The Swedish Connection

The mid 1800s was a disruptive period in the United States and nothern Europe. The US was divided in a civil war and the vast majority of Swedes lived in small rural villages, in constant fear of starvation, all manners of horrible diseases, and God. Researching family history during this period I’ve learned that my ancestors were vulnerable members of society and I’m fortunate that they survived to an age to be able to raise a family, many didn’t. The detailed Swedish genealogical records from this period, which are now being digitized, were created by the Church of Sweden which for centuries was state supported. A Church Law of 1686 required the clergy to keep records of births, christenings, marriages, deaths and burials in the parish as well as records of persons moving in and moving out of the parish. They were in everyone’s business.

The focus of this post is John Jönsson and Gunnil Håkansdotter’s family, my great great grandparents, and their experience leaving their Swedish homeland and finding a new life in the United States. Here’s a simplified tree showing my ancestral family groups:

In 1858 Gunnil was 22 years of age and living on her family’s croft farm in Örkened, Sweden where she, and all of the rest of her family members were born. Gunnil was Håkan Håkansson and Inger Jönsdotter’s eldest daughter of four children and was five years older than her next oldest sibling, so she was expected to manage many of the family responsibilities while her parents eked out a subsistence living on the tenant farm.

John Jönsson was born in Glimårka, about ten miles from Örkened and was two years older than Gunnil. Both villages consisted of only a few hundred people and they probably knew each other most of their lifes. John was the fourth child of ten, three of which died before the age of two. John’s parents, Jöns Olsson and Elna Johnsdotter, were one of several generations of ancestral families which lived in Glimårka, the village they were born, their entire lives. Their daily life involved farming and tending livestock on manor land alongside extended family members. About half of rural Swedish families during this period were crofters, or tenant farmers, paying rent for their land with farm proceeds. Both John and Gunnil’s families suffered nutritional hardships due to poor harvests which the villages were dependant on. Gunnil had two younger sisters that died before the age of four.

John and Gunnil were married in 1861 at the ages of 27 and 25. The mean age for marriage among croft family members increased to 27 for women and 29 for men due to their servitude responsibilities to the manor land owners. Their first son, Pehr, was born in 1864 and Hannah, my great grandmother, followed in a little more than two years after Pehr. The desperation of rural life became increasingly stark during this period. 1867 marked the start of a two year famine caused by a perfect storm of severe cold weather and drought.

1865 also marked the end of the US civil war. Several wooden cargo ships built in the 1850s that were utilized during the war began taking on emigrant familes seeking escape from Northern Europe. The lowest fares could be found on the sailing ships carrying lumber from Canada that would otherwise have returned empty. During the spring of 1868 John and Gunnil secured passage on the Norwegian sailing vessel Nornen departing on April 19 from Christiania (present day Oslo) to Quebec City. Their fare was 15 Spd (Speciedaler) for each adult and 5 Spd for each child under eight. In 1868 1 Spd equaled about $1.60, their total fare of 40 Spd would have been about $64 which in today’s dollars would be about $1,200. I’m guessing that the funds for the voyage were borrowed in good faith that repayment would be sent back from America.

This fare on Nornen was for below deck in the cargo hold, no food, no bedding, no toilet facilities. The passengers were expected to bring all provisions required for the trip. The following is a list of provisions provided by the carrier intended to be adequate for one adult for up to 10 weeks:

After crossing the Atlantic we don’t know if John and Gunnil had a final destination already decided. The first documentation I can find of them in the United States is the birth of their third child, Charles Benjamin Johnson, on March 1,1870 in Galesburg, Illinois. Galesburg is the closest town (population of 10,000 in 1870) to a Swedish emigrant community named Bishop Hill Colony. Bishop Hill was founded in 1846 by a notorious Swedish religious dissident named Erik Jansson and was well known throughout Sweden for his defiance of the Church of Sweden. The colony has been designated a National Historic Landmark and was one of the largest Swedish communities in the US at the time when John and Gunnil were planning their voyage.

The railroad system was quite extensive in 1868 throughout the US and Canada and was the most likely means to get from Quebec City to Bishop Hill Colony. Fares for the family in 1868 would have been less than $40 ($750 in today’s dollars).

Reports of life at Bishop Hill to the families in Sweden must have been generally positive because Gunnil’s brother, Bengt Håkansson, booked passage in 1869 to join the family. Bengt is shown in a green highlight on the family tree above, he is ten years younger than Gunnil and 23 when he makes the voyage. Gunnil must have written horrible descriptions of the passage on Nornen, (did I mention that Nornen is Norwegian for “The Witch”?), because Bengt booked passage on a Danish sternwheeler steamship called Northern Light.

Bengt’s passage on Northern Light was definitely an upgrade, the sternwheeler left Copenhagen on May 1 and arrived in New York City on May 19. Bengt’s 19 day trip was 60 days (2 months!) shorter than John and Gunnil’s 79 day voyage. There were even faster screw propeller driven steamships operating at the time which could make the journey in a week but at much higher fares. The Northern Light adult fare was still about three times the cost of the sailing ship that his sister’s family arrived on but included meals:

Bengt settled in Galva, Illinois, close by John and Gunnil’s family where he met Betsey Johnson, another Swedish emigrant who arrived the same year as his sister and was a domestic servant for a teacher and his family in Galesburg.

