Murder Most Foul

Murder most foul, as in the best it is. (Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5)

With these words, the ghost of his father revealed to Hamlet that he had been murdered by his own brother, Hamlet's uncle. This certainly is not the normal type of story that one expects to come across in researching family history. Neither is the ghost of an ancestor the usual source of information on family history. Without recourse to ghosts, we have to rely on documents, images, DNA, or word-of-mouth. But sometimes these dry sources do reveal stories of long-forgotten crimes. Here are two such stories, both from the Barthelsson side of the family, incidents that took place in the mountains and forests of Värmland.

Henrik Olofsson Lehmoinen

This first story takes us back to the first Finnish settlers in the Värmland forests near the Norwegian border. I learned of the incident from the pages of the book Livet i Finnskogarna (Life in the Finnish Forests), a family history account written by Bjarne Persson. I must thank Ann Meyer Nordström for telling me about this little book. I also should be clear about what I ”know” and what I only think I know. The oldest digitized records that I've seen for this part of the family are for my 6th great grandfather, Bertil Henriksson Lehmoinen (1701-1788). Everything before Bertil is based on secondary sources, documents that I haven't yet been able to find and personally examine.

Bertil was the great grandson of the first Finnish settler in this part of Sweden, the nearly legendary Olof Mattsson (Koo) Lehmoinen. He's often seen in the records just as Olof Koo. Bjarne Persson records four sons of Olof: Klemet (born 1630), Pål (born 1633), Olof (born 1636), and the focus of this story, Henrik (1640).

(As a quick aside, my 6th great grandfather, Bertil, was not the son of this particular Henrik. Rather, his father seems to have been Henrik Olofsson, who was the son of Olof Olofsson, who in turn was the son of Olof Koo.)

The scene of the crime takes place in the forested hills of northern Värmland around the time of the St. Walpurgis celebration, that is, on or about 1 May, 1666 – yes, over 350 years ago! The neighbor Per Andersson visited the farmstead where Olof Koo and his sons lived in Skallbäcken. I posted images of our visit to Skallbäcken in my post But, Värmland... Per Andersson was another Forest Finn with the surname Kartikainen. It seems that he came to discuss or borrow some tools for plowing. Per and Henrik got to drinking, and a fight broke out. There must have been witnesses because calls for help went out. The two combatants wrestled and then the resorted to knives. Per scored first, hitting Henrik in the left arm, but it wasn't a serious wound. Henrik then stabbed Per in the stomach, and Per died two days later from the injury. The tragic part is that the two had been good friends before this altercation and, in fact, they reconciled afterwards in the short time that Per had left.

Afraid of the consequences of this deed, Henrik fled across the border into Norway. But he returned the next year and confessed to the crime. The case was heard during the seating of the Älvdal district court 18-19 November, 1667. During the hearing Henrik's father, Olof Koo, stood and pleaded for his son. He also presented a certificate from the victim's parents, Anders Persson and Anna Mårtonsdotter, stating that they did not seek Henrik's life. Additionally, Olof Koo had “compensated” the parents with a monetary sum of 40 Riksdaler and 20 “tunnor” of rye. (I've not yet been able to figure out either how much a Riksdaler was worth at the time, nor how much a “tunna” was.) Per's brother, Henrik Andersson, also seems to have been paid 4 1/3 Riksdaler. Despite pleas for mercy, the court sentenced Henrik to death for the murder of Per. At this point, things get a little confusing to me. Bjarne Persson records that Henrik may have subsequently been pardoned and escaped execution because there are records of his children born as late as 1678. Perhaps the money and grain sufficed after all!

I only discovered this story from Persson's book. His account of the murder seems to have been drawn from several sources, the most important being the district court record. Although he writes that his account comes from the “dombok,” he doesn't provide a specific citation. After digging through the digital archives, though, I finally found it! You can see it all in the image below.

The name Henrik Olofsson from the court records.

Älvdal district court record of the murder case.

Henrik's father appears in the court record: "Olof Koo i Skallebäcken" (Olof Koo from Skallebäcken).

There's a bit more information in the court record than in Persson's recounting, but I really can't say that I understand a whole lot from the record. I can find facts noted by Persson in the court record, but between the Gothic handwriting and 17th Century Swedish, I can only understand a little of what has been recorded. I can't really complain too much about the handwriting, it really is beautifully and carefully written. I just need more practice at reading it. The Swedish is probably a bit archaic as the meaning of words changes through time. It's probably comparable to the Shakespeare that you may have read in high school English class: Shakespeare's writing is clearly English, but not one that is easy for us to read today. And the timing is comparable: the quote from Hamlet that I began this post with was first published in 1603, a mere 63 years before this murder took place.

