| ROOTS: Arvid Larson, one of the famous eccentrics (and perhaps mystics) of Harris, Minnesota, went to the Chisago County Fair in Rush City and entered the Fortune Teller's Tent. "I don't want to know about my future," he said. "Tell me about my past." Oddly, the best place to look for lost and forgotten progenitors is among the 2 billion names the Mormons have stored in state-of-the-art vaults deep in Granite Mountain near Salt Lake City. They take genealogical archiving very seriously, since they hope to convert your ancestors and propel them into Mormon heaven whether they want to go there or not. Granite Mountain is far more geologically stable than Yucca Mountain where our government proposes to store spent nuclear rods with a half-life of 24,000 years. Just think. If the earth becomes uninhabitable and the last human is gone, our ancestral names will still be safe in Granite Mountain waiting to be discovered by Intelligent Beings from Outer Space. I haven't looked to see if any of our relatives are among the 2 billion ancestral names, Mormon or not. I'll leave that to you. Maybe justifying present success, or easing the pain of failure, by finding famous ancestors partly comes from the Calvinistic idea that worldly gain is a sign of divine approval. He may not favor you, but at least He approves of your family ties. Validation through noble ancestors is an old pastime that may explain the rapid acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory in the 1800s, in spite of its disagreement with biblical Genesis. Forget the incontestable geologic record. With a little modification, the theory can prove the older Great Chain of Being idea. Man come from monkeys, Darwin said, per the 1920s minstrel song. The Great Chain placed everything on a ladder, from the lowliest living things up through the apes, natives, white Europeans, and beyond--to the hierarchies of angels, to Christ and Jehovah. In the old Chain Theory, these all exist at the same time, but when Darwin's theories were popularized, the Chain was placed in the time realm--"older" forms were assigned a more "primitive" place on the ladder. We of European ancestry, in turn, can aspire to climb the ladder to angelhood in the future. Such racist "Social Darwinism" was a perfect vehicle for colonial Europeans to justify their exploitation of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, using cheap native labor to extract gold, silver, rubber, oil, salt, hemp, etc. under servitude enforced by the whip. Hitler told his constituency they were the Master Race standing at the apex of evolutionary progress. On what rung of the evolutionary ladder do our Nordic progenitors stand? When I rub my forehead, I feel a prominent brow ridge indicating Neandertal roots. A friend, of Irish descent, went to a college in Dublin, Ireland to get an advanced degree. When I asked him if he was going to search his family tree while there, he answered, "No. They were all losers. Otherwise they wouldn't have come to America." That's also true of our family trees. We won't find royalty or connections to power. They were all peasants, all losers, with no ties to nobility. At least they can escape blame for oppressing others less fortunate. They were the less fortunate. They were not landowners, but hard working serfs with no prospects for progress. Despite adversity, they grabbed opportunity when it finally came. In thinking about how to present this history, I got to fooling around with a way to construct a genealogy. Draw out a conventional family tree, all with straight lines. Forget about complications like siblings, aunts, uncles, etc. Start with me--above me, mummy and daddy. Next line up, 4 grandparents, followed by 8 great-grandparents, 16 great-greats, and so on, until you run out of paper. Here's a strange tree: not only do the roots grow upward, but they grow without limit as time goes backwards. Assuming 3 generations per century and the latest possible date for the creation of the earth (4004 BC), each one of us alive today had 2180 ancestors at that time. To get some idea of the size of that number, there are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and, if each had one inhabitable planet, this would be enough people to inhabit 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 galaxies to the same population density as we now have on earth. Even without having the other 6 billion humans draw out their family trees, we can glimpse what I call the Dilemma of the Ten Thousand Ancestors (from the Chinese, where Ten Thousand is the poetic equivalent of an infinitely large number, the kind that even the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank cannot imagine). Pushing the human family tree back to 1, 2 or 3 million years only makes the dilemma that much worse. To try to make sense of this, let's turn the family tree upside down, and, for simplicity, start with two humans. Now we can draw a tree as the evolutionists would have it. The embarrassing incests disappear after a few generations. The tree grows more complex with time, but we can include all the uncles, aunts and cousins, even though many of them disappear without issue. By following time's arrow, we can snip off the lines where necessary until we have only a