The essays, diary entries, and articles found in SRIO’s booklets focus on ordinary people who took the extraordinary leap of emigration from Sweden to America. In addition to first-hand accounts, you’ll also find the perspectives of first-generation Swedish Americans born to immigrant parents. Most of these booklets were featured in SRIO’s first book, Swedish Oregon, compiled and edited by Lars Nordstöm, which is now out of print.
Swedish Emigration to America and Oregon after World War II
By Lars Nordström, 2007
Portland’s Swedish-American Community after World War II
By Lars Nordström, 2007
Winter Crossing
The story of Anna Björkmans emigration to Oregon in 1890
Vi Gale: The Immigrant Story Behind the Poetry
An interview with one of Oregon’s better known women poets. Portland: Swedish Roots in Oregon, 2001, 28 p.
Ernst Skarstedt: Oregon and its Swedish Population
Excerpt from the book Oregon och dess Svenska befolkning originally published in Swedish in Seattle, 1911.
Martin Peterson: The Swedes of Yamhill
Martin Peterson’s article “The Swedes of Yamhill” is a valuable contribution to the Swedish history of Oregon because it illustrates how a coherent Swedish farming community happened to come into being in the 1890s
William Carlson Smith: The Swedes of Oregon
This article was originally published by the American Swedish Historical Museum in Philadelphia in its Year Book for 1946. The author, William Carlson Smith, Ph.D., was then a professor of sociology at Linfield College, in McMinnville, Oregon. He was born of Swedish immigrant parents in Minnesota and spent his early years on a farm in a Swedish community at Oakland, Nebraska.
Samuel Magnus Hill, Swedish Educator, Poet and Minister by James I Dowie and Lars Nordström
This biographical portrait of Samuel Magnus Hill, written by James Iverne Dowie and originally included as two separate chapters in his doctoral thesis (later published as Prairie Grass Dividing in 1959), describes Hill’s life from his arrival in the United States in 1868 to his move to Oregon in 1915
Diary Kept on the Journey to America 1868 by Samuel Magnus Hill
During the summer of 1914, the year before he moved to Oregon, Samuel Magnus Hill started spending a great deal of time in front of his Swedish typewriter. He typed up a large stack of old letters to and from relatives and friends in Sweden and the United States,
and he cleaned up the diary he had kept during the family’s emigration in 1868
Order Booklets
All SRIO Booklets below may be ordered by sending $3.00 per booklet, shipping and handling included.
Please make checks out to “Swedish Roots in Oregon” and mail to:
Booklets Archive
- Diary Kept on the Journey to America 1868 by Samuel Magnus Hill
- Ernst Skarstedt: Oregon and its Swedish Population
- Martin Peterson: The Swedes of Yamhill
- Portland’s Swedish-American Community after World War II
- Samuel Magnus Hill, Swedish Educator, Poet and Minister by James I Dowie and Lars Nordström
- Swedish Emigration to America and Oregon after World War II
- Trapped In Oregon
- Vi Gale: The Immigrant Story Behind the Poetry
- Victoria Owenius: Oregon Posten
- William Carlson Smith: The Swedes of Oregon
- Winter Crossing