Swedish emigration to North America

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"Farewell to home!": a ship leaving the port in Gothenburg, bound to England and then on to America

The great Swedish emigration to North America took place from the early 1840s to the 1920s, reaching peaks in 1869 and 1887.^[1] As with that of the Irish diaspora, Swedish emigration was sparked by poverty. During this period, about 1.3 million Swedes left Sweden, amounting to nearly one third of the population of the time. Around 200,000 of them eventually returned home.^[2] Among European countries, only Ireland and Norway had higher emigration rates^{[citation needed]}. Most of the Swedish emigrés settled in the U.S.; a marginal proportion also went to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Brazil. By 1910, Chicago had a greater population of Swedes than Sweden's second largest city Gothenburg. In the 1990 American census, 4.7 million people claimed to have Swedish roots. According to the Gothenburg City Archive, the real number is probably considerably higher, and Swedish-Americans in the US will soon outnumber the 9 million Swedes in Sweden.^[3]

Most emigrants came from the province of Småland. They left by boat, mainly from Gothenburg, and traveled via Kingston upon Hull in the UK to Liverpool, where immigrant ships waited to take them to New York, Boston, or Philadelphia on the American east coast. Several hundred of the passengers who died when the RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage in 1912 were Swedish emigrants with third class tickets.

Vilhelm Moberg (1898—1973), who nearly became an emigrant himself, would later write The Emigrants, an epic four-novel suite portraying the lives of an emigrant family.

The Småland city of Växjö is home of the Swedish Emigrant Institute (Svenska Emigrantinstitutet) located in the House of Emigrants (Utvandrarnas Hus), founded in 1965 “to preserve records, interviews, and memorabilia relating to the period of major Swedish emigration between 1846 and 1930.”^{[cite this quote]} In 1968, research materials Moberg had collected for his epic were donated to the institute and a permanent exhibition is housed in the House of Emigrants (where the headquarters of the Vilhelm Moberg Society is also based).