few billion little wriggling lines, with new ones appearing and old ones disappearing every instant. We now see that the Dilemma of the Ten Thousand Ancestors is really complicated. The family tree branches outward whether one goes forward or backward in time. How can you make any sense of an overlay of two trees, each branching in opposite directions? A glance at the pedigree of a purebred horse gives a clue to a solution to the double-branch question. At the great-grandparent level, the same stallion appears in several slots, if you'll pardon the expression. If we were to fill in names in all those locations in our backward-branching trees, many of them would be identical, particularly in a stable community. So our two-dimensional tree diagram is misleading. You can fold the paper over so one great-great-great-grandparent coincides with another, but after that, you're stuck. A better family tree would be made with strings or ribbons. Constructing a family tree then involves learning macramé and twisting together all the strands of our ancestors. There's still one problem. What do we do with the men's strings? We can tie together a man's and a woman's strings, with a child's string tied to the woman's string a short time later. The trouble is that paternity, unlike maternity, is a matter of opinion. History is full of children with unknown fathers or whose fathers were different from the mother's husband. Men prize paternity because, like God, it is invisible and unprovable, and so must be taken on faith. How can we tie those paternal strings when they all need question marks glued to them? What are we to make of nature's profligacy in supplying each man, in a lifetime, enough seeds to inseminate every woman who has ever lived? So few males are necessary for reproduction that we can simplify the family tree by eliminating all of them. James Joyce was right in Ulysses: the telephone line back to Eden is made up of a series of connected umbilical cords. So I'll dial the number (Aleph Alpha 001) and find it connects through my mother, my mother's mother, my mother's mother's mother, all the way back to Eve. Now the family tree does not branch backwards in time, only forward, and I am hanging onto a lifeline that started so far in the past I might as well say it started infinitely long ago. After all, compared with a lifetime, what's the difference between 3 billion years and infinity? Notice that I just had Eve trace her family tree back to Homo erectus (or, more properly, Mater erecta), then through all those Oldovai gals and the Slow Lorises and the dinosaurs back to the blue-green algae, if that indeed is what happened. But the lifeline can be traced further back, to viruses and even uncoated viruses (bare DNA). At the level of the very simplest potential life forms, the difference between chemicals that make copies of themselves and those that can't isn't as clear as you might expect. The intense energy that keeps molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles on their eternal rounds is the same as what drives my next breath. The simmering sun and the restless earth are as alive as I am, but on a longer time scale. The organization of a spiral galaxy is no more nor less amazing than the organization of my body. The magic lies in transformation, of which the personal history of each of us, from sperm to worm, is a tiny part. I read a short story that summarized the unimaginably large number of coincidences and accidents needed to produce one individual out of the uncountable number of possibilities. The extinct individuals and species are nothing compared to those who never had a chance to exist. What are we to make of the concept of "survival of the fittest" when the simplest organisms have survived unchanged the longest? The immortal beings are the viruses who determine our inheritance as well as attack us. They are also the amoebae who make up our white blood cells, and the bacteria in our bellies who digest our food, and the ones under our arms who generate the chemical signals we use to attract the opposite sex. They have all conned us into carrying them around, giving them population growth opportunities they wouldn't have otherwise had. We strut and fret our hour upon the stage, while the joke is that we only exist as a bag for carrying microbes around*. Astronomers show me a photograph of a distant quasar, and tell me that the light left it 6 billion years ago. My atoms at that time must have been part of some galaxies somewhere in the universe. Who can say what transformations I've seen, who can say whether I or the quasar am older? How ironic--I know almost nothing about my great-grandparents. * Note added January 2007: "Why We Develop Food
Allergies," by Per Brandtzaeg in the January-February
2007 American Scientist states: LIMITATIONS OF GENEALOGY: I don't know how genealogy is supposed to be presented,
but it seems a shame to lose all the information that
Audrey Lofgren, Marina Larson, Rosmer Olson, Bev Larson,
Alf Gunnarson and others gathered without passing it out
to other relatives. Audrey, particularly, organized and
typed up a lot of material. Also, I like stories,
particularly weird or gruesome or funny ones. There are
a number of them in the family, which I repeat here.
