by Richard Bergstrom
For the past several years, I have had a growing interest in discovering my roots. That dream was fulfilled on Sunday, June 10th, when Leona and I met for a family reunion in Vannas, Sweden with 38 members of the extended Borgstrom Family. The reunion was organized by our host, Lena Lundgren, my long lost Swedish 3rd cousin. We got connected some months ago through Janice Farkell, of Grady, Montana, who along with Bernadine Nelson of Oregon had prepared an extensive genealogy book tracing the Borgstrom-Hanson lineage clear back to the 1600’s. A phone call to Janice connected me to Lena, and that was the beginning of our “Great Swedish Adventure.” She was “Face-booking”with Lena in Vannas, a small town in the county of Vasterbotten in Northern Sweden.
The Sunday reunion consisted of 38 relatives who came from far and near to participate in the gathering. Name tags identified each of us, but a massive genealogy chart on 4 display panels enabled us to identify our familial connections. Valter Linghult had built upon the work of Janice and Bernadine to display four enormous wall charts of the family genealogy. Different members of “the clan” came and pointed at their place on the family tree. Lena gave an historic lecture in Swedish, accompanied by PowerPoint picture presentation of the ancestral line. I was invited to give a greeting from America. Then a group picture was taken of all who had gathered, followed by a delicious lunch in the church’s community center.
Monday we made the trek to my ancestral roots way into the backwoods of Sweden, to a farm known as Olofsback. Amazingly, if you do a google map search for Olofsback, you will find it located to the NW of Vannas.
We passed one red house and barn after another (I’m told it is from an extract from mining that makes it cheap), until we left the main dirt road for a more primitive one. The road got rougher, but never impassible, until finally visible between the trees was the home known as Olofsback. We got out of the car and walked the grounds of Olofsback, stood on the porch of this ancestral home where my great-grandfather Erick Borgstrom left at age 19, along with his brother Carl, age 21. It was a profound moment, to realize that this was the man who came to America, married Mary Hanson, and with her produced 13 children. One of those was my grandfather, Rudolph Bergstrom, which is how I made it here in the first place!
We decided to top off our adventure with a visit to the rest of the family, in the cemetery. There Lena Lundgren showed us the grave of her Great Grandfather, Johannes (Borgstrom) Lundberg, who was the brother of Erick Borgstrom, my great-grandfather (they changed their names often in those days). But because Johannes had stayed in Sweden, while Erick had emigrated to America, it was me who was the visitor to Lena, not the other way around. A seemingly small twist of fate, that had huge implications for generations to follow that could hardly have been anticipated as they left for a new land.
