Were your ancestors among these earliest arrivals?
Swedes arrived in America much earlier than you might think. Jealous of the Dutch colonial outposts in America, the Swedish government set out to establish its own New Sweden. It hired Peter Minuit, who had led the founding of New Netherland for the Dutch before being dismissed in an internal dispute, and set up the Swedish West India Company. In March 1638, two ships under Minuit’s command, the Kalmar Nyckeland Fogel Grip, arrived at the site of today’s Wilmington, Delaware, with 50 colonists. They named the settlement Fort Christina, after the young Swedish queen, and Reverend Reorus Porkillus established the first Lutheran congregation in America there.
In the next few years, 11 more ships brought about 600 Swedes along with Finns. The arrivals extended New Sweden along both banks of the Delaware River, pushing into present-day Pennsylvania, where they founded the settlement of Upland on the site of today’s Chester, and Kingsessing. They also settled at Varkens Kill in New Jersey and Strandviken in Delaware.
In 1655, however, Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of New Netherland, decided he’d had enough of the Swedes on his southern flank. He arrived with a formidable armada and took New Sweden by force. The settlements remained Swedish in character, nonetheless, until 1681, when William Penn claimed much of the area and the towns were assimilated into the colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware.
If you have ancestors among these earliest Swedish “immigrants,” you can learn more about New Sweden from the Swedish Colonial Society and at sites including <www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/digital/pahistory/folder_1.html> and <www.founderspatriots.org/articles/swedish.php>. For genealogy information, including names of Swedish-American “forefathers,” see <familysearch.org/wiki/en/New_Sweden>, <www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nycoloni/nwswdn.html> and <www.geni.com/projects/New-Sweden-Forefathers-Swedish-Colonial-Society-1638-1664-Arrivals/8985>.