Check out the inspirational story of Amber Stime, one of the featured storytellers in our salon called “Foreign Correspondents: Immigrant Odysseys” in November, 2014. A bomb changed her life path from Ethiopia to Minnesota. Read More »
My great grandmother Maja Greta Andersdotter may have immigrated from Sweden to the US twice. She was born in Grevbak, Skaraborg, Sweden on Dec. 13, 1847, to Anders Johansson and Maria Svensdotter. She was the eldest of what eventually were six children in the family, including one who died in infancy. In the early 1850s the family was influenced by ... Read More »
My grandfather was born in Sweden and came to America with his wife near the turn of the 20th century. He was known on the East side of St. Paul, Minnesota as “Coffee Carlson” because he delivered coffee to various places throughout that part of town. He married Beda Wilhelmina Rudeen, but there is very little written about them. They ... Read More »
Johannes Hokannson was a religious man, an itinerate preacher in Sweden. His wife, Cecilia came from a wealthy family. Cecelia’s family helped her and her children considerably, but even so Grandpa said they were poor in Sweden. The state church disapproved of such preachers in Sweden; hence, he left with his wife Cecelia, and the six youngest of their seven ... Read More »
Christian Juergen Alpers completed a course of study to become a Lutheran pastor in Hermansburg, Germany and then, in 1875, immigrated to an area southwest of New Prague, Minnesota where about fifteen German Lutheran families had settled in the mid 1850’s. The school was one of several institutions sponsored by German mission societies, and the graduates were sent to locations ... Read More »
My mother was born in Germany in 1927. Her dad was a dentist and her mom was a housewife. They lived in Bamburg and had a nice, comfortable, multi-story house. With the rise of Hitler, things became increasingly worse for her family. Mom, along with all the other Jewish kids in the Catholic school she attended, was thrown out of ... Read More »