Some of them were told me many times. I refreshed my
memory on some of them by listening to tapes we made in
the 1980's of Elmer and Ida Lofgren and my brother Mike.
Where there are conflicting versions of the stories,
I've chosen the most entertaining rather than the one
that's more likely to be true. Our departed relatives
are not truly dead as long as there are stories we can
tell about them. Unfortunately, in the early part of the
genealogy, all the stories are lost, and the ancestors
are truly dead. On the other hand, we can get through
that part of the genealogy pretty fast, because there
isn't much to say. HOW LONG IS A GENERATION?
OLD SOCIAL STRUCTURE: A by (pronounced bee) is usually translated as "village", but it did not look like our idea of a village, and would often not be much bigger than a wealthy farmyard. A farm would usually have a big house for the owner, while a by typically was a group of small houses clustered together without a main manor house. The occupants worked the surrounding fields. Some, if not all, were sharecroppers, living on land owned by an absentee landlord (a literal word, since only the nobility or parishes could own land). A by grew all its own food, and typically had no stores and very little communication with the outside world, although there were some task specializations: blacksmiths, tailors, etc. A parish church was at the center of the larger towns, and would typically service several farms and bys. The church dutifully registered births and deaths. The towns were usually spaced about two to three Swedish miles apart. The English or American mile, similar to the Roman mile, is based on 1000 double paces when marching, or 5000-5500 feet (5280, to be exact). The Swedish mile was always considerably longer, and is now based on the metric system: 10 kilometers, or 6.2 English miles. This difference caused great confusion to my ancestors when they emigrated to America. The next largest settlements were the
cathedral/castle/university cities, as in England,
although the Swedish cathedrals are nothing to write
home about. Then came the landskap
(pronounced "LAHNS-cahp") which is like a province, but
is more of a divider of accents and dance tunes than a
political division. Dalarna ("DOLL-are-NAH") is
probably the most famous of the landskaps, at least as
far as music is concerned. The Lofgren/Johnson ancestors
came from Småland ("SMOH-lahn"), while the
Swensons were from Västergötland
("VES-ter-YUHT- lahn"). Later, some Swedes who happened
to be in power abolished the landskap as an official
entity, and substituted the län ("lehn") as
a political province. Most Swedes, other than those
living in Stockholm, ignore the political divisions, and
identify themselves with the old cultural/linguistic
divisions. WHY DIDN'T THOSE ANSCESTORS MOVE AROUND MORE? My ancestors are best described by the Swedish word bönde, (BUHN-duh), translated by dictionaries as "peasant." The same word in Old English meant "Serf", and that is closer to the meaning. A bönde is bound or bonded to the land, is in bondage (all these words derive from bönde). Although the peasant was in theory free, and had some representation in parliament, the freedom consisted of the freedom to starve if you didn't like it where you were. In practice, the peasants in parliament were not consulted for any decisions. England, from 1500-1600, first underwent what was called the "enclosures movement." Previous to this, small groups of farmers shared the surrounding land communally, and their sheep and cows all grazed together on the "village green." After that, land was parceled out to individuals, who fenced off their land to distinguish it from the others. The land was still owned by the nobility. The farmers were sharecroppers who could now be held individually responsible for production. Sweden missed out on the first enclosures movement, maybe because news travels slowly, or perhaps because Sweden was still mostly forested, and fences wouldn't improve the productivity of grazing animals under those conditions. The second enclosure movement in England (1750's-1850's) did reach Sweden, which passed its own enclosure law in 1827: "when possible, fields of individual farms are to be assembled in a compact manner." Earlier, in 1789, Sweden had revoked the rights of noblemen and the church to exclusive land ownership. Later, in 1864, they passed laws granting freedom of enterprise to everyone. It is probably not a coincidence that both Russia and US had recently freed their slaves. At least in principle, fewer peasants would be needed on the bys, and they could go find work elsewhere. My relatives did become much more mobile in the latter half of the 19th century. A by like Barrud (where my maternal grandmother was born), though, looks to me like it never did conform to the enclosures law, for there are few fences, hedges, or other field markers segregating the land, and there are no old dwellings other than those in the by. I suppose the people who still grow strawberries there know whose land is whose, but they don't make a big deal out of it. Of course, no one lives there in the winter anymore, so it isn't exactly a throwback to the olden days, as much as the summer residents trying to make it feel that way. ALF GUNNARSON SETS ME
