John Hansson emigrated to the US in 1902. He was going to look for his father, Hans Malcom Dahlstrom, who had left Sweden for the US in 1891. John worked at many jobs, and one of them was the building of the Panama Channel. He also worked in Cuba, and his goal was to earn enough money to go to Sweden and pick up his sister Emilia.

In 1906, they went on the ship ”Carmania” to America.John never returned to Bullaren. He married a Norwegian girl Ellen Huseby, and they settled in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, and had eight children. He was a strict father. All of his children had an education and did well in their lives. Every year in July his ancestors have a reunion in Lyndhurst.

In 1988, three of John’s children, Thomas, Kathryn and Edna, visited Sweden. I took them to the place where John spent his childhood. They couldn’t, as American citizens with no money problems, understand how it was in the ”old country” and what kind of childhood their father had.
They couldn’t understand that John and Meli had to walk the long way from their home to Naverstad church, before the confirmation, so far to walk! I spent a whole night talking to Thomas and told him everything I know about ”our roots”. He was deeply touched, and said that his children never could understand the lives the previous generation had lived.

My grandmother told me that is was her job to keep the fire in the old stove alive. She was only five years old at the time. She and her brother John were taking care of some hens so the fox wouldn’t get them, and they also had to carry around their disabled brother Karl Ossian. Their mother, Josefina Mathilda, worked for the farmers in the area, and the children had to manage on their own.

My grandmother told me that sometimes they didn’t see their mother for several days. She would leave before they woke up, and they had gone to bed before she came home.
In the US Meli lived with her aunt, Matilda Elisabeth Dahlström, and her husband, a contractor by the name of Karl Magnus Persson, in Jersey City for a year. Later she worked as a maid and companion for three siblings. She traveled with them to California by train.

One day at her aunt’s home, she met a man by the name of Gunnar Fredrik Pettersson. Gunnar was a foreman for the building of the bridge over the Hudson River, and he was from Sannäs. They married in 1917 and had two children.

They returned to Sweden in 1920 and settled in Sannäs. Three more children were born in Sweden. In 1926, Gunnar and Meli had decided to go back to the US, and everything was ready for the trip, but there was a shortage of jobs in America, and the grandparents to the children were not healthy, so they stayed in Sweden.


The information of John och Meli is given to us from Melis grandchild, Caritta Bryngelson in Ljungskile.