Vasa Order of America National Archives
Online Collections
After years of waiting and numerous requests, the Vasa National Archives now has a small percentage of our collections available online! The Upper Mississippi Valley Digital Image Archive allowed us to join their efforts to make archival collections available. With the help of a grant from the Swedish Council of America, we hired an intern during the summer of 2017 to help with getting a jump start with getting our collections online. The Illinois State Historic Records Advisory Board gave us a grant in 2018 to get 60 microfilms converted to digital and uploaded. In the summer of 2024, we will have an intern scanning and uploading Vasa Stars from the 1920s.
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This is something we work on as often as possible. Many of the items are from our microfilm collection. If you would like to help pay for a reel of microfilm to be converted to digital, please contact us. The digital library is hosted by the Upper Mississippi Digital Image Archive; lodges do not need to be in the Upper Mississippi area to be included. You can visit our digital library here.
While only a small portion of our collections can currently be accessed, we routinely work on improving current digital materials and adding new materials. If you'd like to help, please let us know as we are always on the lookout for new volunteers.
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If you know a family member belonged to a lodge in a particular state or province, here is a list of where all our lodges have been located. You can also see if there is a lodge near you.
We are busy processing the backlog of materials here and creating a detailed inventory of what materials we have. This inventory is called a Finding Aid. Our finding aid is a work in progress. We will be updating the finding aid available here as often as possible. You can find it here.
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Lennart Setterdahl's Swedish Immigrant Oral History Interviews
The Vasa National Archive is honored to be one of two research institutions to hold copies of Lennart Setterdahl's Swedish Immigrant Oral History Interviews. Lennart travelled across the US interviewing Swedish-Americans to collect their immigration stories and history in the US.
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The Vasa National Archive has a nearly 3,000 volumn library of books on Sweden, Swedish-Americans, Immigration, and related topics. We are routinely adding to the collection and will be updating this list as often as possible. We are a non-lending library and materials must be used in-house. Feel free to search our library collection to see if we have a book you are interested in.
