Thank you for visiting. This website serves an extended family of many generations that traces its roots to a small town in the Swedish province of Småland known as Hamneda. Hamneda is where two brothers, Johan (John) and Frans (Frank), and two sisters, Selma and Jennie, lived before emigrating to the United States. (Two other sisters remained in Sweden.) They each found their way to central Iowa where they farmed and raised large families. This is a story of their connected families, including the family of Frank’s wife, Amy (Johnson) Lindgren.
John, the first to arrive (in 1891), changed his last name from Petersson to Lindgren. When his brother Frank arrived in 1893, he also adopted Lindgren as a surname, as did Selma and Jenny, who emigrated around 1900.
The brothers married sisters from the Johnson family that farmed and lived in the area. Lizzie gave birth to ten children and her sister Amy had nine children, with only one that did not survive childhood. While John and Lizzie’s children mostly remained in the area and engaged in farming, Frank and Amy’s children left for higher education and, with one exception, lived their lives outside of Iowa. The exception was Gilmore who after education at what is now Iowa State University, taught agriculture. After marrying another teacher, Hazel Hill, Gil and Hazel returned to the farm as Frank and Amy retired and moved off the farm into Lanyon and later Fort Dodge, Iowa. The Farm occupies a central place in the Lindgren’s lives and legacy.
We hope this website will accurately and fully reflect the history of the Lindgren Family, including its Swedish roots and its diaspora in America. Because of the female marriages the genealogy will expand in many directions and introduce many surnames. We also hope that all those with common ancestry will find the stories, documents, photographs and charts a source of inspiration to expand communication that may extend across many generations yet to come.
The children of Frank and Amy Lindgren maintained their connections with bulk posted letters they called the “Round Robin” —that continued until 202 0 in an e-mailed form among many cousins and second cousins. These letters were published in a 300+ page book. Reunions were also attended by the sisters and brothers of the Amy and Frank Lindgren family. A few cousins have held mini-reunions. We hope this website will foster a renewal of connections wherever we may all be found around the world.
All of the cousins and children and grandchildren of cousins are invited to contribute to this website in the form of stories, opinions or speculative posts (this is a family blog) and fact-filled pages. Categories and sub-categories have been established and new ones are easily created for each family lineage. Amy and Frank Lindgren’s family emerged first; one for each of their eight surviving children. This theme can and should be exp anded to include other families. In addition, a category for obituaries, Round Robin, Reunions, Memories, Photographs, will help point visitors to the site to posts and pages of their interests.
Bruce Lindgren (in Minneapolis) is the current administrator. He can be reached at (218) 348-3325. Your submissions and editorial help will be greatly appreciated. Our needs include: vital statistics for each family member, birthdays and places of birth, death dates, published and unpublished obituaries, place of interment, marriages, natural children & adoptions, divorces, remarriages, and on and on. We’ll also be collecting photographs (ideally with dates and locations), stories of people and places– memories of parents and grandparents to be shared — a legacy of the “I remember …” documents collected by Ruth Coss and edited by her daughter, Linnae.
Last update 25 September 2022.