh 1800´s, it must not have been to have so many Swedish people immigrate.
