Family in Sweden

Tanum Parish Church, Bohuslän, Sweden

Photo: Chumps, CC  BY-SA 4.01

Source: Wikimedia Commons

HANS NILSSON & MAGDALENA OLSDOTTER

MY 4TH GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

The Swedish ancestors in my direct paternal line were found within close proximity to one another in Tanum parish, Bohuslän, Sweden.  On this and following pages, the child's name listed in bold is my direct line ancestor. 

From Wikipedia:  

Bohuslän is a Swedish province in Götaland, on the northernmost part of the country's west coast. It is bordered by Dalsland to the northeast, Västergötland to the southeast, the Skagerrak arm of the North Sea to the west, and the county of Østfold, in Norway, to the north.

Bohuslän is named after the medieval Norwegian castle of Båhus. Under the name Baahuslen, it was a Norwegian county from the unification of the country in the 870s until the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, when the union of Denmark-Norway was forced to cede this county, as well as Skåneland (part of Denmark proper) to Sweden.

Birth places for our family include Tegneby (see image above), Ertseröd, Fossum, Grebbestad etc.   I have been told by a Y-DNA match that my 4th Great-grandfather, Hans Nilsson, who was likely born about 1740, was originally from Norway. He appears to have been married prior to marrying his second wife, Magdalena Olsdotter. Magdalena, presumably her father was named Ols, was possibly born c.1743.  

Hans and Magdalena  married in Tanum parish on 4 July 1762.  They had five children:

Fossum Rock Carvings, Sweden

Fossum Rock Carvings, Sweden

Photographer: Sven Rosborn

 From Wikimedia Commons

PER HANSSON & MAJA RASMUSDOTTER

MY 3RD GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

Per Hansson, the youngest child of Hans Nilsson and Magdalena Olsdotter, was my 3rd Great-grandfather. 

Per Hansson was baptised in Tanum on 28 October 1770. His sponsors were Johan Olsson, Anders Johansson, Ingeborg Simonsdotter and Anna Johansdotter. Per’s father, Hans Nilsson, was a farmer in Tegneby, but as Per was the youngest child and farms and crofts could support only a limited number of individuals, it seems he had to move farther afield to obtain work. 

We next find Per  Hansson recorded in Klädesholmen, Stenkyrka. Here, on 5 June 1797, he married Maja (Maria) Rasmusdotter. According to details provided by a researcher in Sweden, Maja was born 13 April 1776 in Stenkyrka. Thus far, I have been unable to locate Maja’s birth record on the Swedish registers, but based on her patronymic surname, her father’s first name was Rasmus. 

Tegneby, where Per Hansson was born, and Fossum, where he became a crofter, are part of the Tanum parish that is now a World Heritage site because of its famous rock carvings (see image above). The carvings in Fossum were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1994. The justification for this classification by the World Heritage Committee was: 

‘The rock carvings in the Tanum area are unique examples of Bronze Age art of the highest quality. The range of motifs provides rare evidence of many aspects of life in the Europe Bronze Age. The landscape in Tanum testifies to uninterrupted settlement in the area, covering over eight thousand years of human history.’ 

According to information obtained from the Västra Götaland County Administration, the area of Tanum where the carvings appear consists of more than 350 highly varied groups of carvings spread out over flat rock. They are interpreted as primitive symbolic art with motifs and positioning carefully planned by the people who carved them. In northern Bohuslän, there are roughly 1,500 known rock carvings and new ones are constantly being discovered. 

Per Hansson and Maja Rasmusdotter had six children:

By 17 November 1801 when son Anders Persson was born, the family had relocated to Warp under Tegneby near Per’s birthplace. By then he was listed as a crofter. In 1809, Per Hansson was drafted into the Army and became known as Per Falk.  The Swedish military was a fascinating body and the recruitment system vastly different to our understanding of the process. Since this is how our family eventually acquired the surname FALK, it is worth sharing some of what we have read about Swedish army recruitment. 

In 1680, King Karl XI decided to reorganise the Swedish defence network (Indelningsverket). Once established, that system remained in force for two hundred years. The new defence laws meant each province had an obligation to maintain one full regiment (regemente) of foot soldiers. Several farms were obliged to amalgamate and establish a rota, and each rota had to maintain one soldier. The tenant soldier (indelta armen) force grew to number about 25,000 men. 

