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My Swedish great-great-grandmother emigrated initially to Duluth, Minnesota, in 1871, where she met and married her German husband. They moved to Brainerd, Minnesota in 1875. In 1877, after the death of her father, her sister and her mother emigrated and joined them in Brainerd. |
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I had known that my 2nd-great-grandmother Johanna (pictured at left) was Swedish but I had no idea where in Sweden she was from. That bit of information, unfortunately, was not passed down to future generations (and genealogists).
Her sister Emma's obituary said she was born in Smaland, Sweden, which is a province (similar to a state), but did not name a specific village, leaving a large area to search.
It turns out there were "distant cousins" looking
for that same family and the dawning
of the age of the Internet allowed us to connect and
combine our information.
John Rhodes and his sister, Mary Rhodes, have an autograph book that belonged to their grandmother, Josephine Nelson. It was given to her in 1888 and signed "your cousin" by Anna Bellmuth (daughter of my gr-gr-grandmother, Johanna). Josephine's mother, Maria Danielsson Liedholm Swanson, died in 1880 when Josephine was 4 and John and Mary knew very little about her. Over the years, they have tried to trace Maria back to Sweden but have had no luck. So they decided to check out this "cousin" connection.
John posted this query on the Crow Wing County Query Forum at RootsWeb.Com in early 1999 asking about the Bellmuth and "Redeen" (actually Ryden) families. I responded that they were my ancestors, they came from Småland, Christina's maiden name was Peterson, Johanna and Emma were Christina's daughters, Christina and Emma had arrived here on June 29, 1877 (according to Christina's death record), and they used the Ryden surname in Minnesota.
The new information was sent along to Jill Seaholm, a researcher at Augustana University's Swenson Swedish Research Library, whose persistence paid off handsomely. In March of 1999, she identified Christina and daughter Emma in the Göteborg emigration records. Their surnames had been listed as Torsas and Thor for some reason.
Here they are in the passenger list (with a totally wrong surname of Thor and an incorrect home country of Germany, they were hard to find):
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Their usage of the Thor surname was interesting. Thor was the "soldier" name used by the father of Christina's husband (and Emma's grandfather), Sven Olofsson (as I later found out when researching the family in the Swedish church records).
They were from the village of Östra Torsås located about 18 km south-southeast of Växjö in the county of Kronoberg in Småland province, in southern Sweden.
| A partial map of Sweden showing the location of the village of Östra Torsås |
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Researcher Jill Seaholm then found a church "census" for the family with
the Rhodes' great-grandmother, Maria; my great-great-grandmother, Johanna;
Johanna's sister, Emma; their mother, Christina Petersdotter
; and a brother,
Sven Peter, whose existance had not been known (who was later found
to have married and raised a family in Duluth, Minnesota).
Volume AI:12 of the Östra Torsås Husförhörslängd (Household Examination Roll) for 1856-1860 page 372 (GID 850.15.44400) has the following family living at Askaberga Östregård (the name of a farm within the Östra Torsås parish):
| Daniel Svensson | b. 27/01/19 N[öbbel]e | |
| H[ustru] | Christina Petersdr | b. 17/01/19 Täfvelsås |
| d[otter] | Maria | b. 20/02/45 Th[orså]s. |
| d[otter] | Johanna | b. 19/02/48 d[itt]o |
| s[on] | Sven Peter | b. 27/09/51 d[itt]o |
| d[otter] | Emma | b. 23/07/58 d[itt]o |
(The reference to a "GID" number is for subscribers to the Swedish
Genline
service, which has scanned all of the LDS microfilms of the Swedish church
records and made them available. Each scanned page is assigned a Genline
ID number so you can go directly to the page by using the GID field in
their FamlilyFinder program that is used to access the subscription data.)
