Pedigree chart Elivera Mathilda Carlson

Biography

Born 1878 in USA.
Died 1960.

Mother of Mamie Eisenhower.

IN THIS ISSUE of The CHRONICLE we are proud to present Mamie Doud Eisenhower, First Lady of the Land. Life Member of the American Swedish Historical Foundation, and High Patroness of the Fredrika Bremer Committee.

The Board of Governors and the members of the Foundation are honored by the participation and interest she has shown in the preservation of the American Swedish heritage. Her name is now inscribed on the roster with those of other Americans of Swedish origins, who through the maintenance of the Foundation and its Museum in Philadelphia hope to preserve the history and contributions of Americans of Swedish birth or ancestry from the earliest colonial times to the present. Mrs. Eisenhower through her gracious participation honors not only her own mother and grandparents, but the some 3,000.000 Americans of Swedish ancestry now living in our great land.

In the 1860's her maternal grandparents joined the migration from Sweden to the new land in the west. Her grandfather, Carl Carlsson, was born in Dagsås Parish, Halland, in 1841. At the age of twenty-seven he sailed for the United States and arrived in Portland, Maine, in the spring of 1868. In autumn of the same year he started for the West and settled in Boone County, Iowa, where be operated a farm until 1870. Later he went into the milling business and built his own mill in 1892, where he continued to do business until his retirement in 1901. Carl Carlson had married Maria Andersson in Sweden in March, 1868, before he went to the United States. She later followed him to Boone. Here both became members of the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church. Their daughter, Elivera Mathilda Carlson, was born in Boone in 1878. She grew up in a home where Swedish was the daily language and the traditional Swedish holidays and customs were observed. Mrs. Elivera Carlson Doud still speaks and reads Swedish fluently and subscribes to Swedish language papers.

Thus Mrs. Eisenhower inherits from mother and grandparents her love for and knowledge of things Swedish. One of her prize possessions now in the White House is an old-fashioned Swedish desk with a concealed mattress and springs opening into a bed. It originally belonged to her maternal grandparents.
"Mamie Doud Eisenhower" by Esther C. Meixner. American Swedish Historical Foundation: The Chronicle, Vol 1, No. 4. Winter 1954-1955