Per Mattsson

Per Mattsson was born on 08 December, 1836 to Matts Persson and Karin Hindriksdotter on a farm called Snipa, near Kristinefors. This is the same general area of my previous story: today it's only a 30 minute or so drive between Skallbäcken and Kristinefors. Per was baptized three days later in the Vitsand parish church. He was the third of seven children and the first boy born into the family. The family are also direct descendants of Olof Mattsson (Koo) Lehmoinen, making Per my 2nd cousin 4x removed. By the early 19th Century the days of slash-and-burn agriculture were long over. My understanding is that most residents made a living through traditional farming, forestry, or both. In the church records the father Matts is listed as a torpare, that is, a crofter or small tenant farmer.

Vitsand parish church.

In 1845, Per's father, Matts, died at the age of 35 of drowning. Following that, there is a 5-year gap in the records. In 1851 the family appears again in the church books. Somehow, the widow Karin managed to stay in the same area, possibly even the same plot of land in Snipa. In 1851 four of her children are living with her, Per being the eldest. The 1855-1860 household examination book records that he married Maria Jansdotter, and together they have a baby girl Carolina (b. 1860). I have not – yet – been able to find a record of the marriage between Per and Maria. The couple had a total of four children: Carolina, Maria (born 1863), Per Johan (born 1865) and Christina (born 1867).

Maria Jansdotter (1839-1922), wife of both Per and Matts Mattsson. Photo from ancestry.com site of user kayhill124.

This is where the story takes a tragic turn. A witness, Matts Mattsson (possibly Per's brother) reported that on the afternoon of Monday, July 12, 1869 Per, Sven Andersson, and Sven Persson had been drinking, apparently to excess. Around 9 that evening they headed home, with Per and Sven Persson riding in a cart, Matts and Sven Andersson walking. The two men in the cart got to arguing about who was going to drive, and the argument apparently continued during the trip. When they all got back to the farm around 11:30 that night Per Mattsson and Sven Persson went inside the house, out of sight of all other witnesses. Suddenly shouting and loud noises were heard, along with the cry ”You don't frighten me.” Afterwards Sven Persson staggered out, leaned for a while on the cart, and then went off to an empty cow barn. On going inside the house, witnesses found Per's on the floor, lying in a pool of his own blood. Upon later examination, the provincial doctor, Ludvig Kumlién, reported finding stab wound in the heart, and the left lung filled with blood.

These reports are taken from the district records of the case against Sven Persson. Ultimately Sven was convicted of murder and sentenced to six years imprisonment in the citadel in Malmö. The city of Malmö is in the far south of Sweden, just across the strait from Copenhagen. Sven was released in 1875, and returned to live and work in Vitsand until his death 1905.

The Malmö citadel where Sven Persson served his time for the murder of Per Mattsson. Today, this building serves as a museum.

While that was the end of Per Mattsson, the story continues. A little over two and a half years after Per's death, his widow, Maria Jansdotter remarried... to her brother-in-law Matts. The new couple had five children, Emma (b. 1871), Anna (b. 1874), Martin Vilhelm (b. 1877), Hulda Maria (b. 1879) and Ida Albertina (b. 1882). Matts died in 1882 in an accident. If I'm reading the record correctly it had something to do with floating logs, so possibly he was involved in harvesting timber and shipping it downriver. Widowed now for the second time at the age of 42, Maria continued to live in Kristinefors until 1896.

On 29 April, 1896 Maria Jansdotter and her daughter, Ida Albertina, left Sweden for North America. Maria's son, Martin Vilhelm, had earlier moved to Minnesota, using the name William Mattson. Maria is found in the 1910 census living in Rollis, a town in the northwestern corner of Minnesota. As an aside, her brother-in-law Henrik, younger brother of her husbands Pers and Matts, also emigrated to Minnesota. I've written about him earlier, see In the Midst of the Big Woods. The family subsequently moved from Rollis across the border to the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, settling about 40 miles due east of Saskatoon in Viscount and Meacham. So to my surprise and pleasure, it seems I (we) have quite a number of cousins living in western Canada.

