The name

Because the enterprise name is a result of my interest in genealogy, and I think it is a bit of a fun story how I got into it, so here it is.

As so much do, it all began by pure chance. Up until summer of 2007 I had not  been interested in my family history at all, but it all turned around when I had to ID myself in a shop, and the person checking my ID was a genealogy enthusiastic, and recognized my family name from her own research. She started to talk about her interest and findings in such an enthusiastic way that I thought there must be something to this.

The first thing I did after this was to ask my parents what they knew, and I was told that on my fathers side some relative had done some research and created a family tree that went all the way back to late seventeenth century. I got a copy of this, and after subscribing to a service to get internet access to the church books in Sweden, I started to verify the family tree. With the help of my relatives work, and that the relevant church books existed and was not too hard to read, after a week or so I had a verified family tree of seven generations, back to about 1690´s. 

I thought that when iit was so easy, I should be able to follow the tree further back at least a few more generations. The first step would then be to find the date and place of birth of the male at the far end of this tree,Raphael Björkengren. In the death book it said that he died Jan 6 1750, and that he was 56 years and 3 months old, which pointed to a birth date of around Oct 6 1693. So I started to scan birth books from around this date, and from locations around where he lived and died. But no success. I did not give up though, and I spent quite a lot of my spare time on this. So much that my family started to get tired on seeing so little of me. They wondered in a sarchastic tone whether I was hoping to find a king in my search, or what was the reason for my great interest.

After trying for a long time without finding any useful lead I realized that my chance for success was far less than I first had hoped for. Being close to give it all up I got the idea that turned it all around. Instead of focusing on the male, maybe I should focus on his wife instead (yes, it took me that long to come up with this simple idea I have to admit). Her name was Catharina Rosenschantz, and when searching for her name on the net I found several leads. She was from a noble family, and hence there is much more documentation available. The first link I found was written by a genealogic researcher that was related to a sister of Catharina, and it described how she had been able to follow back through four generations of noble families until she had come to a wife named Virginia Eriksdotter, and wondered who that Erik, father of her, could have been. Then she revealed that she had found that it was Erik Gustafsson, better known as Erik XIV, king of Sweden.

I got truly chocked by this information, but after getting myself together, guess how good it felt to go and inform the rest of my family that I had not found one king, but two (in the case it is not known, Eriks father is Gustav Vasa)!

This really fueled my interest in genealogy, and I have since then been reading a lot about the Swedish history. I was also lucky to get in contact with another researcher that shares the noble parts of this exciting family tree with me, and he is a really good researcher (in contrast to me), so he has been able to dig up fantastically interesting facts about some of the noble men in this tree, which I hope to be able to present here later on.

To the right you can see the family branch leading from me back to Gustav Vasa, and this concludes the story, and explains why I have selected UBVASA as the name of my venture in the Android app business.

If you have a vivid imagination, maybe you can sense that royal touch in my apps;)