UPDATED 2022, 2023: Two Swedish places are now found in his records. Linköping, only recently found, is named as his birth place, not the same as the port city of Gothenberg, his expected arrival port for a return trip (cited in his passport application of 1920).
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...Photo Notes (scroll down to see)
...Family Grave List
HIS SWEDISH PLACES--
1) BIRTHPLACE. Linkoping, Linköpings kommun, Östergötlands län, Sweden.
The clerk hand-filling his WW II registration form, in 1942, to be signed by AE, misheard his birth place as Lindkoping, with a D. A doctor typically examined men to see if they'd be eligible physically for any draft or conscription, should there not be enough volunteers. Though men his age, over 60, would not likely be needed, his details were taken "Just in case". No prior injuries or other issues were named. (The registering included both questions that federal officials and the local draft board wanted answered.
Unlike some places, their county draft board did not ask if he was anyone's sole support. He named as his emergency contact his second wife Edith. (All details viewable at FamilySearch.org.)
In his and Edith's marriage record, he named his parents, but Britishized their names. He gave his mother as Anna Johnson (Jonsdottir?). He kept his father's name more Swedish in form, as Gustav Carlson. For Adolph to be a Carlson, Adolph's father needed to be a Carl Somebody. (maybe Carl Gustave or Carl Gustavsson?).
2) PORT OF RETURN, 1920. Göteborg. It's English name, Gothenberg, was given on his passport application as his ship's expected port of entry. (His passport application, of May, 1920, was made at the district court in Caldwell, Idaho. The passport was needed if wanting to return to the States.)
The full Swedish name of the place is found at FamilySearch:
Göteborg, Göteborgs kommun, Västra Götalands län, Sweden
Västra meant "west", so the Swedish port's county was "western Gothland", up semi-high on Sweden's west coast, more northish than first wife Tillie's places when her family came from Sweden, their places more Danish. In contrast to the port being Västra, or "west", his birth place was Öster, or "east". The "-koping" inside Linkoping meant a market town, other places like it also ending in -koping. Each had designated market days where farmers might come in for the day, bringing produce to sell, traveling merchants could show their wares, rural families could shop before returning home.
With no big seaport, his birth area was the one more rural, less work there than, say, at better-connected Gothenberg.
FamilySearch names the Linköping's county, or "lan". Östergötlands referred to "eastern Gothland". We might imagine long ago Goths, tribes that left Sweden in times of drought/famine, headed for Rome and other places in south Europe, said to be more interested in Christianity on their arrival, than had been tribes that remained in Sweden or came into Sweden later.
THE TRIP OF 1920. His surviving granddaughters, as of 2015, remembered the family long ago discussing "his big trip". Decades after it happened, proof that it had happened, lay in the old photos in an album owned by granddaughter Lola, of an age to have her own grandchildren, with Lola deceased since this writing.
When A. E. took his trip back to Sweden, some decades after arriving in America, he stated he planned to visit his mother, with two reasons made for the trip in ink more faded than the rest. Photos show her with her house, a young brother with his family at his house,, a family get-together, maybe for a wedding, with carpenter sawhorses and equipment off to the side.
When he applied for his passport in April 1 of 1920 in Caldwell, Idaho, he referred to himself as farming in Melba. His application stated he had emigrated to America on the ship Etruria on Mar. 1, 1899, that he had become naturalized on Sept. 6 of 1910, in Pocatello, Idaho, that he now planned to leave America for six months, to sail out of NY on May 25, 1920, on the ship called Stockholm:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9X3-968Y
Such a trip would cause him to be absent from his own family's 1920 Census, at his stated address of Melba, Idaho.
Was the passport needed merely to go to a wedding? Or, was that trip perhaps a reconciliation? A last chance to see a mother who might not be around much longer?
Everybody wants to feel loved. He would have been no different?
LEAVING SWEDEN. In 1898, at around age 19, a dark-haired young man photographed with a moustache, freshly emigrated from Sweden, headed first for Minnesota, a common destination for Swedish people. He arrived later than many.
By the 1900 Census, he was in Brainerd. It was still in boom mode as a railroad center, shipping local lumber out. The boom was about to go bust, however, once the lumber supply ran out, and the railroads moved their boxcar repairs shops down to Oelwein, Iowa. Perhaps locals did not understand that yet? They lingered too long before leaving? Or, figuring out how to farm and stay?
His 1900 US Census there listed him as "Adolph", born Oct. 1878. He gave his occupation as "day laborer", perhaps using his carpentry s skills. Unlike his future wife, he boarded alone, apart from anyone in his own family, his landlords on June 14 being the "Kjillquist" family:
SOURCE: "1900 US Census", handwritten image archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-6PW9-HVT?
He had no roommate, no obvious kin close-by, in the same boarding house or down the street. In the next year or two, he would marry his opposite, Matilda Peterson, aka Tilly/Tillie
He would quickly take her to Idaho, away from her closely-knit family, to a new railroad center, one along Idaho's Snake River, called Pocatello. It was an uncommon destination for the Swedish. How to explain all that?
