Dec 2025

Greetings Vasa Sisters and Brothers,

I’m sitting in the office this frosty Lucia night enjoying the wonderful holiday season. Thinking back to my first Lucia night in Bishop Hill. We had several people say they had never seen the Vasa National Archive open on Lucia. It was a great way to start my first year in Bishop Hill.

We had a fairly successful year this year. We received a grant from the Geneseo Community Foundation for an intern to scan our small GL convention books and uploaded those to the Upper Mississippi Digital Image Archive. These are available online at http://www.umvphotoarchive.org/ .  She also got a lot of our convention ribbons and lodge ribbons photographed and uploaded. We’ll try for another grant to finish the convention booklets next summer.

We continued sending anniversary cards to local lodges. Repainted the rock in Carl’s Garden and repainted the bench. Carl’s Garden is in memory of Carl and Sally Cederblad who were great supporters of the archive. Carl and Sally moved to Bishop Hill and worked in the archive for a few years. I think they both passed away about 5 years after moving to Bishop Hill. Carl’s garden keeps their memory alive.

Our biggest accomplishment has been finishing processing the remaining local lodge collections. We moved on to processing some of the non-Vasa materials that we have collected and are currently on the Genealogy section of our non-Vasa collection.

We plan to continue expanding and growing on these successes in the coming years. Follow us on Facebook to see how we continue to improve!

In Truth and Unity,

Kathy