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.
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.
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).
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.