Then, in 1873, John Jönsson died from an apparent diphtheria infection. This left Gunnil, five years after their arrival in the United States, with three children aged 9, 6 and 3 to raise. Her ability to adapt was proven when, within two years, she was remarried to John Blaine, a farmer twenty-one years older and also living in Galesburg. John Blaine already had a large family from a previous marriage and would have three more children with Gunnil, the last when he was 66 years of age.

Hannah was Gunnil’s second child and oldest daughter and made the very long and dangerous voyage across the Atlantic on the Nornen when she was one year old. Hannah is my great grandmother and she shows up in the 1880 US federal census as living with Gunnil and John’s blended family in Cedar, Illinois, about 8 miles out of Galesburg. Five years later on February 20, 1885, just before her 18th birthday, Hannah married Thomas Fremont Warren, a 22 year old farmer, in Union Iowa, where the groom was born and lived at the time. How Hannah and Thomas met each other, when Union is over 225 miles from Cedar, is a mystery.

Soon after marriage Thomas and Hannah relocated to Jewell, Kansas where a number of the large Warren clan began to relocate in the late 1870s. In 1886 their first of four children, Clarence was born, soon followed in 1888 by Elsie Mae, Nellie in 1892 and my grandmother Edith in 1901. Nellie was named after Gunnil who adopted the name soon after arriving in the US. Here are some photos of Hannah, Thomas Warren and their family, and also a couple photos of Gunnil. Unfortunately, these are scans of xerox copies of the originals that I received from my Uncle David, I’m still trying to track down the originals.

In the late 1870s, while Gunnil was raising a second family with John Blaine just outside of Galesburg, Illinois her brother Bengt was working for the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company in Galva, Illinois, a short 30 miles away. The railroads were expanding rapidly and provided employment for not only Bengt but also for three of Gunnil’s sons, Peter, Charles and William. Bengt changed his name to Benjamin Hokom, or perhaps it was changed for him, when he applied to work for the railroad. After Bengt’s marriage to Betsy Johnson in 1872 they were blessed with nine children, seven survived childhood, one girl and six boys. Bengt became a foreman with the railroad until his death in a tragic accident in 1896. It appears that at 4:00pm on a Friday afternoon in February several trains moving in close proximity drowned out the noise of a switch engine that caught the tail of Bengt’s long overcoat and dragged him beneath it’s wheels. He was taken home where by 6:00pm he died from severe head injuries. The local Galva, Illinois newspaper provided this obituary:

Gunnil was living with her second husband John Blaine and their youngest son James in Galesburg, Illinois when John died just before his 86th birthday in 1901. James died five years later at the age of 26, never having married and still living with Gunnil. Gunnil then moved in with her oldest son Peter and his wife who also lived in Galesburg until her death in 1926 at the age 90.

My great grandmother Hannah, having moved 500 miles west from Illinois to Kansas in 1885 with Thomas Warren was able to see her four children grow, marry and provide twenty grandchildren all living close by their home in Jewell. Until 1925. In November of 1923 Thomas’ younger brother Royal Warren died in South Dakota at the age 57 in an unexplained accident. Then, the next year in September his older brother Hiram dies in Nebraska just after his 64th birthday, he was struck by a train at a road crossing while driving his Ford coupe. Finally, on June 4, 1925 Thomas was unloading alfalfa at his ranch and got underneath the wagon to repair something when the team turned suddenly to the right catching his head between the wheels and hay rack, crushing his skull and killing him instantly at the age of 62. All three brothers accidental deaths occurring within 30 months.

After 1925, some of the children moved with their family out of the area. Clarence moved with his family in 1927 to Missouri where he died at the age of 74 in 1961. Nellie also moved to Missouri around 1927 with her husband Arthur Selder but then soon moved to Los Angeles, California where Arthur died in 1938. Nellie remarried in 1943 to Victor Leontovich, a governor of an imperial Russian province and captain in the Imperial Russian Army. He was employed as a gardener by 20th Century Fox when Nellie met him. My grandmother Edith moved with her husband Robert Reed and their five youngest children in 1944 to Nampa, Idaho due to the effects of drought, poor harvests and lingering economic depression in Kansas. The oldest child, Warren, was already married and living in Texas in 1944. Robert died within five years of the move on December 11, 1949, of an apparent heart attack at the age of 54.

Hannah continued to live in Jewell until her death in 1958 at the age of 90.

Sarah Blaine shown in the group picture above introduces a bizarre twist to this story. Sarah attended medical school at the University of Iowa and practiced medicine in Nebraska with her husband, also a physician. Their son, Philip Blaine Kalar, was a musician and music program producer. After a career that included work for Hollywood studios and Chicago radio stations he became program diector for KOAC Radio in Corvallis, Oregon and received his Master’s degree at Oregon State University in 1958. In her last years Sarah came to live with Philip and his family in Corvallis in 1954 until her death on May 1, 1956. Sarah died at Good Samaritan Hospital, the same hospital where I was born in 1953. Sarah shows up in the above family tree highlighted in light blue. Here’s her obituary that appeared in the Corvallis Gazette Times in 1956: