I happened to be in Scandinavia last month when this year’s World Happiness Report came out. Denmark, where I spent two days touring Copenhagen’s canals and cobblestone streets, was No. 2. And Sweden, where I journeyed to learn more about my roots, was number No. 4.
Ancestry DNA says I’m 90% Swedish, more than a century after three of my great-grandparents arrived at Ellis Island on their way to western Illinois — and even longer since four of my Swedish great-great-grandparents crossed the Atlantic in search of fertile farmlands and better lives here. The results also say that 90% of my DNA most matches the people of one specific region — the historical province of Småland in southwestern Sweden.
If you squint a little driving European Route 22 between Malmö and Kalmar and on to Oskarshamn, parts of the landscape look just like Interstate 74 between Woodhull and Galesburg, a stretch of land I know well and that my Swedish ancestors knew well, if from a pre-Interstate perspective. Little towns beacon in the distance and clusters of farm buildings spring up like bouquets from all directions. On a closer look in southern Sweden, the farmhouses have a different pitch of roof and the very road is blasted out from granite. At the edge of every field is a pile of boulders, hard-dug by pioneers of some sort from some era, trying to make their way.
My mom’s grandmother, Signe Franson on her Ellis Island manifest, was 17 and working as a servant when she boarded the S.S. Celtic at Liverpool in 1906. Her hometown of Sankt Sigfrid isn’t really a town but a wisp of one, much like the hamlets of Ontario and Ophiem in western Illinois that hold important histories of my family in America. My dad’s grandfather, Axel Carlson, came to America twice. The 1910 U.S. Census shows him as a boarder living in Galesburg’s then-Ward 7 at age 22 and working as a laborer. But there he is again on an Ellis Island manifest from 1914, after being deported for faulty paperwork the first time. Axel was from Bjälebo, a smattering of red cottages and barns with white trim located a few winding miles of drained peatlands and spruce forest south of Kristdala. He came to America the second time on the R.M.S. Lusitania, about a year before the British passenger ship was sunk by a German submarine.
A few lines down on that same manifest is my dad’s grandmother, Bertha Svenson, then an 18-year-old servant from Mönsterås, a little town right on the Baltic Sea with a towering peachy-pink church. Bertha worked in a matchstick factory as a child. She told my dad about explosions in the factory, when bodies would be carried out and the workers would never be seen again.
Modern-day Swedes — and people from all Nordic countries — are happy because of social cohesion, according to the World Happiness Report. Their high taxes translate to universal healthcare and a deep social safety net. Underpinning that is a strong sense of faith in institutions and benevolence for each other. At a gas station north of Mönsterås,, a local who helped us figure out if we should pay or pump first, told me, matter of factly, “In Sweden, they trust us.”
There’s also the concept of lagom, which means not too much and not too little, but just the right amount, applied to everything from food to work-life balance to housing. The best way I can describe it is that, even in these tiny, rural towns where my great-grandparents lived, everyone has well-maintained homes, nice-looking cars, and paved, pothole-free roads. But nobody’s homes, cars, or roads are better than anyone else’s. That egalitarian society is not the Sweden my ancestors left. That Sweden was overpopulated and had no child labor laws. My great-grandparents lived in the shadows of crop failure and famine. Like all immigrants, they came to America for religious, economic, and social freedom – for safety, security, and some kind of cohesion.
In America, Signe married the son of two Swedish immigrants, and they farmed near Altona. She lived to be over 100 years old, half of that as a widow. Axel and Bertha married each other and eventually settled near Rio. They farmed a patch of land near Pope Creek where I would eventually grow up. Their oldest son — my grandfather, Glenn Carlson — spoke no English when he started school.
The republic of my birth is lacking social cohesion, according to the World Happiness Report. The United States this year dropped to its lowest ranking ever at No. 24. The main factors for this unhappiness? Declining social trust, increased political polarization – and a steep increase in loneliness, especially for people under the age of 30. More than half of Americans surveyed in the Gallup Poll that fuels the World Happiness Report said, on the previous day, they ate all of their meals alone.
The other 10% of my DNA can be traced to Germanic Europe and early American settlers, whose descendants later traveled to upstate New York in search of opportunity, and then, as abolitionists, on to Knox County in western Illinois. In the spirit of lagom, my DNA makes me no more or less American than anyone else. My hope for my country is that we can find some sort of collective buy-in, even as we are hard-dug into our own visions of being American. I hope we can find some kind of shared fellowship at some table, not only for our own happiness but so our young people — our Signes, Axels, and Berthas — feel less alone.
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