I wrote about my great-grandfather Jack (Aubrey) Adams and his name change back in Week 2 , but I have plenty of other candidates for this week’s topic.
Swedish patronymics in general are a topic unto themselves and can cause a whole host of problems when trying to trace family lines. I have seen so many unintended mistakes in other trees caused by an Ancestry hint from the Swedish Church Records collection about someone with the right name and even the right birthdate, but in the wrong parish and with the wrong family members. It’s so easy to get turned around in all the unfamiliar language and indecipherable handwriting and decide that something looks right enough without thoroughly checking the details.
There were also Swedish nature names that folks would adopt as their surname, which were sometimes tied to a location or an occupation, but sometimes not, and sometimes passed down and sometimes not. And sometimes folks would decide to use a different surname altogether, sometimes before they emigrated, but sometimes not until after they got to the U.S., which can make tracing them back to their village in Sweden very challenging. It also means that there’s no guarantee that folks with that surname are in any way related to you!
My great-great-grandfather A. W. Sandberg, as he was known in this country, was one such challenge. He was a bit of a mystery just because of his age and the time period in which he came to the states. He was born in 1849, came to Texas in 1871, and died in 1894, which means he only appears in the 1880 census. His naturalization application offered no clues, and by the time The Blue Book was published in 1918, he had been gone more than two decades, so some of the details about his origins had been lost and the biographies of his children did not offer any clues.
Aside: While his naturalization petition did not contain much detail (“Sweden” is not enough information, Ay Dubya!), it did contain this wonderful tidbit – his signature. I always love it when I find an actual signature rather than a “his X mark.” It feels a little more real.
My Aunt Diddie knew that there were other Sandbergs in Central Texas, but always said that they weren’t related to us, but I was always curious. She did say that A.W. had a sister in Austin named Hilda, who married a guy named Gustaf Peterson and I was able to locate her in The Blue Book. Happily her biography had many helpful details. It says, in part:
“The widow, Hulda Christina Peterson, Austin, grew up in Lekeryd, Smaland, where she was born in 1861. She went to America in 1883 to her brother, William Sandberg, living in the Brushy area.”
The Swedes in Texas, 1838-1918, p. 258
In Swedish-American genealogy, that right there? Is the motherload. Birth year, parish name, and emigration year! I found her birth record (confirming her name as Hilda), her family in the Husförhör (Household Examination records), her moving out record and emigration records, and, more importantly, was able to confirm the sibling relationship to not only A.W. (Anders Wilhelm), but also to another brother, J.A. (Johan August), and to confirm that their patronymic was Magnusson/Magnusdotter. The three of them emigrated till Amerika, A.W. in 1871, J.A. in 1881, and Hilda in 1883. Out of seven total, these three were the only children of Magnus Svensson and Christina Bengtsdotter to survive to adulthood and I can’t imagine what it was like for their parents to send the three of them off to America. Talk about your empty nest syndrome! Magnus and Christina lived until 1906 and 1901 respectively, so they presumably would have known that only one of their children, Hilda, survived them.
All three seem to have adopted the name Sandberg after coming to Texas. A.W. Sandberg appears in the founding documents in the church records of the Palm Valley Lutheran Church, shortly after he arrived in Texas and later, after his marriage to Hedda, with their family. Hilda uses Sandberg as her surname on her marriage certificate to G.E. Peterson. And after his emigration record from Sweden, I have only ever found Johan August referred to as J.A. Sandberg.
Other than the three sons of A.W. Sandberg, this line of Sandbergs only produced one other male to continue the surname. His brother J.A. Sandberg had one son, Ruben Sandberg, but as far as I know, he only had one daughter, so the assertion that there weren’t any other Sandbergs around that were related to us holds up!
I have so many stories about these random Swedish surname connections that I may have to make a whole category and schedule for posting them, just so I can get them recorded somewhere outside of my head. So many stories, so little time!
Chasing Swedes 