Anne’s Journal

We visited the Norra Ljunga church (57.3747, 14.5906), home church of Erick Abrahamson (1821-1917), Daryl’s great great grandfather and Erick’s daughter, Helena Sofia Ericksson (1856-1889), who would become Daryl’s great grandmother Ring. Johan Larsson Ring moved his family to Norra Ljunga in 1863, when son Andrew was 13, and they lived there until their emigration in 1869. In 1875 Andrew married Helena Sofia after both groups had emigrated and moved to Stanton, Iowa.

The Norra Ljunga church is one of nine churches in the Njudung district built in the last half of the 1100’s from the same architectural plan in the Romanesque style. The church was built with 5-foot thick stone walls covered inside and out with plaster.

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Marc Gettemans is Daryl’s friend whom he met on the double-gun bulletin board online. This is for collectors of antique double-barrel shotguns. When we went to Belgium in 2008, Marc hosted us for a week and showed us the sights in Belgium. Belgium is a country that produced many elegantly decorated shotguns more than a [...]

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Marc and Tanya accompanied us on this visit to Kråksmåla, the birthplace of James Johnson, Daryl’s great grandfather, and the place from where he emigrated in 1870. This was our first ancestral visit without Barbro and Åke and we really missed the in-depth research that they had done for us at the other sites. If they had come with us, I feel certain we would have seen Lindehult, the actual home of James Johnson, but as it was, we saw the strikingly beautiful wooden church that was built in 1761.

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While we were driving back from Gothenburg after dropping off Marc and Tanya at the airport, we received a phone call from a cousin we had not yet met. Jan had told us there were some cousins who wanted to get to know us before the reunion. Dick Lövgren is Jan’s first cousin and Daryl’s [...]

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Daryl’s second cousins from America had been traveling with Monica and Kjell Lindstrom and Barbro and Åke. Judy Lefgren McCracken and Nancy Lefgren Porter are related to to Barbro and Monica through their grandmother Anna Lydia Olsson Lefgren. They all arrived on Thursday in preparation for attending the Lövgren family reunion on Saturday. Daryl had [...]

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