LISA OLSON PADDOCK is a lawyer and a free-lance writer. She has published books and essays on literature and the law.

CARL SOKOLNICKI ROLLYSON is a professor of English at Baruch College, The City University of New York. He has published six biographies and several articles on Poland and Eastern Europe.

Understanding Your Heritage. To understand the experiences of Scandinavian immigrants, you need to know something about the history of Scandinavia and about that part of it from which your ancestors came. The next chapter will provide a brief history of the "old country" and suggest further reading about Scandinavian culture and its outstanding figures. Don't overlook the very rich tradition of the various Scandinavian literatures. The more you know about your parent country, the more you will discover what makes you both Scandinavian American and Danish, or Finnish, or Icelandic, or Norwegian, or Swedish. Your opinions about your family, community, and country may change as you explore the nature of what it means to be a Scandinavian American. You will probably become interested in comparing the experiences of Scandinavian Americans with those of other immigrant groups. This will be a research project that can be shared with friends, some of whom will doubtless be descendants of other immigrant groups. The Resources section at the end of this chapter introduces several books that provide insights into immigrant history, followed by sections specifically devoted to the separate histories of immigrants from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. You will also find sections concerning prominent Scandinavian Americans, such as the Saarinens, who arose from one of these separate, but similar groups. Eliel Saarinen (1873-1950) and Eero Saarinen (1910-1961) were a father and son team of Finnish American architects. The elder Saarinen first made a name for himself as the architect of the Helsinki, Finland, railway station, which was completed in 1914. After taking second prize in a prestigious architectural competition in Chicago in 1922, he took up residence in the United States, where his increasingly functional style had a profound effect on the development of several American cities, such as Detroit, where he headed the academy of art at the Cranbrook Institute. Among the influential buildings designed for public use by Eliel Saarinen are the Crow Island elementary School in Winnetka, Illinois, and the music shed for the Berkshire Festival at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Eliel Saarinen's later projects were undertaken in conjunction with his son. Like his father, Eero Saarinen had a base in Detroit, where he was responsible for designing the innovative General Motors Technical Center. And like his father, Eero Saarinen also designed significant public buildings, such as American embassies in London and Oslo, the Trans World Airlines Terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York City, and the Dulles International Airport outside Washington, DC. Perhaps his greatest works are those at such prominent American universities as Yale, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Like much of the art created by Scandinavian Americans, the Saarinen's designs fuse Nordic romanticism with New World practicality, giving rise to a wholly new style that has come to seem quintessentially American. Because their work is seen and used daily by Americans who live, work, study, and travel through some of the nation's largest population centers and institutions of higher learning, they continue to shape the country's sensibilities. You may be surprised to see how rapidly Scandinavian Americans adapted to their new land. They did, of course, experience setbacks and tragedies. Overcoming obstacles became part of the process of assimilating new experiences and adjusting to changes. The immigrant experience is a process of identity-formation. Immigrants have kept the United States a dynamic country, unwilling to be complacent, always in pursuit of new ways of doing things. Scandinavian Americans constitute one of the major ancestry groups in the United States. This means that your family's history will be representative of the complex and diverse history of the United States. Your research may lead you to new photographs of relatives and of places where your family lived. You may see features resembling your own in a photo that is many years old. It will feel as if you are holding history in your hands-especially if the pictures mesh with the interviews, oral histories, and other tools that you will use to make the past live again. The immigrant experience was a journey, a quest for a better life, a way to express oneself. Think of your research project as your own journey of self-expression. You can look back at the cumulative record of the past to see how your family history might have shaped your personality and family dynamics. In the course of your research, you will learn how to read maps, secure various documents such as birth and death certificates and military records, and use a wide range of logical societies, and of course among members of your own family, you will find many people willing to help you. You will probably make mistakes. If this happens, remember that you can always backtrack. Do not be afraid to reinterview people and to reread materials. Veteran researchers will tell you that everyone goes through the same trial-and-error process. This book will give you many pointers on how to proceed and how to organize your research. Ultimately you will become more comfortable as you discover your own favorite ways of information-gathering. Listed below are books and articles that will help you get started thinking about your roots and the place of Scandinavian Americans in the history of American immigration. Detailed information and more resources are listed in Chapter 3, Beginning Your Genealogical Search. For now, you might take inspiration from the stories of others. read some of the autobiographies, oral histories, and historical and biographical studies recommended here. They will give you an idea of form, of what a genealogical study of family history can look like. These readings should give you the inspiration to go on; they will also provide you with working models. Once you have a basic grounding in historical, biographical, and genealogical research-and after you master the basic history of your ancestral land-you will be able to create your own history and to act as your own guide to your Scandinavian American past, present, and future.