Johanna Charlotta Barthelsson

This is not another story of murder, but one of discovery. Johanna Charlotta Barthelsson (1861-1922) was my great grandmother. Hans Malmkvist, cousin from Västerås, sent me some pictures he found a few months back while going through old letters, etc. in his family's summer home in Södermanland. Two of them are pictures of Lottie. One is a photo of her together with her daughter Wilma. Wilma was born in 1898, and Lottie died in 1922. You can make your own judgement about how old Wilma looks to be in the picture, but I'm guessing that the picture was taken sometime after 1915 and before 1922. The second picture shows Lottie with two children. The boy – to me anyway – looks just like my grandfather, Fred. (Compare this picture with his picture taken around 1917). If the baby is Wilma, then this picture probably was taken sometime between 1898 and 1900. Fred was born in 1888, so he would have been 10-12 years old.

Wilma Westerlund (on left) and her mother, Johanna Charlotta Barthelsson. Photo courtesy of Hans Malmkvist.

Johanna Charlotta Barthelson (on left) and her children, Arthur Westerlund (or Fred Johnson), and - I think - baby Wilma. Photo courtesy of Hans Malmkvist.

These pictures are fantastic, and many thanks to Hans for sharing them. But they're also frustrating in a way. Hans comes from the Westerlund side of the family. If you recall earlier posts, his great grandfather (Gottfrid Theodor) and my great grandfather (Gustaf Alfred) were brothers, so that makes us 3rd cousins. The frustrating part is that my great grandfather appears in none of these pictures! I still don't have any idea of what he looked like. And as I think about it, I wonder if it wasn't Alfred behind the camera all the time? Maybe he was one of the early adopters of cameras.

One last thing...

The year 2017 is the centennial of the U.S. entering the first World War. In commemoration, the Herkimer County Historical Society put out a call for pictures of local veterans from WWI, preferably in uniform. The plan was to create an exhibit in the Society's building, and also to have banners made that would be hung along the streets in the veterans' home towns. I contributed the image of my grandfather, Fredrik A. Johnson (thanks to Ron Johnson for sending me a copy of that picture in the first place). Nephew Keith Johnson first spied the banner with Fred's picture on Central Avenue (Route 51). The banners were only to be on display until the end of August, so we made a quick trip “back home” just to see it in person. Below is a picture of me posing with my grandfather.

Thanks to all who contributed in any way to this blog post, to Ann Meyer Nordström, Hans Malmkvist, Bjarne Persson (with whom I've never met nor corresponded), Ron Johnson, Keith Johnson, and Luciana Musetti.

More than a name: Lars Ericsson

Despite the slow pace of posts to the blog, I have been very busy the past few months on family history. The results, though, are not a neat and tidy story: they're usually small discoveries that generate more questions than answers. So in order to keep you all informed on these, I think posts for the near future will be shorter than my recent efforts.

Back in my post from 25 Nov 2016, West to Västmanland and Västerås, I outlined what I´d learned about the direct male lineage of the Johnsons-Westerlunds. The last person that I had any real data for was Johan Larsson, born in Lillhärad in 1738, died in Dingtuna in 1799. I had the name of his father, Lars Ersson (or Ericsson or Eriksson, all forms of the name are commonly encountered) from the birth record in Lillhärad.

Sign to the church at Lillhärad. View of the countryside, roughly (and totally by chance) in the general direction of Bännby.

Unfortunately, that was all that I had from the family´s time in Lillhärad. This is because although the birth records begin in 1703, the household examination records only go back to 1835. Recall that the household examinations were when the local priest would visit the family and test them on their knowledge of their religion and ability to read the Bible. Obviously, the records beginning in 1835 were not going to tell me anything about Lars Ersson and his wife Margareta Ersdotter. By looking through the birth records for Lillhärad, page by page, I was able to find another child born to Lars and Greta, a daughter named Margareta (born in 1740). But without the household examination records, I was stuck, unable to further trace any of those three people.

Husförhöret, painted by Kilian Zoll in 1854. The pastor stands examining the household on their understanding and ability to read the Bible. Note the side comments, such as the serving of brandy (brännvin) from a small keg on the left. Thanks to Sven Backlund for pointing this painting out to me in the February 2016 issue of Arosiana, from the Västerås Släktforskarklubb.

Birth record for Margreta Larsdotter (1740-1798). Born 7 April, baptized 9 April, father Lars Ericsson from Bänbo, witnesses to baptism listed on right.

So that was as far as I could go using the records available through ArkivDigital. In fact, that´s all the records there are, at least in terms of parish births, deaths, marriages, and household examinations. If they´re not in ArkivDigital, then either they never existed or they´ve been lost. But there is another source of information, the Royal Archive or Riksarkivet (SVAR).

