I can say with reasonable certainty that almost all of my ancestor families were in the United States before the Revolutionary War. These two are two of my three known ancestors who were not from pre-Revolutionary families. Great-great grandparents Nelson and Mary Anderson, or as they were known prior to August, 1869, Nils Petter Andersson and wife Maria Charlotta Persdotter, came from Sweden on a steam ship that had been a blockade enforcer for the Union Army but had reentered commercial service after the Civil War. Three days after disembarking, a very pregnant Mary had their second child, the first born in America, Ella Josephine Anderson, in New York City.
After stopping for a few years at the Swedish settlements around Jamestown, NY, the Andersons followed a somewhat unusual migration path through eastern Virginia and thence to the north central Missouri town of Shelbyville, MO. When Nils died in 1917, their children gathered (even Ella, who had married that “lazy Virginian,” James Absalom Waller “Abby” Smith), and laid him to rest with honor at the edge of the local town’s cemetery. Mary lived about another decade, but as my grandmother, Mary (Anderson) Lamberson recalled, her grandmother, for whom she was named, never really knew much English.
I visited their gravesite for the first time in 2008, and the gravestone, though no longer at the edge of the cemetery, still looks exactly the same.
I love the then and now photos. You are lucky to have both!
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