“Jonas Christiernson and his wife, Maria Hilma, came to Texas in the 1850’s with the help of the Palms, and they settled on the north side of A. J. Nelson’s homestead in the Brushy settlement. Jonas Christiernson, who had been deferred from military service because of a physical handicap, was allowed to stay home on the farm. The couple belonged to the Palm Valley Lutheran congregation. Mrs. Christiernson died in 1884 and her husband in 1891. Their children were Mrs. Sandberg, formerly married to Mr. Mercer, Mrs. C. J. Carlson, Mathilda, Mrs. J. Larson, and there was also a son named August. All the children are now dead. The two older ones, Mathilda and August, are buried in the Palm Valley cemetery.”

Swedes in Texas in Words and Pictures, 1838-1918: English Translation

While the Swedes in Texas in Words and Pictures is arguably the most important resource available for those of us descended from the Swedes who settled in the area around Central Texas, it is frustratingly full of half-truths, vague references, incorrect information, and questionable data. The above paragraph about my great-great-great-grandparents Jonas and Maja Lena Christerson, from the section entitled “The First Swedes in Texas,” contains the following errors in order of appearance:

• Christiernson is not the correct spelling of their name. Their name is spelled three different ways, that I have found, within the book – Christerson, Kristerson, and Christienson
• Maria Hilma is not my great-great-great-grandmother’s name. It’s close, but her name was Maja Lena. Maria is the equivalent of Maja, but Hilma is not quite the same as Lena. I’m kind of quibbling here, but it always bugs me when they don’t get a name quite right.
• “…they settled on the north side of A. J. Nelson’s homestead in the Brushy settlement.”– This is sort of true. Jonas Christerson and A.J Nelson bought their properties in the Brushy settlement on the same day in 1860. And the Nelson’s arrived in 1854, one year after the Christersons, who arrived in 1853. Now I really am quibbling, but it has always bothered me that the Nelson family, who had 2 sons who were later very prosperous, always seem to get the headlines while Jonas and Maja Lena, who had four daughters and one son who died young with no children, barely get a mention in the discussion of early settlers. Granted, this book is written a full 65 years after they emigrated, but it always surprises me how quickly these details are lost in the telling.
• “…deferred from military service because of a physical handicap.”– Not an error, but this is that vagueness I’m talking about. Wish I had more details about this little tidbit. I haven’t found any other mention of Jonas having a handicap in any of my research.
• “Their children were…” Just a general rant here about only referring to a married woman by her husband’s name – 50% feminist, 50% frustrated genealogist. It is lucky that I had the online resources to track down their birth records in Sweden, or I might have had some real difficulty sorting out who these sisters were.
• C.J. Carlson – I was like a dog with a bone about this one. I could not find anything about a C.J. Carlson anywhere. Turns out his name was not C.J. it was John. And that uncovered a whole saga that I will have to dole out to you in installments at some future date. Key an eye out for posts about our murdering horse thief. It’s quite the story.
• “The two older ones, Mathilda and August, are buried in the Palm Valley cemetery.” – Mathilda and August were not older. They were child number four and two respectively. And only August is buried in the Palm Valley cemetery. I finally found Mathilda buried in the Oakwood Cemetery in Austin, Texas, presumably because she was visiting her sister Hedda (that’s Mrs. Sandberg above, my great-great-grandmother who lived in Austin at the time) when she died of consumption in 1870. It wasn’t until I found her recorded twice, in both Travis and Williamson counties, in the 1870 U.S. Census Mortality Schedules, that I even knew to look for her in Travis county.

I know that’s half the fun of doing genealogy – finding all the fun stories behind the stories. But I still get offended beyond all reasonableness when authors of these old and so very precious books just happen to spell my ancestors name wrong or get some other details confused because someone two generations removed from the actual events is telling the story as they remember it. Bless their hearts. There’s still a nugget of truth in there somewhere and you just have to chase down the actual facts in more contemporary documents and accounts. It’s what I live for. Bless my heart.

So I was procrastinating coming up with a topic for my First Official Post by indulging a desire to figure out what happened to the parents of a cousin I’m researching when I found the above phrase. It’s funny what a faulty OCR reading of an early 20th century Swedish-American newspaper combined with Google Translate can do to the Swedish language. “Frid öfver hennes minne,” which roughly translates to “Peace be on her memory,” with one wrong letter becomes “Peace over her mips.” I guess if the letters are wrong Google Translate just starts guessing.

Just to fill you in on the rest of the story, I am currently researching Oscar Theodore Petersson Forsvall, a cousin whose great-grandfather is my 5-times-great-grandfather (Jonas Jonasson Holmberg of Byhult Södergård, Lekeryd, Jönköping, Sweden, 1747-1815). Oscar was the first of his family to emigrate, in 1881. His older sister, Christina, followed in 1887, and his parents, Peter Jonasson and Anna Catharina Jonasdotter, and his youngest sister Augusta, came in 1897. I am looking to find more evidence of his parents’ life in Texas after their emigration in 1897 at which time they were both 74 years old. I have evidence in the form of a passenger list of their departure from Göteborg on 18 August 1897, but I could find no evidence of them in census or cemetery records in Texas after that.

I was about to head out the door and start crawling around the three possible cemeteries that they could be in, which are all within 5 minutes of my house, but then I thought to look in the newspapers! One of my new favorite online haunts is the Minnesota Historical Society’s Swedish American Newspapers collection.

They have an extensive collection of the Texas Posten, Austin, Texas’ Swedish-American weekly newspaper, from 1898 – 1922. These are not all the years the paper published, but they do span a good number of years that my ancestors, et al. were active. I have been able to find a number of obituaries and other articles about family members, particularly in the 1890s, who I otherwise had very little information about (shakes fist at the fire gods who took the 1890 census).

Searching newspapers can be a frustrating, but often supremely rewarding, endeavor. The search algorithm doesn’t usually return very specific results. Unless you have a very unusual search term to use, the returns are usually a jumble of possibilities, many of which are just an instance of the surname you’re searching appearing in a list of names of those who maybe have a letter to pick up at the post office or something. But you have to look at every single one, because the one you decide to skip is the one that will contain the full column article about the murder trial of your 4-times-great-uncle who shot that guy and ran off to Missouri, or that mention of the Presbyterian minister named McClurkin who preached at your paternal great-great-grandfather Steele’s church in that little town in Pennsylvania. But those are stories for another day. And possibly another blog….

What I found today was one brief mention, in Chicago’s Svenska Amerikanaren, January 3, 1899, of the death of Peter Jonasson Forsvall, of Georgetown, Texas, 27 November 1898, 76 years old, from Lekeryd, Småland. If you’re feeling adventurous go ahead and click that link. He’s on page 7, right there in the fourth column, next to the advertisement for “Dr. Owens Elektriska Bälten.”

And I also found the very nice obituary, containing the quote for which this post is named, in the Texas Posten, for the widow Forsvall, who died on January 27, 1908, at the home of her daughter, Mrs Alfred Eklund, funeral services held at the Free Church in Brushy. Peace over her mips. (It’s on page 12, in the middle column right below the big header “Texas” if you’re curious.)

Now I will have to go look for their graves at the Free Church cemetery. Since the Georgetown Evangelical “Brushy” Free Church was founded in 1891, and the Eklunds were members, there’s a good chance Peter and Anna Catharina are there.

Note to self: figure out how to add footnotes to a blog post so that I can officially and properly cite the sources I’m using. Already spent more time on this than I intended today, but that is the definition of genealogy, at least in my world.