long time no see
Spreckels, Calif.
A potential relative (through a strong candidate for great grandfather Johan Adolf Abrahamsson) moved to Spreckels, Calif. in the 1890s to work on the sugar factory that dominated the town back then.
Spreckels is still agricultural. Central California is very pretty.
Johanna worked at an inn in Torbjörntorp north of Falköping at the end of the 1860s. I am pretty sure that’s where she met Karl Adolf’s father, whoever he was.
The owner of the Inn was Adolf Ruckman. The son of a minister who’d been forced to resign for drunkenness, Adolf started out as a bookbinder, became a singer and an actor, and then an inn keeper. His sister and her husband owned Viken, the property outside of Falköping where Johanna and her family lived when she was young.
I have no idea what kind of relationship Johanna had with the Ruckman family. But she did name two of her children after two of the ten Ruckman kids: My grandfather, Karl Adolf, and his younger sister Elma Georgina.
Iversons gränd 5, c. 1885.
Gustava lived in Iversons gränd 7, now Iversonsgatan, for a few years at the end of the 1890s and in the early 1900s.
Humlegården, Stockholm, 1880s. Gustava lived close to this park for many years.
Anna Cajsa and Johanna’s younger sister Gustafva left Falköping for Stockholm on Oct. 21, 1870. She was 18 years old.
Gustava gave birth to a daughter, Susanna Olivia, on Sept. 2, 1873 in Stockholm. At that time Gustava was living in Kalmar, Uppland, where she was employed as maid. She moved to Stockholm on Nov. 3, 1873, leaving Susanna Olivia behind to be raised as a foster child. During 1873-74 Gustava was employed in a household in Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s Old Town.
According to the Kalmar, Uppland, church records, in 1876 Susanna Olivia seems to have moved back to Stockholm. It’s unclear where she went.
The Stockholm population was exploding in the late 1800s. The Swedish church, the main keeper of records, couldn’t keep up and books were instead kept by local offices. It’s not easy to piece together Gustava’s life.
In 1878-1879 Gustava is listed as living in Östermalmsgatan, with a son born in 1877, Karl Anders. In 1879 she’s living in Grev Turegatan with three children, Ada Gustafva born in 1874, Karl Anders born in 1877, and Olga Karolina born in 1879. There is no sign of Susanna Olivia.
In 1879 she’s also listed as living in Bellmansro, with no children.
In 1881 she’s living with her future husband, Anders Wenngren, in Djurgården. No children are listed as living with them.
In 1882 she’s still listed as Anders Wenngren’s fiancé, and now they have two children in the house: Susanna Olivia, and Ada Gustafva. At this time the two girls would have been 8 and 9 years old. Three different addresses are given for them this year: One place in Linnegatan, and two different places in Nybrogatan.
Provisoriska barnbördhuset, c. 1890
On Oct. 4, 1873, Anna Cajsa Hedberg gave birth to a second son. She gave him the same name as his older brother, Bror Johan. He was baptized on Oct. 6.
Women who couldn’t afford to bring a midwife to their home were forced to give birth in a hospital, where the risk of contracting infections was high. Anna Cajsa gave birth at Provisoriska Barnbördshuset, a temporary hospital in the southern part of Stockholm where she lived.
On Oct. 16, 1873, Anna Cajsa died from barnsängsfeber (childbed fever or puerperal fever). She was buried on Oct. 19. She was 25 years old.
Two of Johanna’s younger sisters moved to Stockholm. Anna Cajsa, b. 1848, and Gustafva, b. 1852. Anna Cajsa left Falköping for Stockholm in 1866, when she was 18 years old.
In 1867 Anna Cajsa lived in Katarina parish, in the southern part of the city. On Dec. 2, 1870, she gave birth to a son, Bror Johan Theodor.
Anna Cajsa must have been without means because the little boy was taken care of at Allmänna Barnhuset, a home for children. According to the established system, Anna Cajsa paid for the care by nursing other children as well as her own son. She is the only parent listed for Bror Johan.
On March 28, 1871, Bror Johan Theodor was placed with a family in Rosendal. They would raise him and receive a small stipend in return.
