Princess Estelle

As you all know Swedish Princess Estelle was born in February 23, 2012.


Prince Daniel, Crown Princess Victoria and Princess Estelle.
Copyright Kungahuset.se

Estelle Silvia Ewa Mary, Princess of Sweden, Duchess of Östergötland, born February 23, 2012 as the first child of Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel.

Nobility and royalty is not so often related to us "ordinary" people, they tend to marry within their own circles.
But now, when we suddenly got a "man of the people" (Daniel Westling) in the royal family, there are suddenly lots of “common Swedes” who suddenly are related with the future sovereign Estelle.

And since many Americans have Swedish heritage, probably lots of people in USA are now also related with Estelle.

I am actually myself related to Prince Daniel and Princess Estelle. Not closely related but in several ways.
Our closest shared ancestor was Per Johansson Wall (also named Borg during a period of time) and his wife Kerstin Nilsdotter.

Per Wall is noted born 1730 in Ockelbo parish, he died 1806 in Hanebo parish. Kerstin was born 1726 in Arbrå parish and also died 1806 in Hanebo.

Via these ancestors there are two connections, since Daniels great grandmother, Brita Westling (1868-1965), her parents was actually 1st cousins with each other.

Daniels grandfather took the surname Westling from his wife when they got married and that was not common practice these days..

Besides Per Wall (military officer), I and Estelle also have other shared ancestors in the couple Erik Nilsson (1641-1719) and his wife Anna Svensdotter (1643-1713) who lived in Segersta parish.

Probably there are even more shared relations between us that I still have not documented (in Bollnäs).

Prince Daniel and Princess Estelle
Copyright Kungahuset.se

My grandmother Edit was 5^th cousin with Estelle´s grandfather Olle.

And my mother Agneta is 6^th cousin with Prince Daniel.

So me and Princess Estelle are 7^th cousins.

But I really don’t know if relationship with someone is to brag about, regardless if its a Prince, future Queen or a world famous Opera singer... But we genealogists do like to find relatives of all kinds.

And if we step further back in time, we end up being related to everyone.

I have noticed an increased interest from customers in USA to find out if they are related to the new princess Estelle, and depending from where in Sweden your ancestors came, the possibility is there!

Genealogy mistakes

Some people say Swedish genealogy is very easy to do, but thats not quite true...

Actually its rather tricky sometimes, mostly because of the fact that we in Sweden rarely used family surnames. So one great challenge is to avoid mixing people up when they all have almost the same names.

From my last post about Swedish surnames and family names. I have got some questions and reactions from people wanting me to share some more examples.

I often notice that americans trying to find their Swedish roots end up wrong sooner or later and one reason is that they may think that people named Andersson, Johansson or Olsson are actually carrying family surnames and that they may think they are related to all other Andersson, Johansson and Olsson...
(actually there are also Swedes making this error...)

I have studied hundreds of public and private familytrees that contains these type of mistakes.

Here is an example of how this sometimes tends to occur;

Lets start with a man named Andrew Olson that is supposed to be borned in the year 1870 in the parish Brösarp in Sweden. As a bonus in this example we know that his name before leaving Sweden was actually Anders Olsson.

We check the birth records for Brösarp 1870 and find that there are actually six Anders born there this year.

May 9: Anders : fathers name; Ola Persson
May 30: Anders : fathers name; Per Persson
June 20: Anders: fathers name; Per Olsson
July 26: Anders: fathers name; John Larsson
Oct 16: Anders: fathers name; Nils Brock
Oct 21: Anders: fathers name; Nils Andersson

Now guess which of the Anders most people pick out as to be "their" Anders Olsson here?

Yeah, most common mistake is to pick Anders born in June 20 because his fathers surname is what we are looking for; Olsson.

The correct Anders is the first one. The fathers name is Ola Persson and his children will have the name Olsson based on the fathers first name Ola.

Anders that was born in june 20 will be named Anders Persson, as his fathers first name is Per.

So thats a typical example how easy things can go wrong from the start.

From about early 1900 we changed and started to use our current surnames as normal family names.

Swedish surnames and family names

Until quite recently, Sweden have not commonly used family surnames.
Instead we have had a patronymic tradition, which means that all children got their fathers first name as their surname, with the suffix -son (for men) or -dotter (for women).

So if a man named Lars Andersson had children, his sons would automatically had their surname as Larsson and his daughters would have Larsdotter as their surname.

It was first in the late 1800 and early 1900 that we stopped using patronymic surnames and changed them into family names.

About the same time women started to take their husbands surname as their own when getting married. Before this all women kept their surname their entire life, married or not.

When the change from patronymic surnames was completed all women that had their patronymic surname (ending with -dotter) to become the male version, ending with -son instead.
So Elisabeth Svensdotter suddenly was changed to Elisabeth Svensson. Quite boring I think.

