Grandparents

My ancestral roots are all in the country of Sweden. The genealogical records extend back only to ∼1700 and have been investigated by various family members. These records have been coordinated and stored by my wife Jean. Before 1700 the record of my ancestors in Sweden appears only in the general history of the people inhabiting Scandinavia. In Appendix A are Xerox copies from a book describing what transpired in Scandinavia prior to 1700 insofar as historical research has determined it. Unfortunately I neglected to record the title and authorship of the book.

Briefly the present-day inhabitants of Sweden are the descendants of humans who entered the populated the country following the retreat of the ice sheet of the most recent ice age. This in-migration occurred about 7000 B.C. Who these immigrants were and where they came from remains undetermined.

My grandfather Peterson died several years before I was born so I have no recollection of him as a living being. My grandmother Strand died when I was about three years old and though I imagine her as a person I have no real recollection of her. What I know then of these two grandparents I know only secondhand, from comments of my parents or other relatives or what I have gleaned from secondary sources. So I will wait to discuss what I know of them when I write about relatives or when I describe the secondary sources I just mentioned.

My grandfather Strand I remember well of course since I was 18 years old when he died in 1938. He was born in this country in Andover, Illinois, where his parents had settled on an interim basis after emigrating from Sweden to this country. On the first occasion I was in the town of Andover I inspected the county records in the nearby county seat and I learned that my great-grandfather had apparently owned a couple of lots in Andover. Whether these lots had a residence on them and whether he resided there during his relatively brief stay in Andover I don’t know. Did he contemplate settling in Andover? That information is lost.

At any rate the family moved fairly shortly to Webster County, Iowa, and settled down on a farm outside the town of Dayton. This farm was I believe the farm that later on was the property of Ralph Strand (a cousin of my father’s) and in my early years there still stood on this farm the house in which my great-grandparents lived while farming and in which my grandfather grew up. I dimly recall being inside this house on one occasion when our family visited the Ralph Strands. These visits to my father’s cousin were rather infrequent and later ones to the ranch-style house that Ralph later built. On one of these later visits I seem to recall the old house, unoccupied, sitting off by itself and looking quite forlorn and dilapidated.

On a visit to see Ruth Strand (Dad’s cousin Alger’s wife) in recent years (perhaps during the year of the Strand reunion in 1988), Ruth took us past Ralph’s farm and we stopped and walked around. There was an old building like a house on the periphery of the building site but it didn’t match my recollection of what the original Strand farmhouse looked like. It was 2 stories in height where my remembrance of the old Strand house was one story and low in height.

One of the few experiences, if not the only one, I have of eating pheasant was on one of our family’s visits to Ralph Strand’s house. I suppose Ralph, or perhaps Earl, his son, went hunting on occasion and that this was the source of the pheasant.