Perhaps the lumbering boom was a moving one. The railroads moved the boom's path ever westward, with the boom in Minnesota to end after its best timber had been cut, but to be followed by a later boom in Idaho?
What else?
His children, born in Idaho, were told that his family wanted A.E. to avoid the compulsory military draft back in Sweden. That was indeed a common reason in some countries, on top of the bigger one, economics. (Sweden had not yet made the social changes for which it later became famous. It still had very few in the middle class, as almost no one was permitted by the old aristocracy to rise past their parents' social class. That "failure to care" by aristocrats and business elites explained the sheer massiveness of their out-migration.)
But, was there more going on?
For one thing, his immigration was perhaps too early to have a fear of conscription. Sweden would not have compulsory military service (conscription) until 1901. The Swedish Navy, by then, was slated for coastline defense only, not for attacks on others, unlike the bygone Viking days. He left a few years in advance of that change.
He also left some brothers behind, seen in old photos of his later visit. If conscription was a problem, why did they not leave?
Contrast his situation with his in-laws, the Petersons.
One or two Peterson brothers left Sweden for Minnesota first. Then, all the surviving Petersons followed. (Most ended in or around Brainerd in Crow Wing County, Minnesota; one, out in California, the rest, across the county line from Brainerd, in more rural Cass County.) One geography professor told us that Swedish emigrants, unlike many Germans, rarely could afford to move whole families on the first trip. They moved pieces of the family instead, in just ones or twos, at the beginning.
Oldest brothers or young husbands often arrived in Minnesota first, frequently working as farmhands, saving money to bring more people, the process then repeating. The Petersons leaving Sweden fit this staged pattern. Future wife Tillie's widowed mother Lucia and her youngest two children, Matilda and Charley, came last, some years later than the eldest children, almost grown, now old enough to work, to re-pay the older brothers for buying their tickets.
MYSTERIES. Some of AE's granddaughters, now in Oregon, do remember the many Petersons. They have, however, no memory of any Carlson cousins in America.
Yet, A.E.'s and Matilda's first son, Carl Herbert Carlson, known as "Herb", left Idaho, returned to Minnesota once grown, married, had children. He did not return to his mother's Petersons around Brainerd. He instead went to Pequot Lakes, MN, is found buried there, with his sons, near other people who might be Carlson kin.
Swedish surnames are too common. Lots of people descended of some father named Carl are all called Carlson, though unrelated.
Passport excepted, we lack the birth and travel records in the same detail that was often seen back in Sweden. Our hope, instead, is that families, once here, have some unusual first names to track, with two odd first names better for tracking a family than one.
==========================
ADOLPH'S PHOTOS. Again, not all of the sons in his family of Carlsons moved away from Sweden. Nor did his mother.
Consider his Swedish photos. Some perhaps were sent by mail to him, from Sweden. Most, very likely, were taken on his "big trip" back to Sweden, maybe 20-some years after immigrating here. His passport application, saved on microfilm, is partly illegible, but catchable words definitely included mother, wedding, and, perhaps, funeral. Some granddaughters say his daughters remembered him returning from Sweden with a "full money belt", consistent with his receiving an inheritance while there.
His photos show at least one brother who did not move to America. His photo is marked "1928". He stands tall, with handsome leather boots extending knee high, the kind a soldier or Russian Cossack might wear, breeches tucked in, a billed European peasant cap on his head, wearing a possibly blue-ish farmer's work blouse. His photo shows the capped brother standing by a Swedish-blond wife, with a braid down her back, and two small ones, the children both barefoot.
They are charming, informally placed, standing here and there in their farm yard. They'd not yet been taught they must follow the "please-gather-together and smile" rules of modern formal photography.
These treasured photos also include a formal group shot. Women and children tend to be seated in front, with a youngish couple at their center, more males standing in back, showing other brothers or male cousins about A.E.'s age, or younger. All seem present for a Swedish wedding. Why guess a wedding? The assumed groom, front and center, his assumed bride at his side, has a flower in the buttonhole of his "Sunday-best" coat. He would be the only one later photographed alone, not with his bride. No other men wore flowers.
Open each photo to enlarge and read the caption underneath. Open the photo's face, then click the ctrl key and the plus sign to enlarge and see more details.
These Carlsons seem to have had a specialized, family-taught skill (a nice carpenter's sawhorse stands near the groom in one photo). Carpentry was what A.E. did very well, when not farming, when local US economies were in boom mode, so carpenters were in demand.
Maybe the family back in Sweden was better-off than typical for Swedish migrants to the U.S.? They, thus, remained behind, did not need to move? Consider the Swedish houses he photographed, houses that looked more prosperous than the one his own children lived in, back in Idaho. His mother's house was painted a cheerful "barn red", contrasting to the typical "American white".
Did military demands not bother all of his male kin, so they could stay in Sweden? A.E. and maybe another brother or two would leave Sweden, but other male kin stayed behind. Was "something else going on", other than a future conscription a few years down the road?