Each rota then had to recruit, feed, arm and equip their soldier and provide him with a house (soldattorp). The soldier was to attend military drills and in time of war was to report for duty wherever he was needed. The man recruited as a soldier could be from other parts of the country but was usually from one of the rota’s farms or the nearest village. Mostly it was a dräng or statare (farm hand), but occasionally even the farmer or one of his sons filled the position. If the soldier happened to be killed in action or unable to serve for any reason, he was replaced as soon as possible. It was up to the rota to decide his replacement. Sometimes, the replacement soldier was expected to marry the deceased soldier’s widow, even if she were much older, because that made maintaining them more economical for the rota. However, the new soldier could be rejected in the general inspection (genaralmönstringen) that took place every year. The general inspection was sometimes even attended by the king! 

Since soldiers had rural backgrounds and were mainly from the peasant classes, they had patronymic names that were very common such as Andersson, Eriksson, Hansson, Olsson or Petersson. Hence, these names became unworkable in the military because too many individuals had the same name. Just imagine a line-up of soldiers at roll call, and most of them stepping forward at the same time when a name such as Andersson was called out! To alleviate this problem, when a new soldier appeared before the military scribe he was allocated a soldier's name to use during his years of service, and he often retained it afterwards. Traditionally, the name should have been borne only by the soldier and not his family. The name was also tied to his rota. If he moved to a different rota, he was given a new name unless he was an officer. This may have worked very well for the army but not so much for the family genealogist generations later! 

The ‘soldier name’ was usually short, most consisting of only one syllable. Some were taken from military objects such as Hjälm (helmet), Granat (grenade), Spjut (spear), Svärd (sword), Stake (stake) - or personal characteristics: Rask (fast), Flink (deft), Modig (brave), Djärv (bold), Lång (tall), Liten (small) and Stor (big). In some cases, they were issued names coming from natural phenomena like Dunder (thunder) and Blixt (flash), or from natural objects such as Lärka (skylark), Falk (falcon), Gucku (cuckoo), Sparv (sparrow), Lo (lynx), Tiger (tiger), Lejon (lion) etc. It was completely within the company commander’s power to decide what to call his soldiers' rota and he was only limited by his imagination. 

The new soldier became a person to be relied upon. Farmers had to provide him horse and carriage transport to church every Sunday, then after attending service he trained outside the church with fellow soldiers from his district. He was paid an annual salary, provided with an area of land and his house, given seed, a cow, sheep, clothing and food. Farmers would often lend him a horse to transport wood from the forest.  Nevertheless, even though the uniform gave him a degree of respect, he also had to be accessible to the farmer to work in the field. He was still a dräng, a labourer, to the farmer. 

The old handwritten clerical household inspection documents seem to indicate Per Hansson Falk’s soldattorp was Torpet Lillybrålen or Tilljebraten (the writing is difficult to decipher on the document) at Under Sör Fossum. We established when Per Hansson became Per Falk - in the army. However, there were times that we wondered if Falk may also have a hereditary link to our family.  A search for Falk in the Swedish births register in about 2005 showed there were only nineteen instances of the name recorded in all of Tanum parish from 1730 until 1906, and only 213 in all of Sweden during that era. The one most interesting was a Hans, son of Anders Falk and Helena Hansdotter who was born in 1730 at the same place soldier Per Falk and his family lived: Under Sör Fossum. This Hans’s birth was forty years before Per was born.  We've speculated about these other Falks and whether they were related in some way but we will probably never know for certain. It may simply have been that they were unrelated families who also acquired their Falk surname from the army rota.

The patronymic naming system coupled with the complication of ‘soldier names’ makes Swedish research challenging, to say the least. For example, Per Hansson is listed in different records as: Pehr Hansson, Per Hansson, Petter Hansson, Per Falk, Pehr Falch and Per Falck. Even the patronymic system was not a standard. Sometimes members of the one family randomly used different last names. Some were derived from the father’s first name, some used his last name or a name derived from a village or farm, and still others a normal hereditary surname. If the Swedes wanted to change their name, all they needed to do was advise the vicar so he could note it down in his clerical household survey. Thankfully, in 1901, Sweden ‘froze’ the patronymic and it became law for all children of the one family to have the same last name. The wife still had the option of retaining her own name instead of adopting her husband’s last name at marriage. 

My 3rd Great-grandfather Per Hansson Falk passed away at Under Surtung, Tanum, Bohuslän on 16 February 1832, aged 61-years. His wife Maja Rasmusdotter died in Björnås, Tanum on 12 March 1869 at the grand old age of 93-years. 

Map showing the distance between Ertseröd and Grebbestad

Google Map shows the distance between Ertseröd and Grebbestad as 4.6km.  

