The Sandberg Cousins have a number of birthdays to celebrate in July. If we were all together on the 3rd Wednesday in July (which is my birthday, I will just mention), as I hope we will be soon, we could wish each other a happy day. I would attempt to list all the rest of y’all here, but I’m sure I would leave somebody out. I am a family genealogist. I keep track of the dead people, but I’m not so good about keeping up with the live people.

But today is an important day for us Sandberg cousins. 207 years ago today Jonas Christersson was born in a little place called Stenseryd Mellangård, in the parish of Forserum, located in the county of Jönköping, in Sweden. He was the youngest of nine children, six of whom lived to adulthood. He was actually the second Jonas, the first one having died at age 13 the year before our Jonas was born.

In 1838, Jonas married Maja Lena Svensdotter and by 1851 they had 4 children. In 1853, when Jonas was 39 years old and Maja Lena was 42, they made the decision to pack up their belongings and emigrate with the 4 kids till America. I would love to know what prompted them to make that decision. It was only 5 years before, in 1848, that S. M. Swenson convinced a group of 25 folks from Forserum and Barkeryd to travel back to America with him. This group included his mother, some of her brothers and their families, and young men and women, most of whom were related in some way to Swenson.

In the next 4 years, only one other young man and one family, also with four children, left the small village of Forserum for the promise of America. By the time of the 1860 U.S. Census (which, incidentally, is the year that Jonas bought the property near the corner of 1460 and University Ave (Chandler Rd) just south of Georgetown), there were approximately 60 people in Travis and Williamson counties who listed Sweden as their place of birth. Of the 32 Swedes living in Williamson County, most belonged to 6 families:

• The Palms, relatives of Swenson’s, who came with the original group in 1848
• The Heards, also part of the group from ’48,
• The Christerssons, who came in 1853,
• The Munsons, who also came in ’53,
• Larsons, who came in 1854 (and I recently found out Mr. Larson was actually a nephew of Jonas’ and the older brother of the Larson nephew who was Waldine’s grandfather, but I digress.),
• And the Nelsons, who also came in ’54.

What must it have been like to come to this wild country? Of the just over 3600 people living in the confines of Williamson county in the 1860 census, they were most likely the only ones who spoke Swedish. They didn’t have an established church for almost another twenty years, and unless they did things backwards in those days, the Christerssons would just be breaking ground on their new property at the time the census was taken that summer. Jonas would have been 46 years old.

Speaking of that summer, our beloved Hedda would have turned 16. Tomorrow, July 13th, would have been her 177th birthday.

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And for those of you planning out the rest of your month, don’t forget to mark July 26th to celebrate Anders Wilhelm, our A.W., who gave us the Sandberg name (but I still don’t know when or why).

I’ll devote more time to Hedda and A.W. in future posts, but for today, my dear cousins, raise your coffee cups in celebration and remembrance of our original Swedish-Americans, without whom we might not be here, much less have a reason to gather once a month.