That is the reason that we in Sweden have so many family names ending with -son (Andersson, Svensson, Larsson, Nilsson, Olsson, Johansson, Persson, Karlsson, Gustafsson, Eriksson, and so on...)

As you probably understand, there was literary hundreds of thousands of people living in Sweden that shared the exact same name during all periods of time.
But there was some of them that adapted a family name instead.

Sometimes just to avoid being mistaken to be someone else (since there often were maybe 10 Lars Larsson living in the same small village...), some started using a non-patronymic surname, sometimes this was passed on to their children, sometimes not.

Most common surnames (besides the patronymic ones) are very often connected to nature and names of places where people lived.
This gives quite many possible combinations, but also many of these surnames was adopted by many unrelated people in many different locations at the same time, making these family names not that unique and not very helpful to determine if people with the same family name were related or not...

Some very common words that are current in many Swedish surnames are to mention a few;

Berg (mountain), Gren, (branch on tree), Blad (leaf on tree), Kvist (twig on tree), Ström (stream in water), Lund (grove of trees), Ny (new), Söder (south), Nord (north), Väst (west), Öst (east), Sand (sand), Fors (rapids water), Sjö (lake)...

And often names of trees or animals are used, many times in combination with the above.
Some examples;



Flowers from a Linden tree

Lind (lime or linden), Ek, (oak), Gran (spruce, fir), Tall (pine), Hassel (hazel), Örn (eagle), Falk (falcon), Björk (birch), Asp (aspen), Äng (meadow), Lönn (maple)...

So by combining these we can generate almost all common surnames that is in top 100 here in Sweden...
My own surname Lindberg is a perfect example that is one of the most common surnames here.

Some people also got special names if they were soldiers. These soldier names was most of the times only used by the soldier himself and not passed on to his children, but sometimes they became family names also.

Most of these military names were either directly connected to the place the soldier served under or some classical ones like for example;

Trygg (confident, safe), Hård (hard), Stark (strong), Grym (cruel), Dunder (thunder), Stolt (proud)...

Also noblemen, priests, merchants and some craftsmen like smiths often used a family name as a surname.

The only family names that was protected was the one reserved for the noblemen. No one else outside the family could use a registered surname used by a noble family.

But besides that, no rules, so many people used the same surnames without being related at all.

But since early 1900 there is strict regulations and procedures when someone want to change or create a new surname.
Today the name must be unique or if it exists you must have a connection to this surname not so long ago in ones family.

In my family the Lindberg surname was first used by my great great grandfather, and he took it the year 1874 when he was 16 years of age. Before that his surname was Lindman, but that name came from the soldiers that served in Lindö In Vallentuna parish. (all soldiers there always was named Lindman).

So he could not use Lindman since he was not the soldier and he had to change.
Why he decided for Lindberg is not sure. But maybe he wanted to keep some of Lidman and since he lived at a farm that was named Berga, he maybe was influenced by that?

The boring part is that Lindberg is so very common here in Sweden, so sometimes I wish he would have had a little more fantasy when he made the change.

But of course I am very proud of my family name anyway!

Genetic cousins.

Not so long ago, I entered the world of DNA and this is one of the most exciting thing I have done during my 30 years in genealogy!

I have been looking for this several years, but I have not felt that it would be of any real use in my genealogical research to know about my deep ancestry that you can get from taking the Y-DNA or mtDNA tests that have been available for some years now.
Of course it is interesting to find out what haplogroup you belongs to and be able to match against others, but in short it turns out that we all are related to each other if we get way back in time.

As a genealogist I have the drive to know HOW we are related and since the timeframe that are possible to verify and do actual genealogical research is limited to the last 500 years it was not that interesting for me to get information that I match someone that share a common ancestor in say, 50 000 years ago...

But now things have drastically changed with the autosomal DNA tests that have arrived!

With an autosomal DNA-test its possible to find whats called "genetic cousins" and that means the matches you get, share an common ancestor in the range between present time and back for about 300 years, or 5-8 generations! So its absolutely within the timeframe that is possible to verify with traditional genealogical research!

Some people even call this a genealogical revolution and I tend to agree! This is really amazing and very exciting!

If this had been available when my grandparents had been alive, I had done whatever possible to have their DNA tested with an autosomal DNA-test. Because every generation some of the inherited and traceable DNA get lost...

I have already tested my fathers DNA and now I am just about to get the test done for my mother also. I use Family Tree DNA that are totally dedicated to genealogical DNA testing. Their autosomal DNA test is called Family Finder.

So my search for my genetic cousins have started and I have already got some very interesting matches that we started to figure out how we are related, and thats genealogy!

Some people are thinking that taking a DNA-test would "spoil the fun" from doing traditional research, but they are strongly mistaken since working with DNA in your genealogy is NOT presenting you with a complete family tree. It only gives you a new dimension to your genealogy and without traditional genealogical research its quite useless.

