Late in the fall of 1886, Carolina Margareta Brandt, my great-grandaunt, left Sweden on the long journey to America. With Carolina age 39 traveled her niece, Milda Kristina age 14, and her nephew Carl Henning age 12. These two also were Carolina’s step-children, because Carolina had married August Johnson the widower of her sister Cristina Carlotta who had died 6 days after Carl’s birth. The youngest in the group was Carolina’s and August’s son Gustaf Albert, age 9. Another woman and her children from the village went with them.
The group traveled from their village near Lake Vanern in central Sweden to Gothenburg’s harbor. They sailed on the Diana from Gothenburg to Frederickshavn in Denmark, then took another ship to Bremen, Germany where they boarded a German steam/clipper ship the SS Hermann built 1865.
They landed in Baltimore on November 11, 1886 and traveled by train to Minneapolis where my great-grandfather August Johnson was waiting for them. He was sitting on the porch of a boarding house, when his wife and his three children came trundling along the walk, looking, according to the family story, like gypsies.
The iron-bound wooden trunk you see in the photographs also went to the New World, via Liverpool and then to Baltimore. I am sure the family traveled with smaller bags, too.
What do you think Carolina packed in that trunk? Was my grandmother Milda Kristina allowed to put something in it? What would you take from home across an ocean to a new land? The trunk, a cherished family heirloom, now sits in the home of one of Milda’s great-granddaughters.
Last June, I stood on the bow of the canal boat M/S Juno built 1874 as it sailed out of Gothenburg harbor on its way to the Gota Canal system of rivers, canals, and lakes, and ultimately into the North Sea and the docks of Stockholm. I thought about those brave women in my family who sailed from that same harbor across the Atlantic Ocean, and that wooden trunk containing pieces of their lives. I felt a circle had been closed. And I was grateful for the traits of tenacity, resiliency, and courage I have inherited.
