I work with genealogy about my family. I have a friend who has studied genealogy. I work with him in our library to look for my “roots”. Before we had to send for the documents in the archives, but now it is easier, because many of the documents are on internet. One has to pay a little, not much, to research. We book three hours every Monday to work with this. It´s rather popular among retired people to genealogize.
Something that makes it easier for us swedes to genealogize is that the Swedish authorities very early wanted to keep the populations documents in order. Much was due to the fact that it was necessary to know how many men there were to recruit to the army. We have also had peace for 200 years, so the archives are intact.
There are archives from the beginning of the 17th century. According to a law from 1686 the priests had to keep parish registers. There you can find information about the inhabitants in the parish concerning born, dead, baptized etc.
In the year 1749 came Tabellverket (the table department), an institution that gave us even more information about the population of those times. We Swedes are a statistically very examined people ….
Well, where am I in my research? To be exact, in the year 1715, three years before Karl XII, the Warrior King, died. Then Mats Olofsson was born. His son was Michel Matsson, born 1755. Anders Mickelsson, his son was born 1805. But he changed his name to Forsström. (In older times we had a name system different from today. If the fathers first name was Mickel and his second name Hansson and the sons first name was Mats, he took the second name Mickelson (Mickels son) from his father Mickel. And therefore the second name changed every generation. Somewhat troublesome for the genalogizer…) Let´s go on! Anders Forsström had a son, Reinhold, and his youngest son is my grandfather and father to my father Henry.
I have sailors in my family in the 1900th century. One of them, Augustinus, met a very beautiful English girl, Hannah, on her brothers boat. They fell in love and got married, got two children, Augustinus, and a girl, Julia. But in a storm at the Egyptian coast outside Alexandria Augustinus drowned, because he couldn´t swim. He is buried in Alexandria.
But Hannah went to Sweden and after some time she married Augustinus brother, that is Reinhold, the father of my grandfather John. And in this way my father had an aunt born in England. And Julia had siblings who also were her cousins!
This was something about my family history, not of much interest to somebody else than me. I´ll try to find out more about them, but it will not be easy. They had different types of writing in older times. I like to think about these people who lived such a long time ago. Some help I´ve had from aunt Julia´s story, where she writes about her mother Hannah´s life (born in 1839).
To be short – genealogy is fun! And if You haven´t learned how to swim, learn it!