The archives have been working hard to make digital copies of their holdings and make them available online. They now have over 100 million images of documents and artifacts. The oldest dates from the 10th Century, a single parchment page from a missal originally from England. The archives today are housed in a 6-story building near Stockhom. I'm not sure that ”building” is the right word since the structure was not built up, but down, blasted into the bedrock well below the water level of Lake Mälaren. This is definitely a place that I want to visit the next time we find ourselves in Stockholm.

The digital holdings of SVAR include all of the parish records that I've been working with over the past few years. However, they also include a huge resource that I hadn't yet tackled, the mantalslängd. In the words of Christopher Bullock in 1716: “‘Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes.” The mantalslängd is a record of taxes owed and paid to the government. A mantal was a measure of the wealth of land. It sounds very similar to the Old English hide, the amount of land needed to support a peasant family (one defintiion of several through the centuries). Exactly what a mantal was is subject to some debate. It may, at some time or place, have been the land required to support a family. Another option is that is was the land required to provide and support a mounted warrior. The important point is that the mantal was the basis for taxation. Registers were maintained of people subject to this tax and how much they owed. The archives have copies of these registers, and they extend back in time into the mid 1600s, years before the King directed the parishes to maintain records. So this has the potential to give us a glimpse farther back in time.

There's a downside to these records (of course there is!). First, not everyone was subject to taxation. Exceptions were noble families, soldiers, very young people, and very old people. The records, at least in the earliest days, only listed the person heading the household. If that was a man with a family, his name would be listed, but not his wife, minor children, or anyone else in the home such as an elderly parent. All others were simply counted. To make it worse, often only the given name of the head of household was given. This last problem was mitigated to some extent by the fact that each little cluster of homes within a region had its own name. If you're lucky, then there was only one Lars in the area you're interested in, so you could be confident you'd found the right guy.

Where has all of this led me in terms of the history of the Westerlunds? While the oldest records for births and marriages in the parish of Lillhärad started in 1703, the mantalslängd begins in 1643. The two children that were born there were Johan (in 1738) and Margareta (in 1740). So I went to the mantalslängd for 1738. There are 91 names listed there, and – fortunately – their surnames/patronymics are given. Even better, there is only one Lars Ericsson in the parish, living in a place called Bänbo (now spelled Bännbo).

The relative positions of Lillhärad and Bännbo (in the upper right corner of the image. Lars Ericsson and family lived in Bännbo while in the Lillhärad parish.

Going through the Lillhärad registers year by year we find a Lars Ersson from 1737–1744, but no farther. We get a little unexpected gift in the final 1744 record. The record says ”Lars Ersson til Bäckeby i Lundby ....” I haven´t been able to figure out the last word, but it doesn´t matter. The entry translates as "Lars Ersson to Bäckeby in Lundby".

Lundby is a parish in the southwestern suburbs of the city of Västerås, and in the household records there we find the family. But now the family has expanded from two children to seven! The two we had are there, and their birth dates match those I´d found in the Lillhärad birth records. This is what gives me the confidence that I´ve got the right Lars Ericsson.

To elaborate a bit, the ”1745” in the leftmost column tells when the family moved into the parish. The next column are names and titles. We have Lars Ersson (Ersson is a shortened version of Eriksson); wife Margeta Ersdotter; Carin daughter; son Johan; dotter Margareta; son Lars; son Anders; twins Lisa and Maja. Lisa´s name is crossed out because she died during the period covered in the book (on the far right it says ”754 8/4 död” or ”8 April 1754 died.” The column to the right of the names are the birth dates. Here we find birthdays for everyone starting with father Lars (24 Sep 1698) to the twins (08 Jan 1753)! The next few columns are, basically, their grades in how well they knew their religion. The next set of numbers are the dates when each individual moved away, followed by where they went. Unfortunately, this priest did not record the place of birth. In later years it became standard practice, and this helps greatly in knowing that you´re following the right paper trail when so many names are so similar.

To continue forward in time, Lars, Margareta and the youngest children then moved to Dingtuna in 1756. Lars died the next year, sometime in November 1757. Here is the entry from the parish death records. Roughly translated (pardon my Swedish), it says Lars Ersson, crofter from Bählby region, born in Norrby parish, married to Marg. Ersdotter and had 11 children, of which 8 are still living. Died the ... (no number)... November of tuberculosis. 58 years old.

This death record provides two very important further clues. First of all, Lars had 11 children, and I´d so far only accounted for seven! Second, it says that Lars was born in Norrby parish and he died at the age of 58. Given that he died in November, the odds are that he'd already had his birthday that year. The household record from Lundby records his date of birth as 24 Sep 1698. So there´s a small discrepancy in dates between the two records. If the birthday is right, then he would have been 59 when he died. We´re within a year, though, and hopefully the birth record from Norrby would decide the issue.

Norrby parish, now in the town of Sala, is about 30 miles north of the Västerås area. My first impression was that this was a bit far afield. People certainly did move around lot, particularly farm hands looking for work wherever they could find it. But all the other movements I´d seen so far were much smaller distances: 6.8 miles from Lillhärad to Lundby (church to church), and 4.4 miles from Lundby to Dingtuna. Then the birth records in Norrby failed to register a child named Lars born to a father named Erik in either 1698 or 1699. The closest I came was a Lars Ersson born 2 Sep 1700. So far I haven´t been able to find and follow the records of that Lars, so that I can rule him in or out as my target. The place name Norrby is not particularly uncommon, basically it simply means north (norr) village (by). There are several places by the name of Norrby in the vicinity of Västerås. I tried looking in all of those, but never found the right combination of name, father, and birthdate (even allowing for errors). So for now, Lars Eriksson is still where the Westerlund family runs into the mists of time, but now we have a lot more information about him.

I think I´ve been able to follow Lars some distance back from his time in Lillhärad. From the record that gave the jump in the number of children from 2 to 7, there was one child born before the family moved to Lillhärad in 1737. This was Carin, and she was born 4 Jun 1736. When I followed where she went through her life, I eventually came upon a 1775 household record that said that she was born in Skerike. This is another parish in the immediate vicinity of those where we know the family lived. Sure enough, in the birth records for Skerike we find Carin, daughter of Lars Ersson and Margareta Ersdotter. So before they lived in Lillhärad, they lived in Skerike. Following similar methods I´ve been able to trace Lars back in time from Skerike from Dingtuna in 1729, and then in Dingtuna all the way back to 1711 )at the age of 13).

And those missing children? We have seven and we´re missing four. They turned out to be Brÿta (1735-1735), Kiersten (1733-1743), Anna (1732-??), and Erik (1731-??). Remember also that I knew nothing but the birth date for Margareta. I mention her now because in 1771 she was working as the housekeeper for the Frankenheim family, first for the father and then the son Captain (in the army) Axel Hendrik Frankenheim. It was Capt. Frankenheim who gave Margreta away when she was married. The remarkable thing is that she is listed in the 1771 record as Greta Vesterlund. This, so far, is the earliest record I´ve found for use of the name Westerlund.

Given the question marks in the dates for some of the children and the continuing mystery of the birth of Lars Ersson, there are still many discoveries waiting to be made. And then I had the descendants of seven more children that survived Lars to follow through the records and bring their histories to light. I´ve made a lot of progress there with much more to go. There are some surprising findings that I´ll be sharing with you soon.

And, appropriate to the season, let me wish you all a “Glad Midsommar” or Happy Mid-summer. Definitely a holiday we should all adopt.

Photo from hejsweden.com

But, Värmland....

The first time that it happened was, literally, the first day of our trip to Sweden. We flew on SAS – Scandinavian Air Service. Both Lu and I are on the tall side, so I spent a few extra bucks to get extra leg room for our seats on the airplane. We ended up with bulkhead seats, with tons of room to stretch out. On takeoff and landing, though, that meant that a stewardess was sitting directly opposite us. So here we were, sitting practically with our knees touching, and of course the only polite thing to do was to strike up a conversation.

We told her that we were traveling to Sweden to see first-hand what it was like. “Where are you going to go?”, she asked. Well, first, we'll spend a week in Stockholm. She nodded and smiled, “It's so beautiful there.” Then we're going to travel west to spend a week in Västerås. ”Oh, I was born in Västerås, you'll love it.” And then we're going to continue west to spend a week in Värmland. That's when it first happened.

A look of confusion mixed with a touch of concern played across her face. “Ah, Värmland... but what will you do?”

This same scene repeated itself when we chatted with the hotel clerk in Stockholm. Then again with a charming woman in a shop in Gamla Stan. And with the hotel clerk Jonas when we got to Västerås. Jonas gave us that look of sincere concern: “What will you do? Don't get me wrong, I'm from Dalarna and it's beautiful in Värmland.” (Dalarna is the county/län north of Värmland, famous for its copper mines and wooden horses.) Somehow, it felt that while no one was willing to directly say anything negative, the idea that Värmland was a place that an American would want to go was deeply confusing.