As a professional genealogist, I have also included DNA in my "toolbox" and I am following the technical progress with great interest.

Bearhunting in Hälsingland...

I have researched a lot on my grandmother's ancestry in Hälsingland and there are many interesting lifestories and exciting moments to get out from the church books.

Some of these ancestors are originally from Finland and in the late 1600's, they arrived to clear and occupy unsettled land in Hanebo (X) parish.
I noticed that some places, speciallyTönsen and Raman seems to be populated mostly of people of Finnish origin.

But in these days,Finland of course was just another part of Sweden.

My grandmother's grandmother's great-grandmother's name was Cecilia Henriksdotter (1703-1784) and she had a nephew named Olof Andersson and he was born December 7, 1744 actually in the place Raman.

A week after that Olof celebrated his 34th birthday, he and some others went out in the forests of Hälsingland to hunt for bear...

How common it was to hunt bear, I really do not know, but I guess there was a little more bear in the woods at the time.

Anyway, this story does not end so well for Olof ... Apparently something goes wrong in the hunt, and he died December 20, 1778, after being severely injured during that hunt.

Here's how the somewhat odd death notice looked like in the death records;
The text reads;

“Biten och illa sargad i hufvudet af en Björn, som han i följe med andra ämnade skjuta, hwarefter han lefde, allsomst 4 dygn.”

Translated it would be;
Bitten and badly wounded in his head by a Bear, that he had, in company with others, the intention to shoot. He lived for four days after the accident happened before he finally died.

I'm not an expert on bears, but I guess that time of year, the bears should be doing their winter-sleep and perhaps this hunt actually really was poaching?

What happened to the bear the story does not tell.

“Best not to wake the bear that sleeps...”

When the technology causes trouble...

We have become quite dependent on technology to be able to do genealogy effectively today. Firstly, it depends on that our computers are working properly, and that the broadband connections is working and is fast enough.

Secondly, we become also dependent that the suppliers of the sources, the church-book material, are functioning properly. And it is unfortunately not unusual that either of these fails, which leads to that the genealogical research will suffer.

This kind of hassle is a pain even for the amateur researcher who may have a few hours off and will try to keep up with the genealogy for a moment and notice that you can not access the service provider.
To me, who has genealogy as a profession, it is obviously very annoying when I am unable to work. Because even if I do have all the providers of the Swedish church book material (Genline, SVAR and AD), they are not identical.

Was it better in the past? I can remember how it was to do genealogy for 30 years ago when I had to visit the archives, standing in line, order up books (only a few at a time) and then wait until the archives staff arrived and delivered the book to the researchdesk.

It was not dependent on the technology... Writing was done with a pencil in the notebook I had brought.

On the other hand, I remember that sometimes it was archival staff who were sick and we genealogists had to sit back and wait considerably longer time than usual in order to let the decimated staff deliver. This is perhaps equivalent today when we have network problems or the computer is malfunctioning?..

Today I still visit the archives on occasional times. I don’t really do that because I miss being there, waiting for the staff to bring up the books I ordered or waiting in line to get a place to sit, no its of course because there are still lots of books that are not digitalized (yet) and that quite often I need to check things that are still considered private (70-year secrecy-rules).

But I must admit that in a strange way I do like to wear these goofy gloves and also there is the smell of "old books" that you get for free when visiting an archive...

Swedish genealogy

My first post...

Welcome to my genealogy blog!

My intention is to write about genealogy as a hobby and a science in general, but most of all it will be about my own thoughts and experiences in genealogy and my own findings in my family history and ancestry.

I have been into genealogy for 30 years now and since 2010 I am also working as a professional genealogist in my own company named Trosa Anverk.
I am a specialist in Swedish genealogy and even if my customers often are from USA or other countries, they do have a Swedish heritage.

Did you know that almost a quarter (1/4) of the whole Swedish population emigrated  to USA in the late 1800 and beginning of 1900? This means that today there are actually more people with Swedish heritage living in USA than there is in Sweden itself! Amazing!

I do not write or publish anything that are related to my customers, so personal details and stories will only be from my own family tree or something I stumbled upon in general.

Do you have Swedish roots?

 I hope that maybe someone will get inspiration or find something that I write here to be of interest. Besides traditionall genealogy I am also very involved in DNA genealogy.
I am really  a very sporadic blogger, not writing that often as I would like to do, but try to post something now and then.


As you all probably already have noticed, English is not my first language... But I do hope that at least you can understand what I am trying to say here.

I also have a blog in Swedish with similar context as this one. I have been blogging there for a year now and I like it. I hope that this blog in English also will be found and appreciated by many readers all over the world and is of course grateful for any help with sharing or linking to this blog.

Genealogy is very popular here in Sweden. Many people do it and today its quite possible to do almost everything from home with your computer and an Internet connection.

As this is my first post I would like to mention that you may also find me on other social media as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. But I have dedicated Google+ as my English platform besides this blog.