ANDREAS PERSSON & INGER 'HELENA' HANSDOTTER RUDERBERG 

MY 2ND GREAT-GRANDPARENTS

My 2nd great-grandfather, Andreas Persson, was also the youngest child in his family. He was born 17 July 1817 at Under Sör Fossum, a farm about 3km east of the Tanum parish church in the county of Bohuslän, Sweden.  Under Sör Fossum indicates a croft under or below the South Fossum farmhouse. Andreas was the third son and sixth child of Per Hansson and Maja (‘Maria’) Rasmusdotter. He was baptised on 20 July 1817 in Tanum. His sponsors were Olaf Hannson, Johannes Andersson, Anna Jonsdotter and Johanna Olsdotter. 

Information in the Tanum parish register where the baptism of his son Hans was recorded on 7 October 1851, describes Andreas as ‘the crofter Andreas Persson in Ertseröd’. In Sweden, a crofter or torpare is similar to a tenant farmer.  Ertseröd farm is about 2km south of the village of Grebbestad in Tanum parish. 

To help illustrate what a crofter's life was like during the time of Andreas Persson and his family, the following was gleaned from various sources:  For those Swedes who wished to remain on the land and at the same time be at least semi-independent, crofting provided a viable way of life. The crofter and the farmer signed a contract stipulating what each was to furnish the other. If the crofter were unable to meet his obligation to work for any reason, he was required to provide a substitute either from within his own family or by paying someone else from his own pocket. 

The crofter worked his plot of ground, seldom larger than a couple of acres. He planted potatoes and vegetables, grew some hay for his lone cow and maybe a horse if the land area was large enough, and also raised a couple of pigs and a few chickens. Crofts were very basic and consisted of one or two rooms, usually with a dirt floor. 

By 1860 there were 100,000 Swedish crofters who, with their families, accounted for 457,000 persons. The social conditions under which they worked varied greatly from farm to farm and village to village. Where the farm owner and his crofter worked together harmoniously, life was tolerable at least. If not, and the farm owner made unreasonable demands, life could be miserable for the crofter. This was one reason why large numbers of Swedes emigrated. By the year 1900, the number of Swedish crofters was reduced by 30,000. 

The gradual lessening of the torparproletariat ( the custom of crofting ) and its eventual demise, can largely be credited to the ongoing industrialisation of Sweden. The industrial revolution siphoned off many thousands of men and women from farms. Emigration, coupled with the emergence of Swedish labour movements that were able to improve living conditions for farm workers, eventually eliminated the torpare and statare classes altogether. 

Interestingly, in today's Sweden, the torp (croft) has developed a somewhat romantic aspect. Nostalgic modern Swedes wanting to go back to their roots have returned to their parishes of origin to purchase the old family torp if still in existence. If that were not possible, any other torp would do, so long as it was a torp! These summer cottages (sommartorp) have become a retreat and safe haven for many harried citizens from the city. Here they refurbish their dilapidated crofts then sit back and envisage an era when their ancestors resided there. 

During my research into Andreas Persson’s background, I was in contact with Turi and Hans Martin Jarmund, a retired Norwegian couple who were living on the old Ertseröd farm where Andreas Persson once crofted, and where my great-grandfather, Hans Andreasson ‘Falk’ was born. Turi and Hans Jarmund let their two cottages, named Drängestugan and Annekset, to summer tourists. Along with their neighbour, Turi and Hans kindly investigated old records for me to try to locate further information on Andreas Persson, but although unsuccessful, I was very grateful for their assistance. 

Besides being a crofter, Andreas Persson was also a shoemaker. Andreas married Inger Helena Hansdotter Ruderberg, the daughter of Hans Jonasson Ruderberg and Johanna Pålsdotter, on 1 June 1846 at the Under Ertseröd farm near Grebbestad. Inger Helena was born in Grebbestad on 26 Sep1815 and baptised on 1 Oct 1815. Her sponsors were Hans Larsson, Bryngel Djupström, Anna Andersdotter and Oliana Johansdotter. 

Andreas and Inger had five children: 

Their father, Andreas Persson passed away at Ulmekärr in Tanum parish on 27 Apr 1872 aged 54 years. 

Sometime around 1879 or 1880, Andreas and Inger’s son Hans Edvard (my great-grandfather) disappeared from Sweden. The widow Inger possibly thought her son (a ship's carpenter) had perished at sea, although church records described him as vistelseort okänd (whereabouts unknown). History now shows that Hans arrived on our shores about this time after being almost shipwrecked on his way from New York to Japan. His story follows on the 'Glenn Innes NSW' page ( see tab at top ). It is not known whether there was ever any contact between Hans and his mother after he decided to remain in Australia. 

On 10 August 1888, sixteen years after Andreas’s death and at the age of 73, Inger Helena travelled to Philipsburg, Pennsylvania where her daughter lived. She later returned to Sweden where she died in Grebbestad 1 Jun 1946.