Sweden

My daughters and I are having a wonderful time in Sweden, enjoying the cool Swedish summer and looking up relatives of my grandfather (my mother's father). We have seen enough sunshine to know that it is bright by 4 am and there are beautiful sunsets at 11pm. Mostly, however, it has been cloudy and rainy. Anne and I flew from Minnesota and Sarah came from Denmark since she is living in Copenhagen at the moment. We have been warmly welcomed into the homes of several relatives, and we are enjoying getting to know them. Southern Sweden is rural so the land is very green with farmland and forests; the houses and barns are primarily red.

My grandfather, Albin Monson, left Sweden in the early 1900's and went to St. Paul. Two of his brothers followed him, but four other siblings remained in Swedcn. My mother was always very good at keeping in contact with her Swedish cousins and I visited them with my parents in the early 1960's, and later, in the 1970's, after I had moved to Denmark.

I have kept in contact with one family so I made arrangements to visit each of three brothers, Bo, Mats, and Lars, my mother's first cousins. We arrived in Stockholm and then went directly to the home of Bo and Ann-Catherine in Nykoping, a lovely small town, south of Stockholm. We met four of their seven children and several grandchildren. Ann-Catherine made sure that we ate delicious food the whole time we were at her house, the desserts were especially wonderful. We went to a nature reserve on the Baltic Sea where we walked in the forest and on large grey rocks that reach out into the sea. Ann-Catherine has done extensive family tree research, and I have learned about many family members from her. I have also been able to talk to a number of relatives on the phone.

After several days we traveled west near Skovde to visit Lars who lives in a small village called Varnhem with a beautiful church and monastery ruins from 1150. Springtime flowers are in full bloom: the lilacs are gorgeous, and the wild flowers are abundant with Queen Anne's Lace, Buttercups, Forget-Me-Nots, Lupines, and many others. Lars plays the organ in churches in the area and his daughter, Johanna, is a classical singer in Stockholm. Father and daughter preformed for us. Anne discovered that Johanna and she have the same birthday exactly, November 3, 1978, so they enjoyed getting to know each other. We went to the summer home that I had visited on my previous visits and walked in the forest and by the lake. One day we biked along the Gote Canal which was completed in 1832 to connect Stockholm with Goteborg by a series of lakes and then the canal. We watched locks being opened and closed as boats made their way up or down the canal, and bridges being raised or slid out of the way. It was a lovely ride with abundant wild flowers and few people biking.

We're off to Stockholm tomorrow, and then we fly north to Vilhelmina in southern Lapland to visit Mats and his family.