VIII. “Quiet Day in Hossna”
May 17, 2008
Hossna

The day had a very tentative beginning because Rose Ann was not feeling well when we went to bed, and she had a not so good night. Thankfully, by noon she was beginning to feel better. Two days of nausea, vomiting, and headaches finally concluded, and she could get back to the business of being a tourist again.
There was lots of activity at Konkordiahuset in the work area beneath our apartment all day. About 30 people were here for a workshop on genealogy led by Anna-Lena, and on this cool, rainy day they kept the whole building warm. I stopped in for a few minutes, and with the pellet stove hard at work the room was too hot for me. They must have been dedicated to their learning, however, because they looked like happy students. Their presence kept me away from the center’s computers so I spent a quiet day upstairs with Rose Ann, and we both had our noses in books.
We are perhaps too immersed in Scandinavia. I’m reading Ole Rolvaag’s Peter Victorious, his sequel to Giants in the Earth. It’s the story of the child of Norwegian immigrants growing up in South Dakota in the late 1800’s. Rose Ann just finished Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavrandsatter: The Wreath, the story of the love of a young couple set in 14th century Norway. We are living the stories of our ancestors. Is it too much of a good thing? Perhaps, but I’m still enjoying it.
We went for a walk in the later part of the afternoon. Living in Hossna is, for those of you readers who know Milan, a bit like moving into Big Bend for a week. Big Bend, Minnesota, is not a town. It’s a church with a few farmhouses nearby. As is Hossna. Today we walked to the church, a picturesque old building surrounded by a cemetery, farms, a big parsonage, and stately trees. We took some pictures and enjoyed the fields sprouting grain, the wildflowers, and the exercise.
To continue our Scandinavian immersion experience this evening’s meal included Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes. If we would have had anything else, we would have eaten that, but our grocery shopping two days ago was rushed.
Anna-Lena spent several hours with us this evening showing us church records from the 1850’s and 1860’s that tracked our Lundborg ancestors and their friends, the Brobergs, who lived near to each other before leaving Sweden for America. It was these two families that suffered 13 deaths back in 1862 shortly after they had moved into the West Lake area in Minnesota. From the church records we learned a lot of interesting details. All of the family was baptized; the grown ups had studied Luther’s Small Catechism; all had memorized it; not a one of them understood it. The pastor had a lot of categories to fill out, and that last one allowed him to reveal that as confirmands the Lundborgs didn’t put their hearts into learning their material. They had been vaccinated for smallpox; everyone read well except Gustaf; three sons left for America in 1858; one son moved to Goteborg in 1861; all but Sara moved to America in 1861. One other interesting tidbit, this time about the Brobergs, was the pastor noted that Daniel Broberg was deaf. And the Lundborgs owned their farm in Sweden. One possible reason for moving when they did was that land reform was a big issue in the mid 19th century. Parcels of land willed to children generation after generation had created farms with small strips of property separated by miles and difficult to farm. The farm Andreas and Lena and their children were living on was going to be redistributed among the 7 families that owned property adjacent to one another. In 1850 the mapping began, and in 1860 the process was almost complete. They moved in 1861 and sold their property before moving, and in 1862 the land reform was completed. Had they not moved to America they could have possibly had their farm property drastically rearranged and been forced to move all their buildings to another location. It’s conjecture offered by Anna-Lena, and it sounds plausible.
That’s all for today. Not terribly exciting. Tomorrow we will be attending two church services—one at 9:00 a.m. in Harene, a service especially for the local historical society where we hope to meet someone who will show us around, and one at 11:00 in Algutstorp, a church we visited back in 1992. It’s supposed to freeze here tonight, and as I look at my “Weatherbug” icon on the computer screen displaying the present temperature in Olympia, it says 88 degrees. Oy!