Looking forward to hearing more about Nordic genealogy this week.
More about the Nordic Genealogy Conference - on right now virtually - and the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, Washington, USA here: https://www.nordicmuseum.org/genealogyconference
Photograph titled: "Edwin A. Alm and his family in Sweden before coming to Canada". Photographer unknown. Courtesy Edwin A. Alm / Library and Archives Canada / PA-102051. No restrictions on use. The collection also includes biographical material and photographs of family members.
In genealogy, when tracing immigrant families in Canada, often you hear a warning not to look overseas until you've gathered as much information as you can from Canadian or North American records, and analyzed it for details to shape your history of their life here, and for details which will help you pin down where they lived before emigration.
Now, I want to stress that this is good advice and often can save hours (maybe years) of frustration. Many of us have common names, and family that lived in well populated places. It's all too easy to follow the wrong family and end up tangled up in all the wrong places. Don't jump to looking for Johnsons, Eriksens or even Rydbergs overseas without good solid grounding.
But once you have a few specific details on the 'original' immigrants or first generation Canadians, including any known siblings (like years of birth, year of immigration, first residence in Canada), perhaps clues for place names of birth or residence locations overseas, and if your names are not too common, you may be able to give your research a boost by checking family trees from overseas.
Doing research on Nordic families in overseas records can be frustrating if you don't have all the right information (and don't know the language yet). And if you are looking overseas for immigration dates and places people were going to, it can be very unsettling to see over and over - in any language - just "gone to Canada" or "America" or "North America".
Yet many times, it seems immigrant families and those back home were in touch, usually with letters or postcards, at least for the first years or the first immigrant generation. But after several generations and migrations across country or borders, family members lost touch. But those letters or postcards in the home country may have been saved. Family members overseas could be searching now too but with very old but specific details.
If I have what I believe is good information on the earliest immigrants to Canada and their children, I often do searches in family trees on websites I know have more Europeans among their customers.
MyHeritage is always one of my choices for this. Searching the trees there includes the MyHeritage trees, and those at Geni.com (a MyHeritage company) and the FamilySearch.org tree, so it's a wide search. (If you don't have a membership, you may see free search results and may have full access at a library or a Family History Centre.) https://www.myheritage.com
Another choice might be Geneanet.org. This European based website is mostly free; premium features are available.
Both these companies do have free offers. Right now Geneanet.org has its digital library free for all from September 28-October 4, 2020. https://en.geneanet.org/
Since my personal Nordic interests are mainly in Sweden, I also belong to DISBYT, a tree database created by the DIS (Föreningen för Datorhjälp I Släktforskningen) in Sweden. This gives reciprocal access to Finnish and Norwegian tree databases too. https://www.dis-sweden.org/
Tread cautiously with family trees, but stay optimistic!
And, do keep washing your hands.
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