My grandfather never knew his father. According to older relatives he never spoke about his original family at all, and it seems his silence created space for peoples’ imaginations. There were theories about who his father had been, one more fanciful than the next. In one often repeated version my grandfather’s origins were noble (but of course).
Carl Adolf Kratz (1871-1933)
In the early 2000s a cousin took it upon himself to research the family history. He traced my father’s mother’s parents to the 16th and 17th centuries respectively. In the process he also found a name for my grandfather’s ‘unknown’ father: In the meticulously kept records of children born in Falköping in July of 1871 my grandfather is noted as Karl Adolf, with a mother Johanna, a maid, and a father named Johan Adolf Abrahamsson from Göteborg. No one had ever heard of this Abrahamsson before, and the cousin apologized for having put an end to the romantic fantasies.
When I started researching my grandfather’s family I wasn’t interested in his father. The endless speculation about paternity irritated me.
Instead I went looking for my great grandmother, Johanna, the maid. My grandfather’s mother. I found a young woman with four sisters, an older brother, and a widowed father. The mother, Anna Maja, died in the late 1850s, still in her 40s. Anna Maja had given birth to eight children, six of whom had survived childhood. Johanna was the second of the five girls, and by the time her mother died Johanna was already working as a maid. She was 16 years old.
The father, Anders, whose father and grandfather had been soldiers, worked as a stable hand and as a laborer. He died poor.
Thanks to the record-keeping of the Swedish church it’s relatively easy to track people’s movements, births, deaths, and marriages. I know that the five sisters scattered in four directions: Jefferson Co., Iowa, Stockholm, Göteborg, and a small place called Toresund, in Sörmland.
Toresund is where my grandfather grew up. He had four half siblings and a stepfather whose last name was Kratz. According to a relative the stepfather was “not nice”. His last name had come with his job as a soldier, along with the small croft where the family lived.
Karl Adolf used his stepfather’s last name, while his younger sister Elma refused to do so. According to a note made by a minister she “called herself Nilsson”. It looks to me as if she had grabbed “Nilsson” out of thin air. She shares this name with no one. She was a teenager and I like to imagine a certain rebellion.
Johannas brother, Sven Johan, remained in Falköping where he became a master blacksmith. The one single photo from my grandfather’s family that has survived the decades shows Sven Johan, a stern man with enormous sideburns.
Sven Johan, b. 1839, master blacksmith.
I am relieved I see no family likeness.
Three of Johanna’s sisters had large families. My grandfather had numerous first cousins in Iowa, and in Sweden. I don’t know if he knew them.
Through a descendant of Johanna’s sister Gustava I have a picture of Gustava with two of her children, their spouses, and a friend. Gustava is the woman to the right, in a light colored dress. The photo was taken around 1905, when Gustava was in her early 50s.
Gustava, b. 1852, and family in Stockholm c. 1905.
I have tracked many of the descendants of Johanna and her sisters, using Swedish and American public records. There were a lot of girls, and I’ve concentrated on them. All those sisters, and cousins, set out into the world at a time when choices were limited for women. Several of them had to support themselves, and their children, with little or no help. At times that was very difficult. I can’t help but think what my own life would have been like had I been born a hundred years earlier.
And, finally, I find myself curious about the man who appears only once in the records, Johan Adolf Abrahamsson from Göteborg. I wonder who he was, and if he really was my grandfather’s father. I’ll be telling the stories of the women, but their men will be there too.
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The blog posts aren’t chronological, and can be read in any order. If you want to start reading the blog from the beginning, the first post is here: http://genegenie.charlottakratz.com/2018/03/12/july-10-1871/. You’ll find a link for the following post (in red) at the bottom right corner of the page.