I’m so late with my post this week! I really struggled with this one. So MANY possibilities! And the more I tried to narrow it down the broader it got. In my genealogy journey I have been many times blessed to have access to a wealth of family information, whether in direct access to, and plenty of time to spend with, relatives who were the keepers of the heirlooms/photos/farm/stories, or the treasures of family bible pages, scrapbooks, detailed family trees, and wonderful writers who wrote the story down for future generations. And to be honest, I already have posts about those folks planned for future weeks.
And then it struck me. The Blue Book.

Most people properly call it Swedes in Texas in Words and Pictures 1838-1918. In my head I call it The Blue Book. In my research notes I usually abbreviate it as “SIT”. It was originally published in Swedish around 1918, in two volumes (with red covers), as SVENSKARNE I TEXAS I ORD ACH BILD 1838-1918, and subsequently translated into English and republished in 1994. It is a lovely, blue chunk of a book, weighing in at about five pounds, about eight by eleven inches, three inches thick, and 1208 pages long, not including the indexes. It took an army of folks and around 5 years to translate it and I can only imagine what a daunting project that was.
And I am eternally grateful to those folks for all their hard work (including cousin Mabel Lindell, who is mentioned in the Dedication at the beginning of the book). Sitting cross-legged in my big arm chair with this tome in my lap, and the Swedish Church Records on Ancestry.com open on my laptop, I was able to trace my grandmother’s family back to the villages and farms in southern Sweden from which they made the trek to Texas. I remember sitting around the big dining room table at “The Farm,” trying to get my Anderson ancestors straight in my head, making my Mama Tut and Aunt Diddie laugh till they cried because I kept pronouncing Knut with a Swedish chef accent and a really hard “K.” And I love just sitting with this book, flipping through the pages, visiting the stories and familiar faces of my folks and discovering the stories of other families who took a chance on Texas.