The purpose of this essay is to describe Högsby parish’s emigration to North America during the years 1887-1888 and to compare it with Sweden's emigration. Emigrants' numbers, age, gender, civil status and occupational distribution are examined. The trends in Högsby parish's emigration are compared with the trends in Sweden's emigration as a whole to see similarities and differences. Source materials used to answer the purpose and the questions are “husförhörslängder”and “in- och ut-flyttningslängder” of Högsby parish 1887-1888. In the background, among other things, Högsby’s population, fertility, and population change are discussed. In total, 178 people emigrated from Högsby parish during the years of exam-ination. The difference in tendencies between the emigration of Högsby parish and Sweden's emigration regarding age distribution, gender distribution and marital status were small or nonexistent. There was a difference in the division of labor. 38.7 % of Högsby’s emigrants were categorized into the main group of professions "Industry and Handicrafts". The same main group of professions percentage for the whole of Sweden's emigration was 17.9 % between the years 1851-1915. The difference can be referred to differences in the cate-gorization of professions as "arbetare" are a very broad concept and source material does not invite to a deeper specification. Another explanation could be that many farmers used their forest land as a capital reserve, which resulted in no need to emigrate, which in turn led to the industry's large share of the occupation of emigrants.

This Bachelor thesis aims to uncover the main reasons the Swedish emigrants stated for migration during the mass migration to North America during 1840 to 1914. The research material used for this thesis is a mix of Swedish emigrant letters, letters to the Swedish government’s report on migration (Emigrationsutredningen) and letters to the editor of the Chicago based Swedish-American newspaper Svenska Amerikanaren. By using quantitative content analysis I got results that are presented in this paper through different categories of stated reasons. The distribution of the categories in the different kinds of material and how the distribution of stated reasons changed over time is presented through charts. Results show that the by far most stated main reason for migration during all the periods of the mass migration was to improve the economic situation of the Swedish emigrant. The results also show that the stated reasons for migration confirms a lot of the ideas and research presented by earlier studies on the subject of the Swedish migration to North America during 1840-1914.