It's been a while since my last post, and I've already failed to live up to my biweekly target. It's been a busy time, though: aside from the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, we had to prepare for attending the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America. Just imagine, over 3000 people talking bugs all week! This year the meeting was held in Portland, Oregon. It's really a pretty bad time of year if you want to see anything other than the inside of hotels and the convention center, but it is a good chance to get together with friends from around the US and the world. So I really can't complain too much (just a little bit, though).
Most of the genealogical research I've been doing for several months now has concentrated on the Swedish side of the family. Partly this is because it was very poorly known to me: in contrast, my Harrigan relatives have done quite a bit of work. But the big reason for this concentration is that the documents that are available from Sweden are very extensive. OK, you have to learn a bit of Swedish along the way, but I've found that for that all the German courses that I took in grad school have been very helpful. I'm also digging in and trying to learn real Swedish along the way.
So what is it about the Swedish records that make them so useful? In the U.S. the federal government conducts a national census every 10 years. Some states, in turn, have their own census that helps to fill in the gaps. For example, the state of NY had its own censuses in 1892, 1905, 1915, and 1925. This helps a lot when you're trying to follow people as they move.
In Sweden the Lutheran Church is the state church, and its priests were charged with keeping records of the parishioners: births, deaths, baptisms, marriage banns, marriages, familiarity with religious teachings, literacy, even whether a child had been vaccinated against smallpox. The core resource are the parish household records, the församlings husförhörslängd. Here, for example, is the page from the household record for the parish of Teda (in Uppsala county) where Johan Erik Westerlund (my 2nd great grandfather) lived together with his young family.
There's a wealth of useful information here for the family historian. Names, of course, in the left-hand column, with titles for each person directly above. A dräng is a farm-hand, hustru is wife, and son is son (surprise!). The next set of columns gives information on the birth (födelse-) of each person: the year (år), month and day (månad och dag, expressed as day/month), and the place of birth. So we see that the father, Johan Erik, was born on 9 Jun 1825 in Björksta; mother Johanna Larsdotter was born on 11 Mar 1820 in Teda (with a different spelling); and the two sons Gustaf Alfred (9 Mar 1855) and Gottfrid Teodor (15 Jun 1863) were also born in Teda. The Äktenskap columns refer to dates of marriage (Gift) or widow(er)ing (Enkling or Enka). The Flyttat columns tell from where and when the family moved into the parish to be recorded in the book. In this case, the family came to Teda from Björksta in 1857 as recorded on page 104 of the previous parish household record book. Finally, Död would record the date of death of the person. I´m not showing the facing page in this image so that you get sufficient resolution to be able to read it, but the columns there give information on the person´s ability to read and understand the Lutheran catechism and also to where, and when the person might have moved out of the parish. In this case, the Westerlund family left Teda on 24 Oct 1865 for the town of Kungsåra.
As you can see, these records can be quite detailed and give very valuable information on the relationships between people, their professions, and movements. When it all goes right, you can follow a person from one book to another, from one town to another, from birth to death. But it wouldn´t be any challenge if everything always went right, would it? There are the typical minor problems you´d expect: misspellings, people don´t go where they say they are, people emigrate without leaving me a forwarding address, etc. Here are my big problems, though.
First, until well into the 20 th century, these records were all handwritten. In the example above the handwriting is excellent, and I think easily legible. Check out these examples for the other end of the spectrum.
Any guesses? I picked these two examples because, based on other evidence, I do know what they say. The first, written in blue ink, is the name Elin Maria Axelsson (4th cousin 2x removed). The second says Gevaldigern Vesterlund, and it refers to Constable Axel (Jansson) Westerlund (4th great grand uncle, 1784-1840).
The second difficulty in handwriting arises from the fact that in the old days the Gothic script was used. Here´s an example of that:
This is the birth and baptismal record of my 5th great grandfather, Johan Larsson. I will not pretend that I can read everything, but this is what I can tease out now. On the left it says Martius, Latin for the month of March. The two numbers are the birth and baptismal days. Then, in the big block of text you see the underlined name Johan, the name of the child. Preceding that you can see the name of the father: Lars Ericsson (yes, really!). On the right hand side are the witnesses or godparents (not sure): I see the name Erick Pärsson and wife, Anders Pärsson and wife Anna Pärsdotter, and then maid (i.e., single, marriageable woman) Anna Larsdotter).
My last difficulty comes not from handwriting, but is a reflection of societal change beginning in the early 19th century. My first example of a parish household record was rich with information. However, in the 1800s people began moving to city regions, and one area of tremendous growth was Stockholm. I think that as a result of the sheer numbers involved, the household records in Stockholm were much sparser in terms of the information recorded. Here´s an example:
This is the entire record! All it records is the city quarter (Cupido), the house number, name of the persons, and birth year. The records that I was interested in are the fourth and fifth handwritten lines. There, it records the workman´s widow Lindberg and her son U.A. This refers to Brita Stina Lindberg (born in 1782) and her son Ulric August (born in 1822). (I´ll have more about Brita in another post, I promise!) Sometimes the records are even more obtuse, just listing 4 children - no names, thank you - or in other cases the name of the head of household and the number of people living there. The record in the picture comes from St. Nikolai parish, the main cathedral in the Old Town or Gamla Stan. Stockholm had a whole series of other parishes as well, so to follow a clue that a person moved to Stockholm, you have to check the records from each parish in order to find them. Things got so bad, both with a massive influx of people into Stockholm, constant moving from one parish to another, and emigration that the church basically gave up on trying to maintain the records.
I should say at this point that all of these records are accessible online. The images I´ve included here come from ArkivDigital (you have to pay, but it´s been well worth it to me). You can read up on them at www.arkivdigital.net. After they gave up in Stockholm toward the end of the 19th century, you can still access a database with many records, but not always with images of the real record. That you can find at Rotemansarkivet.
OK, a special treat now. Two weeks ago I got an email from a Mr. Hans Malmqvist. He noticed that people in the family tree I have on ancestry.com overlapped with those in his. In particular, his grandmother, Beda Sofia Westerlund (1891-1975; she is my 1st cousin 2x removed). He said that he had a picture of Beda Sofia, her parents, and brothers and sisters outside the family house in Lerbo, Södermanland around 1914. Hans asked if I would be interested. To use the vernacular, OMG! Absolutely! Here you are:
The head of house is the bearded gentleman, Gottfrid Teodor Westerlund. (See, we've come full circle from the beginning of this post. Gottfrid was my great grandfather´s brother.) From left to right we have the matriarch Ida Sofia Karlsson (1857-1942); son Sigurd (1888-1967); Gottfrid (1863-1919); daughter Anna Maria (1893-1975); daughter Beda Sofia (1891-1975); daughter Margreta (1898-1933); and son Eric Ture (1895-1974). Hans tells me that the family still owns the little house, now with some additions. It started out as a soldier´s house. In those days, in lieu of conscription into the army, the local community would "convince" someone to be their contribution to the armed forces, in return for which the community would supply the soldier with a home and land to farm. Eventually, somehow, this one passed into the hands of the Westerlund family and remains there to this day. Help me out, though: I look at this and I wonder what those plants are that they're standing in. Are they potatoes?
I hope you found this interesting. More on the Swedish family links to come! As always, please post or send me comments, questions or suggestions. Hej då!
