Scandinavian Festival

We went down to the Scandinavian Festival in Junction City with David and Cherrie Blake. We visited a museum, watched the dancers, saw a costume show, and had Swedish meatballs with red cabbage and all the trimmings. It was a fun excursion.

Naturally this got me thinking about our Scandinavian ancestors. I never tire of telling the stories. We have Scandinavian pioneers on both the Olsen and Fugal lines.

Carl Johan Olsen was a young boy when his parents and three siblings came to Utah as new converts from Hjorring, Denmark. His father, Johannes Oleson, a Swede, had gone to Denmark to find work and had married Johanna Christensen. Carl's three siblings wer

e among the 37 persons who died on the strenuous journey. They went by sail ship, on the Emerald Isle, and then by ox team to Utah. They started out in June and arrived in Utah the end of September. This was 1868 just before the railroad was completed. There were 830 members in this company that was the last of the sail ship and ox team travel for organized groups of LDS converts. 

Carl Johan grew up to become Charles John who married Mary Nelson Okerman who had been in the same pioneer company with her grand- parents. Albert was the fourth of their nine children and became Eldon's grandpa.

Another convert family that traveled from Hjorring and was on the same ship and in the same company was the Fugls. It consisted of a father, Christian, who was a shoemaker, his wife, and three of their adult, unmarried children. The oldest at 35 was Andreas. They, as well as the Olsens, settled in Pleasant Grove. The Fugls lived in a dugout at first over 

which an adobe house was later built (next door to Aunt Gail's.)

They were totally self sufficient with chickens, cows, sheep, and a vegetable garden.

Andreas married Hanna Carlsson, a Swedish convert. Their youngest son was Niels, my grandpa, whose school teacher called him her little home- made boy because everything he wore was homemade from the shoes his father made, to the clothes that Hanna made from wool she spun, wove, dyed and sewed.

Because of these tenacious hard-working ancestors, we are blessed to be Americans and members of the only true and living church upon the face of the earth!