If you go Travelers with Swedish roots who’d like to dig into their past should check out the Kohlers Genealogical Travel Service website at kohlersgts.com. It’s in Swedish, but Google Translate will turn it into English with a click.

I never met any of my great-grandparents. They died long before I was born. But after a trip to Scandinavia last fall, I feel a lot closer to my maternal grandmother’s parents — who left Sweden in the late 1800s and moved to Minnesota.

Thanks to Anders, a Swedish cousin three generations removed, I was able to visit Oklunda, the farm where my great-grandmother grew up. Amazingly, it’s still in our (greatly extended) family. Anders also took me to the church where my great-grandparents were married. I also got to hear some 130-year-old gossip about them.

One of the best parts of the visit was having a fika — coffee with pastries and sandwiches — at Oklunda with another cousin, Eva, and her husband. As we walked around their property, which had several large red barns, I could imagine my great-grandparents courting there back in the 1870s. The farm is also the site of a well-known rune stone, which tells the story of a man from the early Viking age (perhaps another relative?) who killed a rival and fled for his life before he was pardoned.

And while I’d expected the Lutheran Church where they were married to be a modest structure in the small village (population 800) named Östra Husby, I was surprised to see that it was an imposing building with a tall bell tower that had been recently restored. The graveyard was full of kin.

Blood ties — even distant ones — are strong. For the few days I was in the province of Östergötland, where Östra Husby is located, I was a special guest in Anders’ home. Better yet, he drove me around to see castles, museums and parks. Why, we even went mushroom and wild strawberry hunting together!

Probably the most interesting tidbit of information I learned from him, however, was that my great-grandmother was 30 years old when she married. While that is certainly not unusual now, it was late back then.

Moreover, her husband was the hired man at her father’s farm. So she married down on the social ladder. He’d been to the U.S. and returned for her. They moved several weeks after they were married, never to return to Sweden. But she stayed in touch with her kin in the old country. Lucky for me.