Letters to Sweden

[At this point, my father diverged from the contents of his handwritten notebook. For the next 24 pages, he inserted new material before picking up the narrative from the notebook. —LS]

I have been transcribing the first notebook which I wrote detailing the events of my life. At this point instead of continuing I shall digress. Up to this point I have pretty much limited myself to my father’s side of my family. I will next consider my mother’s side of our family. I have mentioned the relative dearth of material about my father’s life, especially his early life. The situation regarding my mother’s life is quite different. There are a lot of written records dealing with the doings of the Peterson family.

First of all there is the account that my mother wrote about the life of my grandmother. Although this account was directed at my grandmother it contained much general material about the whole family.

My brother Verner on a trip to Sweden visited some of the Peterson and Seashore relatives and he learned of the existence of letters written by my grandparents to relatives in Sweden dating from the 1870s and 1880s. Included in these was the first letter my grandmother wrote to Sweden after arrival in the United States. I wrote to the relative that Verner had visited and he very generously furnished me with copies of quite a few of these letters — not the originals but his recasting of them in more modern Swedish.

My aunt Laurine who was at that time living in retirement in Friendship Haven in Fort Dodge translated the letters I received from my Swedish relative into English. Although she did most of the translating she received some help from my aunt Dagmar (my uncle Lawrence’s wife) who was also at that time residing at Friendship Haven. I think one or two letters were translated by Ruth Strand (the wife of my father’s cousin Olger Strand).