Volume AI:15 of the Östra Torsås Husförhörslängd (Household Examination Roll) for 1871-1875 page 381 (GID 850.29.65900) shows the family from 1871 through early 1876 (the image below shows both the left and right pages with most of right-hand page removed). The death of Daniel on 26/4/1876 (April 26) is noted in the "Död" column and his name is crossed out. Under the "Flyttat" column on the right, Sven Peter left for "N. Amerika" on 12/8/1871, and Johanna left on 21/10/1871. Their names are crossed out. Emma moved to a different location within the parish in [18]75, so her name is crossed out as well. (The next Roll covering 1876-1880 shows that Christina and Emma left for "N. Amerika" on 21/6/1877.)
| Volume AI:15 of the Östra Torsås Husförhörslängd for 1871-1875 Page 381 (GID 850.29.65900) |
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In the above record, Daniel Svensson
had an additional comment across from his name on the right-hand page -
"Straffad första resan Stöld" (Punished first time for stealing) and below it,
"Lam" (lame or physically weak - possibly paralyzed to some degree).
The note about being punished for stealing first appeared in the Husförhörslängd for 1851-1855 (GID 850.14.1900) and was carried forward so that additional convictions would receive a harsher penalty. Some people received prison time for "andra resan stöld" (second time stealing) and even life for "fjärde resan stöld" (fourth time stealing).
Daniel Svensson's death record in the Kronoberg vital statistics (GID 100007.41.34100) says that he died April 26 1876; Occupation and residence: backstugaman fr. Askaberga Östrege [Östragården]; Age: 57y 2m 29d; Cause of death: Brännskada; Place of death: Ö Torsås.
A "backstuga" is a small house, usually above ground in a slope, located on land owned in common by the village. The occupant of such a dwelling is usually a general laborer, and not necessarily a farmer.
A "brännskada" is a burn injury from a fire.
As shown in the above record, they lived at Askaberga Östragården in the parish of Östra Torsås. There is a Swedish map archive site with detailed maps of each parish, down to the farms and little villages. To see a detailed modern map showing the Östragården farm in Askaberga (spelled Askeberga in modern maps):
| Zoom "4" : Askeberga east of Östra Torsås | Zoom "1" : Östragården southeast of Askeberga |
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The church records also have Birth/Baptism, Marriage and Death/Burial records. Usually there is little information in the death record beyond residence, age, and maybe the place of burial.
I needed to find the parents of Rebecca Petersdotter
(a great-grandmother of Christina Petersdotter), but her birth/baptism was
not recorded and the Household Examinations for that parish didn't start
until after she married so I couldn't find her birth family.
But her death record had a remarkable amount of information for way back in 1798 (it is more like an obituary!).
| Volume CI:2 of the BMD records for Tävelsås 1795-1853 Page 293 (GID 853.16.94400) | ||||||||
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| 1798 Death #13. Died June 23. Buried July 1. Age 72. Transcription and translation courtesy of Bo Johansson. | ||||||||
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The Ryden surname used by Sven, Johanna, Emma, and their mother Christina does not appear anywhere in the Swedish church records for this family.
Perhaps it was adopted by Sven and his sister Johanna when they emigrated (some Swedish emigrants chose new surnames entirely different from their patronymic surnames when they came to America).
The proper Swedish form of the name is Rydén (with an acute accent over the "e").
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Sven used Ryden when he applied for Naturalization
and it was used with the proper accent mark in the
1885 Duluth census.
Johanna used Ryden when she got married in in Duluth in 1873. The phonetic spelling, Redeen, of the Swedish pronunciation of Rydén was used for Christina and Emma in the 1880 census when they were living with the Johanna and Adam Bellmuth family in Brainerd. The only person to use Danielsson was daughter Maria, who emigrated with a small child after the death of her husband in 1869. Danielson was used as her maiden name in the cemetery record following her untimely death in 1880.
The father's name in cemetery and county history records in Brainerd was Swan Ryden (or sometimes Sven Ryden) instead of Daniel Svensson. So not only was the surname changed, but the given name was changed as well. But this information was provided by the descendents of this family and may have been incorrect about "Swan".
According to this explanation of the origin of the surname Rydén, it is a Swedish ornamental name composed of the place name element "ryd", meaning woodland clearing + the common surname suffix -én, from Latin -enius. So it would certainly be an appropriate choice of surname for a family emigrating from a rural area.
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