So, why Värmland? Well, this is the part of the country where my great grandmother, Johanna Barthelsson, came from. As I described in an earlier post, these were Forest Finn people, emigrants who came to Sweden in the mid-1600s to settle the wild border regions. Unlike our earlier stops, there was no big city like Västerås or Stockholm to use as our base of operations, at least not without adding at least a good hour's drive. So I decided to work out of the town of Torsby.

Torsby is a very modest town. The old name of the parish there is Fryksände, which translates as the “end” (“-ände”) of the Fryken. The Fryken is a long narrow lake, or more precisely a series of three lakes. They look a lot like the Finger Lakes in New York, but on a smaller scale. Fryken extends for 80 km, or 50 miles from the town of Kil (pronounced “sheel”) in the south to Torsby in the north. There's not a whole lot of choices when it comes to hotels in Torsby. We stayed at a very lovely place called the Hotel Örnen, or the Eagle Hotel, the former house of a town doctor, now run something like a cross between a standard hotel and a bed-and-breakfast. It's very pretty, convenient, and friendly place to stay.

My plan, such as it was, was simply to visit the towns, parishes and settlements that I'd seen in all of the old church documents I'd been using to trace family history. We also planned to get together with a cousin that I had met over the Internet, Ann Meyer Nordström. Beyond that, nothing specific other than to “absorb” the countryside.

The drive from Västerås to Torsby was roughly 3 hours or so. The first thing to do, of course, was to explore Torsby and the Fryksände church and grounds. I swear that you could walk from one end of Torsby to the other in a half hour, so it wasn't hard to get around. Most of my family didn't live in Torsby per se, but in the small towns and settlements scattered around it, mostly to the north and northwest. There's enough going on in and around the town, though, that it was very comfortable. For example, there's a year-round ski tunnel just outside of town. Now I don't ski, so I can't tell you if it's good or bad. But the idea of a tunnel carved out of – no, into - the hillside where you can ski winter and summer (mostly summer, I'd guess) is pretty impressive. That level of activity also means that there are a fair number of restaurants in the area: we really liked a little hole-in-wall Japanese place where we struck up a brief acquaintance with the hostess. Sushi in Värmland: the world has changed, hasn't it?

My next objective to explore was the parish of Östmark. This was a drive of about 24 km (a little less than 15 miles) northwest of Torsby. This is a tiny town: the census in 2010 listed a grand total of 216 residents! From my point of view there were two main attractions: there's the Emigration and History Research Center and the parish church. I really didn't want to use the little time we had in Sweden sitting inside in a library – although it killed me to pass up the opportunity. So we'll have to leave a serious visit to the Center for a future trip (hint, hint; nudge, nudge). The Östmark church, however, was amazing.

First off, remember that we'd come from the big cities and the parishes immediately surrounding them. The churches there are good, solid, stone and masonry buildings. That's what was so striking about Östmark: the church is made of wood! It's as big (or nearly so) as the local churches we'd seen around Västerås, but much more rustic. Its sides are shingled and stained a deep red-brown color. It was built in the 1760s, so certainly some of my ancestors had a hand (or a kronor) in its construction.

Like all of these churches there's a graveyard on the property. We found that these cemeteries usually had pretty recent graves, that is, generally less than 150 years old. (Recycling, if you know what I mean.) In most churchyards, at least in my limited experience, I'm used to seeing the individual graves marked by headstones. Some are very modest, and some quite extravagant. In many place, I know, the scarcity of stones forced people to mark graves with wooden crosses. These, generally, can't withstand the elements, and so old wooden markers are pretty uncommon. But in Värmland, we commonly saw another type of marker. It's made of wrought iron, with a single vertical shaft and several horizontal crossbars. Sometimes you'll see little iron “leaves” hanging off the crossbars, so perhaps it's both a cross and symbolic for a tree. Then, often, there's a small, flat iron plate upon which is inscribed the name(s) of the persons being commemorated. Maybe – originally – the names are always there, but today it's not uncommon that there is no name plate.

To recap, we've just arrived at the church in Östmark, and I'm starting to wander around a bit just to get oriented. Almost the very first of those iron markers I looked at put me nearly in a state of shock. Right next to the church itself is a marker, and on the name plate you can clearly read: “Här viler tväne goda makar Hindrik Hindrikson på Kronskogen föd 1802 och hustrun Maria Bengtsdotter föd 1799.” This translates to “Here lie the two good spouses, Hindrik Hindrikson of the Crown Forest, born 1802, and wife Maria Bengtsdotter born 1799.” Amazingly, this is the same couple whose marriage in 1821 was recorded by C.A. Gottlund in his diary and described in my earlier blog post From DNA start to Finnish. Just seeing this made the story that I'd read into something very real and tangible. These people were real, and I was walking in their footsteps.