STRAIGHT ON SWEDISH HISTORY:
In the middle ages (say 1200-1500), all the land in Finnerödja belonged to the monastery (abbey) of Riseberga (in Nerike) and there was less cultivated land then, of course. In Finnerödja there were two dominating culture-areas: Ramsnäs at Lake Unden and Skagersholm at Lake Skagern. Both Ramsnäs and Skagersholm were small estates and they ruled a lot of smaller farmyards, where farmers (yeomen) lived and earned their own living by natural economy. Vallsjön, at Lake Vallsjön, was a yet smaller estate and the settlement of Vallsjöbol was ruled from Vallsjön. But as I said before, the estates belonged to the Church, so there were a lot of small "pontificates" and "marshalls" all over the country. In the 16th century Gustaf Vasa became king of Sweden (1523-1560), after he had been skiing in Dalarna and so on. He started a big reduction of land from the Church to his own Kingdom. After that reduction, the state (Kronan) owned all land and it made no difference for those poor people who lived at the small farmyards: they didn't own their land; they still were yeomen. After Karl XII had left (1718) there was a time that was called Frihetstiden (time of liberty) and now the yeomen could be peasant proprietors, buying their land from the Crown. So did Erik Månsson (Alf's great-great-great-great grandfather) of Mossebo in 1724 and so did a lot of other peasants at the same time. Perhaps it could be interesting to know, that from the Middle Ages until 1866, there were four orders of society in Sweden: adel, präster, borgare, and bönder (nobility, priests, burghers and peasants). In 1866 those orders were replaced by a two-chamber Riksdag (Parliament) that existed about 100 years and was replaced by a one-chamber parliament in the 1950s (I don't remember the year exactly). The diet of the Four Estates had their sessions only if it was needed (some kings thought it was not needed at all) and in the history of Years, we had to learn about the important sessions in school. There were two important sessions in 1527 and 1544 (both in Västerås) during Gustaf Vasa's time. He did not only steal all land and richness from the Church, he also decided that Sweden should be a country of Protestants instead of Catholics. That was the decision of the meetings in Västerås in 1527 and 1544. Sweden had a Martin Luther of their own, Laurentius Petri, who was the first Protestant archbishop of Sweden, if I am not mistaken. The poor people did not notice these changes much, as the priests, Catholics or Protestant, preached in Latin. They did not understand anything, anyway! Let us talk about the names now: A few words more about farmsteading: As you understand, a place like Mossebo had a lot less arable land in the 18th century than a hundred years later. I guess that Mossebo was half the acreage in 1780 that it was in 1880. The farmers worked all the time to cultivate new fields, to be able to feed one cow more and increase their wealth.That was one reason why one farmyard could be two or three later on. At Mossebo I know it was like that and I guess it was the same at other places. In the end of the 19th century (1870-1900), industrialism and other reasons stopped the new cultivating efforts and around 1900, I think the cultivated area was larger than ever before (and after). Let us look at Karlssönernas Barrud: there was a family of father (Carl Gustaf), mother (Gustafwa) and five children. Of course it was absolutely impossible for the five children to earn their living at Barrud. If they had lived 100 years earlier, they might have cultivated new fields and divided the farm in five pieces. Now they had to look for other solutions. Three of them left for America (one came back, two stayed). Both of the Americans became farmers, like their parents and grandparents in Sweden. Why? In America they could earn their living from the industry sector or something else, but they stayed at farming and August wrote letters to his brothers in Barrud and told them, with some pride, that he could feed six or seven cows and a horse and other animals. -- Alf WHAT ARE THOSE FUNNY DOO-DADS ON THE SWEDISH "A"s AND "O"s? The Swedish alphabet has three extra characters, å, ä, and ö. Here's the approximate pronunciation of some Swedish letters that are different from English (there are a few exceptions): A = "ah" (short "a" in English) When trying to pronounce Swedish words, be sure to sing
them, like folks from Harris, Minnesota, do when
