November 2009 It is late autumn in central Sweden. It was still summer weather when I attended the annual genealogy conference in Falköping in the end of August, so I took the opportunity to join a tour in that part of the Västergötland region as well. It was an interesting experience to walk around in the area, which has the densest presence of megalith graves, also called chambered tumuli, in Sweden. The megalith graves are remarkable, large stone creations, which were built some four thousand years ago. The tumuli were probably used not only as burial places, but also as cult places. I would have given a lot just to get a glimpse of that cult or hearing just a little of spoken language at the time.
 It is a very nice, but quite stressful, experience to attend a genealogy conference, since you want to learn and experience as much as possible. If you have been a recurring attendee for many years, like me, you tend to run into a lot of old friends, and also make new ones.
Of course the genealogy conference gave rise to a lot of promising news. Several new databases are soon to be released, both on CD-ROM and on the Internet. The most promising one is huge database, where all Swedes will be searchable. By writing a name, one can find his or her place of birth or place of living. A great source to have, when you are searching for emigrants and do not have very much information! However, the excerption has only started, so you will have to wait for the complete version.
Some months ago I got a different, but interesting assignment. The married couple Villy and Gerd Herrey contacted me. These very nice people are members of the Mormon Church, and are partly living in the state of Utah in the United States and partly on the island of Gotland in Sweden. The Herrey’s were interested in the emigration of Mormons from Gotland to the United States. In the past, I have studied emigrants from the so-called free churches in the southern parts of Gotland. Now, I travelled around together with the Herrey’s and visited the farms from where the Mormon emigrants came during the emigration period. Now Villy and Gerd’s daughter will try to discover what happened to the descendants of these emigrants. A very interesting project!
On the trivia account, one can add that the Herrey name is quite famous in Sweden. Villy and Gerd’s three sons Per, Richard and Louis won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1984 and were very popular at that time.
 For many years, our family has been searching for descendants of my great aunt Agnes, who emigrated from Sweden to America in the 1920’s. Over there, she settled down in New York and married. For as long as she lived she stayed in touch with my mother, but then the contact was lost. My niece Linnéa, aged 17, thought of a new way to search for them. She had in an old letter seen a photo of Agnes’ granddaughter Donna. That said, Linnéa tried to search for the granddaughter on Facebook and there she found her – Donna Englund. Now they have established a very good contact through Facebook.
There are always unsolved cases, which are annoying me. For instance, there is the case of a man who is searching for his Swedish mother. She gave birth to him in New York, left him to foster parents and was never heard from again. The man has only got his birth certificate with her name and her age. I struggle to find a way to solve this mystery and I am running out of ideas, which bothers me. I think, it must be every man’s right to know at least who his mother is. As we genealogists are too well aware of, the question of knowing the fathers is quite a different story.
Your genealogist,
Kerstin M. Jonmyren
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