Top, the Henriksson-Bengtsdotter grave marker in Östmark. Center, a closeup of the plate with names and dates engraved. Bottom, that's me checking the names and dates in my phone app to be sure I've identified them correctly.

Reality check: before we go off too far on the deep end, it's quite likely that this marker no longer stands over the graves of Hindrik and Maria. Graves were regularly reused, but for some reason the persons in charge chose to save the marker. I'm very grateful to whoever made that decision!

I won't go into fine descriptions of all the other churches we visited. Otherwise, I think you'd conclude that our trip was some sort of pilgrimage through the area. But here are a few pictures of the various parishes we visited: Vitsand, Lekvattnet, Fryksände, Lysvik, Ekshärad, Nyskoga, and Norra Ny.

On the Tuesday of our week if Värmland we arranged to meet up with Ann Meyer Nordström (3rd cousin 1x removed). Ann is from Karlstad, about an hour south of Torsby, and she and her husband Matts also run four restaurants in the Norwegian ski resort of Trysil during the ski season. This is just across the border from Sweden, two or two and a half hours north of Torsby. To our great pleasure, Ann and Matts were accompanied by her two brothers, Ulf and Jan Barthelson. After a nice get-to-know-you chat in the hotel (we got kicked out of the breakfast room and sent upstairs!), we drove northwest to revisit our shared Finnish family roots.

We first headed to the Torsby Finnskogcentrum (the Torsby Finn forest center). This is a lovely living museum in the small town of Lekvattnet. In fact, just a few weeks ago it was awarded the 2016 World Architecture News Adaptive Reuse Award (read the story here). Inside the museum are displays on how the Finns eked out an existence in the cold, coniferous forests here near the Norwegian border. We were also lucky to be able to see a short-term exhibit on the uses to which you can put birch bark, both traditional and more modern, artistic uses. For lunch we we introduced to “Värmland´s national dish”: motti och fläsk. You can see the recipe in the image (maybe with the help of Google translate), but basically it´s a dry oat ”porridge,” fried pork, and lingonberry preserves. The pork we had was, pretty much, uncured pork belly, and the oats, the motti, are moistened with the pork drippings. Fläsk, by the way, is the pork, and this is derived from the same word that gives us the English word flesh. So, it just means meat. What can I say? A modern dietician would probably have a stroke thinking about this as a regular diet, but that was the way of life in the mid 1600's. Jan did admit that he loves this food, but just once per year!

The Finnskogcentrum has a number of old buildings that they've transported to their site to illustrate how the Forest Finns lived. Our next stop, though, was to go to the last Forest Finn settlement that was occupied in Sweden, a farmstead called Ritamäki. This is about a half hour's drive from Lekvattnet up into the hills almost to Norway. From the parking area, you then have a 1.3 km hike, about three-quarters of a mile, uphill to the settlement. The last residents were a brother and sister named Jansson. They lived here without running water or electricity until 1964. Since then, the site has preserved life as it was like in the old forests.

The hikers ready for the climb to Ritamäki. From left to right: Matts Nordström, Jan Barthelson, Ann Meyer Nordström, Ulf Barthelson, yours truly.

The first thing that hit me was that this is not prized, bottomland forest. No, this is really up in the hills. And you don't have to go far until these hills turn into real mountains along the Norwegian border. In the open, cleared areas the grass grows richly, so there's lots of hay for the livestock. The only problem there is that the hay has to be harvested and dried by hand. Storehouses are built into the hillside in order to take advantage of the insulation from the soil: not too hot, not too cold. The living house is just mind-boggling. One of the names for this type of building is a smoke-house. Basically, the (tiny) house has a nice big hearth built up in the middle, but no chimney! I suppose it was a tradeoff: with a chimney you can get rid of the smoke, but in the process you lose a lot of heat. Without the chimney you can stay warm, but you have to put up with the smoke. As you can see from the pictures, the walls of the stove are blackened from smoke. You can even see on the walls of the house how far down the smoke would reach in the room. I think it paid to be a bit on the short side in order to avoid constant crouching to avoid the smoke. And although I haven't yet learned to appreciate it, I'll bet that the sauna – there's always a sauna! – would help to “cleanse the spirit.”

