This is Nils-Magnus’ udde, or Nils-Magnus’s headland, outside Oskarshamn on the south east coast of Sweden. It’s named for Nils-Magnus Carlsson, who was a pilot and the father of my great grandmother Maria Charlotta, born in 1857. I believe Nils-Magnus and his family lived in the house straight ahead.
Maria Charlotta married Carl Victor Nilsson, a sea captain. He has a ground named for him nearby.
I was visiting in Sweden a couple of summers ago, and had to get up early for an appointment. On my way back I passed through a park. It was still early, probably before nine, and the air was cool the way it is in the summer when you know the day is going to be hot.
There were a couple of blonde girls raking leaves in the park. They looked like volleyball players, tall, and strong. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing, until I remembered that Swedish high school and college students often have summer jobs filling in during the regular staff’s summer vacation. (Swedish employees have 6 or 7 weeks of paid vacation time, and usually take 4 of those weeks back to back during the summer.) Outdoor summer jobs are the best, because, well, you get to spend all summer outdoors. When I was growing up you’d only get the outdoor jobs through connections.
Right now I’m also remembering an affluent young woman, one of my students in Silicon Valley. She had grown up on a ranch in Morgan Hill, in the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area. As an undergraduate she spent a semester studying abroad in London.
When she came back to school in California I asked her about her time in London. It was obvious there was something she didn’t want to say. It took some prodding, but finally she told the class that in London had been the first time she’d seen white people do manual labor. White people, looking just like herself, had cleaned, sold tickets to the Underground, worked in the supermarkets, and swept the streets. She’d never before experienced anything like it.
This Los Angeles Times story talks about how the California wine industry has such a hard time finding workers after president Trump’s proposed crackdown on undocumented immigrants that they are forced to pay way more than the minimum wage. From the story:
Some farmers are even giving laborers benefits normally reserved for white-collar professionals, like 401(k) plans, health insurance, subsidized housing and profit-sharing bonuses. Full-timers at Silverado Farming, for example, get most of those sweeteners, plus 10 paid vacation days, eight paid holidays, and can earn their hourly rate to take English classes.
The story’s headline? “Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job.”
I’m a member of a Swedish/American genealogy group on Facebook. People post there asking for help finding records for missing relatives in either Sweden or the US. Often Americans need help with translations of Swedish documents or correspondence left behind by older relatives. This morning a man asked for help with a postcard dated March 28, 1928. Here is the translation I typed:
Dear Evelyn I am sending you a view that maybe one day you’ll come visit along with my very best wishes to you and everyone at home from grandma!
One run-on sentence from Värmland to Los Angeles on the back of a picture of Mårbacka.
This is the ship manifest listing the names of those traveling from Göteborg to New York on June 23, 1896 on the S/S Island. One of the passengers was Elna Nilson, my grandfather’s younger sister. They reached New York on July 13, but after that I have no idea what happened to Elna. Unlike her brother she didn’t use their stepfather’s last name (Kratz). Elna Nilson is a very common name, making it impossible to trace her. Family history aside, tho, look how young these emigrants were: 16, 23, 17, 18. Elna was 21.
Years ago I was on my way back from a conference in Frederikshavn (that’s in Denmark, across the water from Gothenburg, Sweden), and the ship was late. We spent an hour or so waiting to board. The waiting area was dominated by a few kids 5-6 years old who were running, screaming, pushing carts, etc. Their moms had no way of controlling them.
My guess is that the moms were teachers, because it was clear that they had had some sort of new training. As their kids were raising hell, the moms were running after them, yelling at the kids to listen. They yelled nothing else, just for the kids to listen. They were also discussing the tactic amongst themselves, which is how I know they had had training. They had learnt that the important thing is to get kids to listen. Making them stop running, climbing, pushing carts into other people, apparently even to calm them down, is secondary.
So, what you had there were two out of control moms, running after four out of control kids, screaming at the top of their lungs for the kids to listen.
Something in the Swedish public discourse makes me think of those two moms.
(American public discourse makes me want to run away from home and spend the rest of my life alone on a stone in the forest. But that’s another story.)
Beginning the year with some social science research, this map summarizes data from the 2010 World Values Survey. At the bottom you have survival vs self expression values, and to the left traditional values vs secular-rational values. My country of origin, Sweden, appears extreme here, by itself up high in the right hand corner. What this means, is that when asked in the survey, Swedes score both secular-rational values and self-expression highly. When asked in the same survey, Americans score self-expression almost as highly, but at the same time their values are way more traditional than those of Swedes. When it comes to traditional values, the US is on par with Argentina, Poland, Turkey, Zambia, and Ireland. Uruguay, Vietnam, Croatia, Italy, and Spain are all less traditional than the US. I think this is a good reminder, and something I tend to forget.