speaking English. WHY DO SOME OF THE SWEDISH WORDS SOUND LIKE ENGLISH WORDS? One-syllable English, the good old Anglo-Saxon variety, is a Nordic language. Of the three major Nordic groups (High German from southern Germany, Low German from northern Germany/Denmark, and Scandinavian), Old English was closest to Low German. That's not too surprising, since invaders such as the Jutes and the Angles were from Denmark, and the Saxons from Saxony. As we know from our time (the end of the Pax Russiana), the fall of an empire is not a good time for the former residents. The Roman rule had not been all that harmful to the English Celtic-speaking people. The Romans were satisfied to govern, enscript soldiers, and maybe plunder a bit. But when they finally had to leave, the Danes moved in. They wanted the land, so they began wholesale slaughter of the Celts, finally pushing them over to Western Scotland, Wales and Ireland. There were, in fact, several waves of Nordic invasions over the years, and only the last of them was the dread Vikings. The land north of London was settled by northern Scandinavians. Lots of those towns have a -by ending, with the same meaning as Swedes used for "village" (Derby, Rugby, Appleby, etc.). All these Nordic languages use a lot of the same words, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing. For example, shön means "beautiful" in German, but "sea" in Swedish. According to The Story of English (companion book to a TV series, probably available in used book stores, and worth reading), English dropped all those Germanic inflections and confusing articles, and replaced them with prepositions, because English became a sort of pidgin-Danish, allowing those different Nordic tribes to speak to each other. In 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded southern England with his Norman Conquest (more "Northmen", although they had moved to Normandy in France from Denmark quite a bit earlier, and spoke French), he only wanted to govern, and was willing to leave the farming to the peasants who were already there. The Norman conquest had almost no effect on the English language. The Normans found they had to learn English to talk to their underlings, who were too dumb to learn French. The British had many more words for their peasants than the Swedes had with bönde, possibly reflecting a more complicated relationship. Still, the bonds that held people were social rather than financial. Rent was paid in crops or meat rather than with cash. A look in the dictionary led me to the following words: serf -- a laborer who is bound to the land. If it's
sold, he goes with it. WHY THOSE DUMB NAMES? Swedes have always had a severe name shortage, recycling a very small number of them throughout the generations, using a convention that was so simple that even the village idiot (called the byfone and pronounced BEEF-ownuh) could understand it. The child is given a first name, then the father's first name possessive with a -son or -dotter attached for a last name. Thus, Ander's son Erik would be named Erik Andersson, and his daughter Lena would be Lena Andersdotter. Erik's son Gunnar, in turn, would be named Gunnar Eriksson. The daughter, when married, would take her husband's last name, so the -dotter name never survived more than one generation. It's easy to see that there would not be much confusion so long as no one ever moved. There was a profusion of Jon Jonssons and Ander Anderssons (those male Swedes were really proud of their names, so often passed them on twice), but you could always use other characteristics to distinguish them. If I remember right, the following neighborhood people were all named Carl Carlson: Blink Charlie (nervous tic); Long Charlie (height); Strawberry Carlson (specialty) and Nightgown Carlson (he'd had a botched operation for hemorrhoids that left him incontinent, so he never bothered to get dressed). Of course, all this surname changing stopped when the Swedes came to America, with the peculiar exception, in our family's case, of the name "Smith" (Chapter 6). If you moved to another part of Sweden, it was common to change your surname to the farm or town from which you came, resulting in various names with -berg, -gard, -quist, or -by endings. Another surname change could occur because each by had to supply a soldier for the Swedish army. The soldier was chosen by the landlord, but the by was responsible for maintaining the soldier's house and farm, and for feeding his family and animals while he was serving the King. This service could be a lifetime's occupation. When entering the military, the soldier often took another surname. You can imagine trying to command an entire army of Pehr Pehrssons. These surnames were more colorful than typical Swedish names. Löfgren (pronounced "LÖV-grin") was one such name: it means "leafy branch" or "green leaf," as when the first leaves appear in the spring. A Swedish relative pointed out, for example, the bright green new growth that appears at the tips of fir branches as being löfgren. The existence of the Lofgren name is no proof that any of our ancestors were ever village soldiers. There are a number of other reasons for a Swede to pick a distinctive name. As far as I can tell, the furthest back anyone has traced the name among our ancestors is to the fourth generation from mine (Chapter 5). Wallace Smith (Chapter 6) once alleged that the Lofgren ancestors were protestant Huguenots who came to Sweden from France in the late 1500s to escape persecution and genocide. I always thought his reasoning was: A) Many Huguenots were blacksmiths. I won't bore you with all the things you can prove with
this method of reasoning, but they include the
allegation that I am the Pope. But other relatives
also claim that our ancestors were Walloons from
Belgium, and evidently at least one, Johannes Persson,
came to Sweden from Belgium, so I was way too critical
of Wallace Smith (chapter
4).
