The Power of Our Collected Stories

Brita Higgins is a former Grinnell student and one of the panelists at the NCSML's upcoming event On the Record: Oral Histories at Iowa Institutions. Recently, she traveled to her family’s native Sweden to carry out an ethnography of Stockholm coffee culture. At On the Record, she will discuss her past work with oral history and her experience of incorporating the medium into her own sociological research.

In this essay, Brita reflects upon her family’s story of immigrating to the United States from Sweden, and the process of transferring aspects of this story from one generation to the next:


Ockelbo, Sweden

Every swaying motion of the boat carries us further and further away from my beloved country, the beautiful land of the midnight sun. Sweden has been our family’s home – our parents and grandparents – as far back as anyone knows.

When I set off for my study abroad semester in Stockholm two years ago, I was the fifth generation to make that particular trans-Atlantic journey. A lot has changed since my great-great grandmother and her family auctioned off their farm in Ockelbo, Sweden, and boarded a boat for America. When I left my mother and father at the airport in Nebraska, there was no doubt in my mind that I would see them again, and while I was maybe nervous and excited, I knew I had in-flight movies and waking up the next day in Sweden to look forward to. Brita Olsson, my namesake, did not have such comforting thoughts as she rode the boat to America, penning these words:

And there in the graveyard beside the parish church in the tiny village of Mo, near Ockelbo, our two dear little girls, Anna and Marie lie side by side waiting the great day of resurrection. And where will I be on that day? Somewhere in the great plains of America – Nebraska – where no doubt Indians will find us and finish us off.

Brita Olsson never got a chance to go back to her beloved Sweden, and for much of my life we were linked only by our common name, Brita, an odd name to American ears, which every single teacher I had from grade school on mispronounced, so that when we would make our annual memorial day visit to her grave, I would simply stare at it thinking, “So here’s the one who caused me all the trouble!” But as I was preparing to go to Sweden for the first time myself, I began to wonder - what is my connection to Sweden? Who were these people? What did leaving mean to them? Many people in America know something about their family’s immigration, but I was unusually lucky when I discovered that from Brita on down to me, someone had been keeping track of those experiences in one way or another, so that by the time that I boarded the plane 120 years after that first voyage, I had a lot of collected experience to draw on in my search for my connection to Sweden.


The Brodin family: Olaf, Brita and children Anna, Olaf and Per circa 1890

Our destination was Stromsburg, Nebraska, and here we found the John Johnsons, Lars Larsons, Peter Petersons, Olaf Olsons, and innumerable Swansons and Nelsons. Father’s name was Olaf Olson, and since this caused even more perplexity in the post-office, we adopted a new name - that of Brodin.

Brita and her family - her husband Olaf, daughter Anna, son Olaf, and son Per arrived in New York on June 9th, 1889 exactly 100 years before I was born. Anna was six years old at the time and was an indispensable help to her mother through the various misfortunes that befell the newly transplanted family. Anna Brodin, my great-grandmother, wrote down many of her experiences during this time for an essay contest, the winner of which would win a free trip to Sweden for the whole family. She had hoped to give her mother, Brita, who was by this time an old woman, a chance to see her home country again. The essay did not win, but the story that remains is a heartbreaking and humorous account through the eyes of a child of life as a first-generation immigrant in America. Anna writes:

The first words of the English language which Olaf and I learned were “molasses” and “upstairs”; and when we felt resentment toward one another that called for special names, we made use of our English vocabulary -- convinced that these words were ultra-wicked since they were English. Mother was now as determined to return to Sweden as she had been determined to stay there. She resented any mention of schooling lest such entanglements would lessen the chances of her realizing her most passionate yearning -that of returning to the Homeland.

When Anna eventually married, it was to another son of immigrants, Carl Eckblad. They had three children, Olive, Annette, and my grandfather Carl James. My grandfather was a quiet man; he was kind and whimsical. He smoked a pipe with vanilla tobacco and was always leaning back in his chair. He told the best stories. I knew that grandpa was Swedish - but as a child all I knew about it was that he would make “Swedish pancakes”, thin crepe-like delicacies, and that every Christmas we had to eat our Lutefisk - a variation on cod that is something between pickled and jellied in a lye solution - before we would get any presents, or so he said. I thought that I might be Swedish too - but only when Christmas or Midsommar rolled around. By the time I had grown up, he had already passed away. He did not wave me off at the airport, I did not get to tell him about how my Swedish host family made fun of me for calling their thin pancakes “Swedish pancakes” instead of just plain pancakes, and I never had a serious conversation with him about his Swedish heritage.


Newspaper clipping from the Gefle dagblad on January 20, 1975 from my mother's visit to the location of the family farm in Ockelbo. The headline reads 'Finally arrived - but the house was demolished'

At first, I was disappointed to see how the most tangible connections to my heritage had already evaporated before I could appreciate them: my mom had visited our elderly last living relative in Sweden when she was in college, nobody in my family has spoken Swedish since my grandfather and his siblings were children, and Stromsburg had never been my home. I felt like I was a generation too late. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized my being in Sweden was not in order to relive a genuinely Swedish past I had somehow missed, but rather it was a way for me to add my own story and journey to the existing narrative. I realized how extremely privileged I was to know so much of this narrative, thanks to a great many people: thanks to my great-aunt Annette for researching the immigration achieves on both continents, to my mother’s fond recollections of cardamom and fresh dill in grandma Anna’s summer garden, to Brita rocking on the boat, and to quiet, stubborn, Swedish grandpa rocking back in his chair.

I hope that all of the women and men who have shared their stories for the Recording Voices & Documenting Memories of Czech & Slovak Americans project have someone in their life to pass these stories on to, someone who will cherish and add to them. But whether they do or not, I feel that we should consider ourselves all to be extremely fortunate to have a record like this.

- Post by Brita Higgins