Delaware: Swedish American

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Background

Map of New Sweden forts and settlements, 1638-1655, together with their modern names.

New Sweden (Swedish: Nya Sverige) was a Swedish colony on the Delaware River on the Atlantic coast of North America from 1638 to 1655. It was centered at Fort Christina, now in Wilmington, Delaware, and included parts of the present-day states of Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. About 600 Swedes and 300 Finns, Dutch, and Germans built the colony for the purpose of producing tobacco and furs.

A lasting legacy of New Sweden was an interest among Swedish people in migrating to America. Another legacy was the log cabin, an idea from Sweden which became the most popular style of first-home on the American frontier. New Sweden also brought some of the earliest Lutheran believers and their ministers to America.

From the first, the leaders of New Sweden knew they were settling on land claimed by the Dutch of New Netherland (New Jersey), and the British Lord Baltimore of Maryland (that is, Delaware). In 1654 New Sweden captured Fort Casimir from New Netherland in what is now New Castle County, Delaware. The next year, 1655, the Dutch counter-attacked, conquered, and absorbed all of former New Sweden, but granted it some autonomy. In turn, New Netherland was conquered and absorbed by the British nine years later in 1664.

Websites

• "New Sweden Settlers, 1638-1654" in Sweden Genealogy Links at http://www.genealogia.fi/emi/3d41indexe.htm (accessed 4 November 2008). Originally published in the Swedish American Genealogist vols. 16-19.
• "List of the Swedish Families Residing in New Sweden in 1693 for Genealogy Research" in Colonial Ancestors at http://colonialancestors.com/de/families.htm (accessed 4 November 2008). 188 families, 932 persons.
• "List of persons to the Colony of New Amstel, compiled from 'Return of Moneys paid for the Colonie on the Delaware River, November 18, 1659 - November 3, 1662'" in New Netherland and Beyond Delaware River Settlements 1637-1682 at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nycoloni/amsteld1.html (accessed 4 November 2008). 41 names.
  
• Swedish Colonial Society - history, churches, and settlers.
  
• Peter Stebbins Craig, "1671 Census of Delaware," in Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, 40 (Spring/Summer 1998): 197-231, and continued in Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, 40 (Fall/Winter 1998): 314-60. Biographical sketches of over 175 mostly Swedish and Finnish residents on the west side of the Delaware River from what is now New Castle County, Delaware, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Also includes a few families in Zwaanendael (now Lewes, Sussex, Delaware), and east of the Delaware River in present day New Jersey.