My Trails into the Past

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. This is a tough meme. I can’t think of any tradition that we have in our family. It seems that each generation tried to make holidays and other events “their own” and did not necessarily pass on old traditions. On my father’s side, his parents were Roman Catholic, and maybe that was a tradition passed down. When we were children, our father took us to church (our mother wasn’t Catholic), and later I took my younger siblings. But none of my siblings carried on being Catholic. I was the only one who married in the Church. On my mother’s side, I would say some food items we ate were passed down. We always had cornbread dressing in our turkey at Thanksgiving. But most of us kids resisted eating greens and...

This is my second year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow . I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails Into the Past . I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways. The Ahnentafel number 8 in my husband’s ancestry is his great-grandfather, Nils Malkom Nilsen. I have written a book about three generations of his Swedish family back in 2010 but have not written much about him on the blog. [1] He spent his entire life as a Swedish Covenant minister, moving from city to city, as he made his way further west. I don’t really know much about him personally, and neither did his grandchildren. He died when they were very young. He left no writings either, which is unusual for a minister. So I thought about it. Perhaps no writings were left because they were written in Swedish. All of his congregations were Swedish-Americans. He served parishes in Sheffield, Pennsylvania...