Thursday, October 11, 2012

Welcome to the Blog - Välkommen till bloggen

Almost three decades has passed now since several of us were actively engaged in exploring our Swedish ancestry.  All of that shared work culminated in the production of a keepsake album by Joyce and a big family get together in Colorado.  Since then a whole new generation has come into the world and we have lost more than a few.  Also the means of doing genealogy have changed greatly and it's now possible to find things online that were virtually inaccessible to us back then.

About a year ago I was contacted by Maria Lundberg, a third cousin from Stockholm, who had heard that I knew something about the family history and wanted to ask some questions.  What became apparent very quickly was that I had forgotten many of the specifics and had to dig out my files, which at the time were in a file cabinet blocked by a home repair project.  Once I got into my files it really became clear I had forgotten much more than I remembered.  And, as it had decades ago, the question of our ancestry got me interested.

Since then Maria and I have exchanged lots of information, asked each other lots of questions, and made much progress. She detected a basic bit of misinformation in our original data which had kept us from finding out more about Andrew Gustave Strom and when he first came to North America.  We have also exchanged many pictures.

So I have started this blog to share this with everyone else.  There will be lots of pictures here plus articles updating what we knew back then.  Some day, I may even try to put up everything we had discovered back then for those who weren't around and don't know the basics.

I have also been getting into Swedish cuisine and Maria has been filling me in on some aspects of Swedish culture, especially from around the time our ancestors left.  There will be blog posts about those topics, too.

Please check in and say hello and pass word of this blog along to family members and invite them to check in.  I have been blogging since 2007 but never used a Guest Book on any of my blogs and I will look for a module that I can plug in that might work better but for now, this thread will serve as a Guest Book.

Your contributions will be welcome here, too, if you care to share.  Probably there are at least a couple of other people in our extended family who have also been doing genealogical research and will have data and pictures to share.  If so, if you want to post it here, please let me know so we can work out how to get it online.  Or if  you already have a family website that you want to share with others, let me know too.  There will be a section on the sidebar for links to other websites or blogs of interest to the whole family.

And by all means use the comment feature to add your thoughts and comments to what is posted. This will be a public blog which means anybody  in the world can read it and it will come up on search engines.  For that reason I have activated Comment Moderation which simply means that your comments will not appear online immediately but only after I have been notified by email and okay them.  I know that there is a very effective spam blocking system on Blogger but we will get spam and comment moderation will make it possible for me to keep any of that from getting online.  I have disabled Word Verification, however, because I know that gives some people fits.

Also, since it is a public blog, be careful about any sensitive information you post - email addresses, ATM pin numbers, things like that!

And no, I don't speak or read Swedish.  I have thought about taking the Swedish class offered by the Swedish Club of Houston but for the purposes of this blog I just asked Maria to give me a few words I could use.  I'm hoping that some of our cousins from Sweden will be joining us here.

Bruce




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