SMÅLAND: The only old ancestors I know about were stuck for at
least 5 generations in Elghult, a parish about 6
American miles from Målerås. The name
means "moose thicket" (location 3 in Småland). There are no
elk in Sweden, although there are caribou, called
reindeer, in the far north. They do have moose, though,
and elg is the Swedish word for moose. Our word
"moose" is an Ojibwe Indian word (plural is moose-ug),
so if Swedes had been a little quicker in settling the
New World, moose would be called elk, which would be
really confusing. Europeans were not notably observant.
The American Robin doesn't look much like the European
Robin, and "deer" comes from German Tier,
meaning "animal." Where was I? Oh, yes. Elghult
consisted of several large unprosperous farms, but, as
of 1900, it also had eight glass factories. There was no
rail service, so I don't know what they did with the
glass. Maybe they piled it up and waited for customers
to come. VÄSTERGÖTLAND: The landskap of Västergötland ("VEST-uhr-YUHT-lahn"), homeland of the Swensons, is about 50 American miles northeast of the port city of Göteborg (location 2, Southern Sweden). Both Småland and Västergötland are part of what travel brochures call "Gothaland," which was first mentioned about 100 AD by the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. The Goths at that time were more powerful than the Svears to the north of them. The hero of the old Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was from Gothaland. The speech in this area is still quite different from that in Stockholm or the northern areas, particularly in words with "sj" in them. We pronounce it with an aspirated "wh," suitable for blowing out a candle, while the other Swedes say "sh," as if they were telling you to be quiet. This is the original home of the dreaded Visigoths (the Ostrogoths lived in the next landskap to the east, called Östergötland). For reasons unknown to me, some of the Visigoths and Ostrogoths took off for adventure in Europe, causing the Roman Empire lots of trouble in the Ukraine, France, Spain, and later even in Italy itself, before they were cornered and came to a bad end at the hands of Muslims in Spain in about the 6th century. Even though my ancestors stayed behind and farmed, I have sometimes used my heritage to remind people of Italian descent to behave. My maternal grandparents were both born in bys: he in Trehörning (TRAY-her-NING) and she in Barrud (BARR-rude). The nearest parish town to the bys where they were born was Finnerödja ("FINN-eh-ROY-yah") (location 1 in Västergötland), located between two large lakes: Vännern (VENN-ern) and Vättern (VETT-ern) (locations 2 and 3 in Västergötland). Neither Barrud nor Trehörning are on any except the most detailed Swedish maps. Each is about 6 American miles from Finnerödja. The land is much more fertile and less rocky than in Småland. It is known throughout Sweden as the best for growing strawberries, which is still the main product. The part that isn't suitable for strawberries is covered with fir and birch forest. The church in Finnerödja, where my maternal grandparents both sang in the choir, was built in 1763, and is still in regular use. My mother Ida once wrote this about Finnerödja: Don't know when, but long ago, maybe in 1600-1700 (it was actually in the 1400s), was when the Black Death raged. A fruit boat from Spain drifted into Göteborg, and people went out to get the ship into the harbor. They found all the people on board dead, so this awful sickness was brought into these towns, and the towns were wiped out. Most of the people living out in the country survived. Then people from Lapland and Finland came and resettled the region, calling this town Finnerödja. As they say, curiosity kills a cat. Throughout Europe, the survivors were those lucky enough to be isolated out in the country. By one estimate, England's population in 1400 was half of that in 1300, and the survivors were almost all peasants. As Ida indicated, the immigrants who came in had been even more isolated, so they may have been the best, but they might not have been the brightest. Without anyone else to eat the food they raised, the peasants began a reproductive orgy. During the 1700s, my ancestors had an average of almost four children per couple. That doesn't include the children who died within a few months of being born, since they'd continue to use the same name for each child until one lived long enough to become a person. From our family tree, it looks like the population