So I thought I wouldn’t have any trouble with this week’s topic. I have a plethora of immigration records for the branches of the family that I can trace. But when I settled on our first Swedish ancestors as my topic it sent me all the way back to the early days of my research and I got caught in a procrastination whirlpool. I was looking at the immigration record for my 3rd great grandparents, Jonas Christersson and Maja Lena Svensdotter and their four children, and in trying to refresh my memory, as well as retrace my steps of probably 15 years ago now, I got stuck on the question of how I knew where to look for them in Sweden.

As I recall, my Aunt Billye was the one who found that ship record (above) showing the family arriving on the Ship Lexington, in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 20, 1853. When I got my Ancestry account in October of 2010, I started compiling all of the information I could about them from what was available, but it was mostly just census records at that point. But sometime that fall Ancestry released the Swedish Church Records. It may have been the reason I started my subscription, but I kinda remember sitting down at my laptop one morning and opening an email annoucement and getting super excited. Prior to that, if you wanted to search those records you had to purchase a DVD set for a princely sum and then you had to know how to find what you were looking for. The records on Ancestry weren’t very user friendly either, and it took me some weeks, with the help of a book that Aunt Billye loaned me, to figure out how to trace our family in those records. But by the next June I had a very detailed story to present at our family reunion. I had found both Maja Lena and Jonas’ families in Sweden, gone back more than a few generations, and traced a few of their siblings, adding some cousins to our family tree who we had always only known as family friends, and realizing that some branches we had thought had only married in were actually fairly close cousins.

But I still can’t remember how I knew where to look! Swedish Church Records are very detailed and if you know the name of the parish a person came from and either the year of their emigration or their birthdate you can find them in the parish Birth Records or what’s called the Moving Out Records and start tracing them through the Household Examination Books. I’ve spent the last week going through all of my primary sources that I would have had available at that time looking for any reference to the fact that Maja Lena was born in Lekeryd, that Jonas and all four of the kids were born in Forserum, or that the family emigrated from Forserum. And I can’t find anything! I also can’t find my research notebooks from those early days. They are somewhere in this house, but — detour! I was sitting here typing and something made me look to my left and there they were! Well, not quite that simple, but I had consolidated some of my genealogy stuff and I didn’t remember where I’d put it till I was sitting at just the right angle to see that shelf. Ah the trials and tribulations of the disorganized. Anyway, it didn’t really help, because even though I found the notebook I’d been wanting, it didn’t shed any light on the question of how I knew where they emigrated from. Sigh.

The good news out of this week of searching is that I’ve been looking through all kinds of boxes and notebooks and files and I happened across some things that I’d always meant to scan. So I’ll share them here instead of hiding them in a to do pile!

I had completely forgotten about this photo. I’m not entirely sure where it came from and the handwritting is sort of familiar, but I’m not sure whose it is. It is a color copy of a scan of the original and it comes from a collection of old scrapbook pages with lots of other photos that I have seen before and mostly already have in my collection. The note at the bottom says this is a picture of, on the right, our Hedda, my great-great-grandmother. As noted, she was mother to Frank and Ed Sandberg, as well as Hilda and Mart.

The notation for the woman on the left, though, is a little garbled. Hedda had three sisters, Anna Lena, Mathilda, and Adla Suzanna. She also had a brother Sven August. The four older children are listed in the ship record above. Adla Suzanna was born 21 June 1859, after they had been in America for about 5 years. And Maya Lena was 47 when she was born! The notation says that this is Mithilda (spelled wrong all three times) and that she is Mrs C. J. Carlson. I am pretty certain that this is not Mathilda, because she died in 1870 at the age of 18, when Hedda would have been about 25. Neither of these women are that young.

The name Mrs. C. J. Carlson is incorrect, and comes from the description of the family from page 181 of The Swedes in Texas, 1838-1918. Hedda’s oldest sister, Anna Lena, married a guy named John Carlson. I started to tell their story way back in 2018 when I started this blog (link here. I probably ought to get back to that…). So the surname is correct, but the initials are not. But the thing that tells me that this is Anna Lena is the address of the photographer, on the square in Carthage, Missouri. When John left Texas after “the incident” he and the rest of the family ended up in Carthage, Missouri.

There are lots more where these came from, so I’ll have to plan some scanning time into my weekly schedule and get some more of these shared on here. And hopefully I’ll get myself back on track for next week’s topic, “Heirlooms.” I guess photos count as heirlooms? Don’t they? You might just get more of these!