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CAN YOU IMAGINE STARTING a journey to an unknown country without knowing what the country would be like, where you would live, or how you would survive? Was the decision you made to leave the right one?
This first book in the Planting Dreams series portrays my great-great-grandmother, Charlotta Johnson. The story follows Charlotta and her family as they travel by ship and rail from Sweden in 1868 to their homestead on the open plains of Kansas a year later.
Only a few pictures and stories of this woman and her family’s early years surfaced as I researched this book. Facts and stories have been gleaned from history to give the background of this book, but the bulk is fiction—my version of what it must have been like for Charlotta to leave her home and family in Sweden and face the challenge of starting over in a new land.
And how did this decision affect the rest of Charlotta’s life and her children’s, and even my life? This three-book series looks at the seasons in Charlotta’s life, from her early years to her final days, as I try to answer that question.
I am writing this foreword on May 10, 1997. One hundred and thirty-five years ago today, Samuel Johansson and Charlotta Samuelsdotter were married in Wimmerby, Sweden. Their union, and their decision to immigrate to America changed the course of their descendant’s destiny.
This is how their life, and mine, started on the Kansas prairie.
