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STRATFORD - Light rain couldn't dampen the spirit of Stratford-area residents waiting for a busload of Swedish visitors to the Carol and Wayne Larson farm.

For Iowans interested in their Swedish ancestors and Swedes looking for any information about their ancestors who emigrated to America, this night on the farm offered a look at the past.

As she waited, Lorraine Young cracked a walnut. She rubbed the outer shells of other walnuts with her foot until the nuts fell out - she wanted to be able to show Swedish visitors how to crack the nut with a hammer. It's something their ancestors may have done to get flavoring for a cake or bread. Walnut trees are not native to Sweden.

The bus with 25 Swedish tourists - 24 adults and one 8-year-old child - missed the Larson farm on 370th Street near Stratford, but that gave their hosts time to get ready before it came back. A few instructions when the bus stopped, and suddenly the visitors could mark up another experience, another day in America.

"Oh, it's really nice," said Ann-Britt Mering. "I have been in Florida once before. I'm here to meet relatives."

She turns and hugs Darrell Young, a local contact for the tour group.

There were two Ann-Britts on this trip. Ann-Britt Olofsson and her husband came to America earlier than the rest of the tour. "We go to Kansas," she said. "We search for family, but we didn't find."

She said church books at Clay Center, Kan., were destroyed in a tornado in 1973, so the trail to find her husband's grandmother's sister was too cold to follow. Still, someone they met in Kansas said he would try to find Olofsson's ancestor and get in touch with them.

For tour leader Gun-Marie Swessar, this is the fourth trip to the Stratford area, her sixth to the United States, but it's her first big trip. Her 8-year-old daughter, Anna, has made her third trip to the states.

"She's cosmopolitan," Swessar said, as she watched her daughter chatting with others on the tour.

In 2003, Swessar spoke at Swede Bend Day about the start of the mass Swedish immigration to the United States.

"From our parish, 10 percent of the people left within four years," she said. "They followed Eric Janson. That was in 1846."

Most of those immigrants ended up at Bishop Hill, Ill., in the western part of the state, which she said "is today Sweden's greatest landmark outside Sweden."

It is special to her tour group.

"All of these people are interested in history, interested in family history," she said. "Stratford is very important to us. From here we go to Illinois for Agriculture Days at Bishop Hill."

Swessar said the tour, which she calls "Culture and Kin," not only works on genealogical research from Sweden to the United States, but for people in the United States who look for ancestors in Sweden.

Tonight the group will gather at the Stratford Lutheran Church, and after another night staying in Webster City, the group will head out to Illinois early Thursday.

On Monday night, the tour group broke into smaller groups at the Larson farm, taking turns to learn about walnuts, watch an antique corn sheller work and tour the 1903 house built by Carol Larson's grandparents. They even ducked into the root cellar to see how produce was saved.

"There's toads down there," Sven-Olov Einarsson said as he stepped outside again. "There's toads down there."

After group members roasted their own hot dogs at a fire fit burning in the misty rain, they gathered in the garage for dinner. An impromptu collection of $115 was taken for the Swedish Foundation of Iowa Swede Bend Settlement Museum.

Swessar handed it to Carol Larson as the group ate.

"If it tastes good," she said, "maybe they give some more."

Contact Sandy Mickelson at (515) 573-2141 or smickelson@messengernews.net