“Död” is Swedish for death, or dead. While in the care of the family in Rosendal, Bror Johan Theodor died on January 7, 1872. He was a little more than 13 months old.
Karl Adolf’s father-in-law Carl Viktor Nilsson (1846-1926).
This is Carl Victor Nilsson, who became Karl Adolf’s father-in-law and from what I’ve heard his stand-in father. I don’t know much about Carl Victor, but I do know that he kicked his own son off the boat (maybe more than once) for being drunk. It looks to me as if you wouldn’t want to have messed with Captain Nilsson.
For the past 20 years I’ve had discussions with students about what it means to be American. One guy described himself as an “American mutt”, and said “I don’t have deep roots, but being a mutt gives me a broad base”.
I’ve poured over my DNA results for a few weeks. Whatever service you use, they will give you access to your own results, and to the results of your matches. I’ve looked at images of my chromosomes, and compared them to those of strangers. I’ve skimmed hundreds of family trees, the Anderssons and Larsdotters of Sweden, and the O’Malleys and O’Briens of Ireland.
There are so many people in the world, and there are bits and pieces of so many strangers in each of us. Bits of chromosomes from our families and from relatives long gone and forgotten. Parts of my DNA was already in the cemetery here in Los Gatos when I moved here in 1995. Wild, huh?
Looking at the results of my DNA analysis has made me feel more human. I too have a broad base, wider than America. We all do. We’re connected. 99% of the time we will never know how we’re connected, but that only makes it more beautiful.
Kilmory of Glasgow, Karl Adolf’s first yearlong trip.
My grandfather, Karl Adolf, grew up on a tiny soldier’s farm, and died a sea captain. He left the home of his mother and stepfather in Toresund, Sörmland, to become a sailor out of the Stockholm Seaman’s House in 1890. He was 19 years old. The coming months he worked on ships that criss-crossed the Baltic sea. When his mother died in late September of 1891 he came home.
A little more than two weeks later, on Oct. 16, 1891, he left Hamburg onboard the Kilmory of Glasgow. He disembarked in Glasgow on Aug. 30, 1892. For the next decade he had similar year long contracts on ships based on the British Isles and in Germany. They sailed between ports in Europe, North America, and the far East. On one of the trips he met his future father-in-law, a captain from Oskarshamn, Sweden. Karl Adolf officially moved from Toresund to Oskarshamn in 1903.
I’ve been using DNA to try to narrow down the options for Karl Adolf’s unknown father, my mysterious great grandfather. I naively assumed that last names I didn’t recognize would jump out at me on the long list of matches, and that I pretty quickly would have some sense of where to look further. That has not happened.
I have a lot of semi-strong matches in Sweden, in the other Nordic countries, and in the US. From what I know about my family I expected that. But there are also strong matches in Finland I can’t explain. There are random strong matches in Poland, Great Britain, and Ireland. I’m guessing the fact that Karl Adolf himself, and my father’s maternal grandfather and his sons, were away at sea for years at a time might explain some of these unexpected relatives.
Because of Swedish naming traditions, if you go back 150 years pretty much everyone was called Andersson, Andersdotter, or Svensson. Family names weren’t commonly used until the end of the 1800s. Before then if your father was Anders Johansson, you became an Andersson or Andersdotter, not a Johansson or a Johansdotter. This makes it almost impossible to make assumptions about family relationships without studying a family tree further. You have to look at places of origin, and the names of other relatives. It’s time consuming, and difficult.
I haven’t found much. But, I have a match with woman in Washington state where I strongly suspect the link is the mysterious mr. Abrahamsson. For a fact she is related to a Johan Adolf Abrahamsson from Göteborg. And for a fact she and I are related. It remains to be seen if he is really the link, or if she and I are related some other way. I’ll need more matches, and cross referencing.
I do know, now, through DNA, that I have relatives buried in the cemetery in the small California town where I’ve lived for the past 20 years. Relatives of relatives who came to this part of California in the 1930s, made money on orchards, and built a house in San Jose that is still standing.