explosion started much earlier than the dates given in the history books. Long before modern medical advances, indoor toilets, hand washing, and sterile surgical techniques, our ancestors, armed with plenty of potatoes, multiplied using the rabbit strategy. The Black Death scourge of Europe involved the first recorded use of biological warfare. In 1347, a Kipchak army laid siege to a Genoese trading town in the Crimea. The army had brought the plague with them from the steppes, and lost quite a few men to it. They catapulted the corpses over the town walls. It worked beautifully. Since I wrote the above in the first edition, Alf Gunnarson steered me to a website (http://www.finnerodjahembygd.se) that gives a brief history of the region. It says the area was settled by a large Finnish immigration in the 1580s, long after the Black Death. Sweden owned Finland at the time, and the king noticed that Finns could live on almost nothing out in the woods. He moved Finns, particularly from Savolax, to forested western Sweden, which became known as the Finnskogen (=Finnish woods, the source for the Swedish fiddle tune Livet i Finnskogen: Life in the Finnish Woods). The Finns started forest fires and successfully grew rye on the burned-over remains, a technique the Swedes had never thought of. (More information on the Finnish settlements in Sweden is given, in English, in the Wikipedia entry for Forest Finns). Later, in the 1890s, Alfred Nobel conducted outdoor
experiments with dynamite near here, which must have
scared the hell out of the neighbors. In spite of its
fame for strawberry farming, that crop was started only
in the 1910s by a pair of enterprising brothers. Another
good story ruined. WHAT DO ALL THOSE "MMFMM" LETTERS MEAN? It would take a giant piece of paper to draw out the family tree. Instead, I assigned each generation a "chapter number." Rather than talk about paternal great-grandmothers, etc., I use abbreviations, so, for example, FMFMM means my Father's Mother's Father's Mother's Mother. This sort of follows Swedish usage, where farmors far means "father's mother's father." I will use "=" to mean marriage, even though we all know they were seldom equal. If I know them, I'm going to list the children from each marriage, not just to bore you, but to show the severe name shortage I talked about. Ancestors that will appear in the next generation are capitalized (remember this is an egocentric genealogy), and identified with numbers that refer to the chapter number of the next generation, assigned in birth order in the next generation. If a name appears without a known ancestor, it is not assigned a number. I hope this is less confusing. If it's more confusing, ignore the numbers. With the exception of more distant relatives, I haven't continued this family tree below the children of my generation. I'll leave that to younger relatives, because I get easily confused about people born after I was. Who are all those stumpy-fingered children who show up at the family picnic? WHAT'S OUR LIFE EXPECTANCY? The best predictor is how well your ancestors did. An acquaintance thought about the fact that every known male in his ancestry died before age 40 of heart attacks. He scrimped to provide life insurance and investments to care for his family. Now he's in his late 60s and contemplating a sailboat trip around the world. He's been forced to go out and hunt for his fatal doom. Most of our relatives who made it to maturity were long-lived, many making it into their 80s and 90s. My grandparents lived to these ages: FM: 80 Oops! A chain is no stronger than its weakest link. My
MF died of a heart attack, and I've experienced a couple
of them, starting at about the same age. All Lofgrens
should have regular sugar tests, because diabetes is
rampant on all sides of the family. Given the choice,
though, I'd rather die while healthy than succumb after
a long, painful illness. The end result is the same, and
if I start to worry about the darkness ahead, I think
about what I was doing all that time I was waiting
around to be born. WHY BOTHER WITH GHOSTS? A memorable visit with Karl Hermanson in Stockholm (Chapter 6) exposed us for the first time to Swedish poetry, and I got enthused enough to try my feeble hand at translating a few of them into English. This one seems relevant to the stories of our dead ancestors. WHEN THEY SLIP THROUGH THE CHURCHYARD GATE When they slip through the churchyard gate O these homeless dead! The living often hurt us -- Translated, 1993, by Lyle Lofgren |
