Website updates, research problems, and other notes. New entries are added at the top.
I'm working on translating the family letters (not online!), and following up the names I see there. One thing I noticed straight away, was that Vendela's husband used the name Alfred, not Peter. (In Sweden, there's no "first" and "middle" name - you have one or more given names, and the name normally used in addressing you can have any position among these.) He signed his letter to William Carlon "A. Klingspor", and Edla mentions in one of her letters that before he took the name Klingspor, he was called Alfred Tranberg.
A few new persons and facts have been added to the database. The page on Karl Karlsson (Vendela's father's mother's father) has been updated with a text from the church record of his death. As in that case, the death record sometimes contained a brief note about the life or character of the deceased. Some of the persons were permanent jurors, and on those persons' pages I've added a brief description of what the position as a juror meant at that time.
I found a short film online, from the area in Norrköping where the family lived. I created a Norrköping page in the Photos section with a link to it, and there are also links on Vendela's and Alfred's pages in the database.
Through a census database I've found out that in the year 1890, Peter Klingspor was living in Helsingborg in Skåne. This guy seems to have moved around a lot! Born in Kristianstad in Skåne in 1843, moved to Karlskrona in Blekinge with his parents in 1844, lived in Linköping and Norrköping in Östergötland from 1869, is found in Helsingborg in Skåne in 1890 and at Kaponiergatan in Göteborg in 1901. (If you'd like, you can locate all of these counties and cities on the map page.)
Pics of Kaponiergatan in Göteborg added, as well as a couple of extra maps.
I've uploaded an updated version of the database too.
I've added:
I've improved (I think...) the explanation of the word parish.
I generated a small database containing only the actual ancestors of Laura - i.e. the people whose genes she carried. No cousins, aunts, etc are included. If the big database confuses you, start looking at this one instead.
I've added some text and a photo of one of my miniatures to the page about grandma and me.
I've changed the format of the website to use frames. I've added pics of Mogata church, added an explanation of the word "parish" to the Explanations page, and made some other small changes.
Due to an upcoming marriage in the family, I have to postpone further research. Hopefully, I'll be able to continue in the winter.
I got a large batch of microcards but was quite disappointed to find that I couldn't find much new information, only confirmations of facts I'd already found.
When I got the parish registers on Peter's birth, I saw that both of his parents had recently moved to that parish, and that they moved to another city, Karlskrona, when he was a few years old. I knew that the records of Linköping (where he lived when he married) said he had came there from Karlskrona, so probably he and his parents spent the intervening time there. But when I looked up Karlskrona I found that there were 13 different parishes and I didn't know which one they moved to. If I look through the various parishes' registers of people who've moved into the parish, I can hopefully find the right parish. But as borrowing church records through inter-library loan costs $1.50 per volume, I decided not to borrow all 13 but rather postpone further research on Peter until next time grandma and I go to the archives.
I found that Vendela's mother was a widow when she married Vendela's father. You can read more about it here . As many people died rather young, it was quite common for people to have been married two or even three times in their life. Of course, a widow needed a man to help sustain herself and her children. And an elderly widow with a farm was a bargain for a young man with no money, so there could be significant age differences.
I got some more microcards on Mogata in the mail yesterday and started to look for Vendela's father and his parents and brothers or sisters. After a couple of hours, I could add 7 people to the database. Vendela's paternal grandfather had six children, but three of them died before the age of 20.
I't's been quite frustrating not to find anything on when and where Peter Alfred Tranberg Klingspor was born. Yesterday I was browsing some internet sites with historical information on the province of Östergötland (where e.g. Linköping, Norrköping and Mogata are situated) and found a link to a searchable parish register database online. It was a sample database that contained parts of a parish register - information of who lived where and when, and according to the web page it covered only the blocks around a certain square in Linköping. (By the time Peter and his family lived in Linköping, the city's population totalled about 10,000 so obviously only a small percentage of the people in Linköping lived in the area included in this database.) Just for fun I entered Peter's name, and imagine my surprise when two matches were found in the database! He had lived in one of the blocks and then moved to another, apparently soon after his marriage. What extraordinary luck! I found records for Vendela too, and for their first daughter Agnes. Additional information in Peter's records told me that he was born in the parish of Kristianstad Garnison (=garrison) in Skåne.
I recalled seeing a database with parish registers from Skåne - this, too, was an incomplete database, covering only some parishes during some periods. I did a search on Peter in the birth records - and found his birth record and consequently also the names of his parents. I searched for them in the marriage records, and found the date of their marriage. Finally, I searched the birth records again to see if Peter had any brothers or sisters, and then I found the birth record of his brother. Later I'll examine the parish records at the National Archives to verify that all of this information is correct.
There are still interesting questions that need answers. Neither of Peter's parents was named Klingspor. His father's family name was Tranberg, but where and when did Peter get the name Klingspor? That name is not mentioned in his birth record. In the birth record of his daughter Agnes, his name is Peter Alfred Klingspor but there's a note that he earlier had called himself Tranberg. Some time between his birth and the birth of his daughter, he started using the name Klingspor, but why? Did one of his parents have an ancestor with the name Klingspor? Was Peter eventually adopted by someone named Klingspor? Or did he have the impudence to use a name that he had no right to, just because he liked the sound of it or thought it would give him an advantage?
