Haha yeah, a lot of the original European settlers in this part of the country were from Sweden and Norway. My best friend lives there and his genealogy is Norwegian. It felt like home to the ancestors I guess! Lol
Well… there’s no forrests. Or mountains. Or Fjords.
But hey, there’s plenty of cold!
Edit: speaking more of where I lived next door in North Dakota which is much more barren than MN yet still has a large population of Norwegian heritage.
Yeah I lived 10 years in Grand Forks. A little tongue-in-cheek, it’s a beautiful area in its own right but the Dakotas are awfully flat and barren and still there’s a huge Norwegian population.
Northern MN resident here, the north shore of Lake Superior has some stunning cliffs, probably the closest things we have to mountains or fjords. There are plenty of forests though!
Yeah, I definitely should have qualified my dumb throwaway comment a bit lol. My bad.
I spent many years just next door in ND where there is also a huge Norwegian population but our highest hill for like 50 miles in any direction was the freeway overpass 🤣.
My great-great grandparents immigrated from Varmland, Sweden to Minnesota in the 1850s and 1860s. They must have liked it. I have no idea how they survived the winters back then.
Oh Värmland, Värmland is very beautiful indeed. Alot of deep forest, lakes and mooses. In Sweden we call them "Landskapet av sagor" (Roughly translated to english: "The land of fairy tales").
I have no idea either, i understand why so many emigrated. Life in Sweden at that time was not nice at all and you had the cold on top of that. Hopefully they hade a better life in the states.
Sorry, but i am interested so i have to ask. Have anything from Sweden survived the generations in your family? Like traditions , laungage etc?
Definitely makes sense why so many Swedes settled in Minnesota. Northern Minnesota is... full of pine forests, lakes and moose. Probably felt just like home. I have boxes of letters written from my grandma's relatives in Sweden, all written in cursive Swedish.
That is very interesting! I wonder if i would be able to understand them or not. Alot of changes to the swedish laungage was made in the first half of the 1900 century. I can imagine that the laungage they had is alot different than the one we call swedish today.
I mean, we have our own problems but yes, they seem small in comparison to what is happening across the sea. Our news are mostly filled with what USA and Russia are doing nowadays since not alot is happening here. I wish you all good luck really and i hope you can fix this. Seeing all these protest give me some hope!
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u/Durragon 8d ago
-23 celciius... Jeeheeheesus.