It was a beautiful day to visit Ritamäki. On the trail up to the site we could stop and pick blueberries and lingonberries... delicious! And the company could not have been better. We had a grand time exploring the site and getting to know our newfound cousins. A nice Swedish fika – coffee and cookies – in the bright afternoon sunshine made for a fine outing.

We said our good-byes to Ulf and Jan that afternoon, but we had yet another adventure in store for us thanks to Ann and Matts. On Thursday of that week they picked us up to go and visit the oldest of old homesteads. The story goes something like this. If you follow the Barthelson family line back in time, directly from father to son, we end up with one of the very first settlers of this part of Värmland, a man named Olof Mattsson (Koo) Lehmoinen. Now I haven't yet seen all the documents that support this story, but the word is that Olof was born in 1610 in eastern Finland, in the Savolax region of eastern Finland. His father's name was Matti Heikkinpoika Lehmoinen. Olof emigrated to Sweden (actually, this was all one country at the time) and settled in Värmland in 1647. His original homestead was in an area called Skallbäcken. This was our destination.

To get to Skallbäcken, drive north from Torsby a bit over half an hour on the main road. Then you turn off toward the east and head uphill. At this point there is absolutely nothing to tell you where you are, it's all forest with occasional bogs and meadows. Ann and Matts had visited the site earlier and so had the GPS coordinates to help direct us. The day was pretty cool and drizzly: not enough rain to run for cover, but you end up soaked nevertheless. Of course, the place we're heading for was settled 370 years ago, so a lot has changed since then. Well, maybe not so much! The land there is no longer actively farmed. It's reverting to forest now, but you can clearly see the impact of past settlement. There are some relatively recent, but now dilapidated buildings. In the forest there are piles of rocks, remnants, I'm guessing, of past farmers trying to clear their fields for planting. There are also open meadows in the hills, whether these are natural or not I can't tell. In the grasses in the meadows we found areas where moose had bedded down for the night. This gives you an idea of how wild this area has become. There were lots of indications of past human settlement, so I really didn't feel that I was out in a virgin forest. Even so, the remoteness of the area still gives you a sense of how it must have been like when the Lehmoinens first settled the area.

After our visit to Skallbäcken, Ann and Matts still had a treat for us. For a late lunch, we stopped in a very popular local restaurant to sample the local cuisine. Now, I work at a university with natural history collections, so I'm used to elk antlers, monster beetles, and stuffed animals. But this restaurant blew me away! All sorts of stuffed animals, antlers, skins, everywhere. For lunch I had the moose, and Lu had a combo of wild boar and the local deer. For my taste the moose was awesome; the wild boar good, but not that different from pork; and the deer a bit on the gamey side (I stole tastes of the boar and deer from Lu's plate!).

As we said good-bye to Ann and Matts, Ann had a last suggestion for us. Our return plan at the end of the visit was to drive from Torsby south to Karlstad, then more or less east to the Stockholm airport (Arlanda). Ann pointed out that as we go south, there's a pulloff to a high and very picturesque lookout, Tossebergsklätten, where you can get a beautiful view Fryken lake. That seemed like a great way to finish off our visit to Värmland, and so we made sure to look out for it as we started our return trip.

Ann was right about the view. It was a clear and bright morning, and so the lake was deep blue and contrasted with the green countryside. We must have spent 20–30 minutes walking from one end of the parking area to the other and snapping photos. We got to the north end of the parking lot and decided it was time to get back on the road. But as I turned around there was a sight that I never expected to see: strolling up toward us (with a grin on his face) was cousin Ulf Barthelson together with his wife Marie. It was only by the purest of chance that both of us had stopped at Tossebergsklätten to admire the view. A fifteen minute difference either way in the start of our trips, and we'd have passed each other on the road none the wiser. The stars must have been aligned that day.

Overlook of Fryken from Tossebegsklätten.

I'll close my short family history travelogue with images of picturesque Värmland. We certainly didn't see everything that Sweden has to offer, and I'm already making a list of sites to see on a return trip. Thanks to all of my newly discovered Swedish relations for the kindness, generostiy, and hospitality. It was a visit I'll always cherish and I hope that you, dear blog-reader, can tell just how much it meant to us.

Left, view of the valley of the Klarälven from Ekshärad. Right, Kläggen, a small lake south of Östmark.

Left, Fryken from Lysvik. Right, road to Rattsjöberg; lots of blueberries here for the picking!.

Lomsen, a small lake at the trailhead leading to Ritamäki.