Was there a need for the adventure of a new place?
Was there a family argument that pushed one or two out the family door?
Were those leaving "no longer needed" at home?
Is it significant that A.E.'s trip back to Sweden was after his father's death, that father not seen in any photos? His mother was agreeable, once his father had died, whereas his father would not have been welcoming?
FARMING & GAMBLING IN AMERICA. He immigrated to America in 1898, according to one Census, thus, showed up not long before his first Census, the 1900. He was housed as A.E. Carlson, inside the town of Brainerd itself, not in the surrounding countryside. A laborer then, this changed in the next several censuses. Once in Idaho, he would list himself as a "farmer", not in sufficiently wet Minnesota, but in distant and dry, unknown Idaho. How did that change happen? Did it work out?
Young Swedes in 1898 would be late arrivals by that year. They would find the most productive farm land in the Midwest had already been snapped up by earlier arrivals. The remaining land was too often "marginal", meaning borderline, meaning too sandy, too hilly, too cold. Some parts were too wet (think of poorly drained, marshy spots around Brainerd and its many gorgeous lakes). Some parts were too arid (think of Idaho, the beauty of its mountains having a price; mining and lumber long being the main jobs there, not farming, for a reason).
Any of these land problems could quickly translate into "lots of work, little pay". Sometimes the new farmers arriving late could "improve" their acreage somehow. A solution in southern Idaho was to use the waters of the Snake River for irrigating. Irrigating fruit trees took more money than harvesting hay from un-irrigated land. However, clear from the farm photos, there were no fruit trees or irrigation trees, but there were stacks of hay. A.E. did indeed call himself hay farmer", his household seen with a mortgage in censuses, economically on the edge, never an orchardist or fruit grower.
The kids had some nice things, on occasion, but, for too many of the too-late arrivals, this happened only in "the good years". The family photos, many to be added to his childrens' pages, show this.
Even struggling farmers could afford camera film in the good years, but the houses still look beat-up and dreary, the land too dry. A drought? A drop in crop yield or prices? While crop-planting costs and land prices rose? Mortgage payments came due. Good years too often and too quickly changed to bad.
The best situation for weathering bad years was to inherit land, so as not to have a mortgage to pay. Farm kids could then be better-off, more like "town kids". They might have new things to wear every Easter, not just one special Easter. Once grown, some went to town to work, guessing at "town ways" they had not been taught. These were at a disadvantage when guessing wrong. Having a loving family would certainly help. Some would "get lucky" and marry into in-laws with better land, who had arrived in earlier times, having the resources, finally, to make working hard and intelligently pay-off.
SWEDISH NAMES, A SIDE NOTE: Inheriting a last name would start with their children, once here. It was not true of the generation consisting of parents and grandparents, back there, but would start being true with his brothers who remained. A.E.'s brothers would share the Carlsson name, perhaps spelled Carlsson or Karlsson among their descendants. A.E.'s father and grandfather would only share the Carlson surname if the father of both had also been a Carl. That's a possibility, actually, as A.E. named his first son Carl. There may have been a string of Carl's back in Sweden, with A.E. not the eldest son. so not named that himself.
Nicknames could cause a last name to be spelled differently for the same person. His wife Tilly's father was a Peter, using the nickname Per. Per died before his widow Lucia left Sweden with daughter Matilda and son Charley/Charles Peterson, to follow older sons who had arrived early, who perhaps saved the money to buy their passage, with them working once here, to pay back the older brothers. Per's sons could just as easily have used Persson intead of Peterson, meaning "Per's son", which morphed into Parson over here. We do find Parson listed as if it were their mother's maiden name, even though that's not likely. A son's Minnesota death certificate reported his mother's maiden name as something else.
Spelling changes came into play in the late 1800s in Sweden. A "double s", not used in older records, made it clearer that a "Carlsson" was simply a "Carl's son". A "Petersson" was simply a "Peter's son". Also, modern Swedish spelling aimed for each sound to have just one letter. That was done to make the language more phonetic, easier to teach to children. This caused many a Carl to turn into a Karl over there. Thus, for anyone to find A.E.'s brothers and their descendants in the old country, they might have to check multiple spellings, Carlson/Carlsson/Karlsson.
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Were there more Carlsons in America?
ELIN JOSEPHINE, PEARL & CHURCH. A woman, Elin, maiden name Carlson, married name Johnson, "of the right age" to be Herb's playmate in his youth, is found in the Lutheran cemetery that is adjacent to Herb's village cemetery, both graveyards in Pequot Lakes. Her name and her daughter's name were unusual ones also seen among A.E.'s daughters. Either it was a co-incidence for people using the same names to be buried in the same MN town, or the two sets were related.
Looking for her parents, her father would be listed officially as "Anders Gustaf" Carlson. In 1910, with five children, living near Spencer, Iowa, he went by a nickname, "Gust", and finally, at death, given a more British sound as just "Gus". Could he have been A.E.'s brother? Born 1871, about 8 years before A.E., he immigrated at around age 20, around 1891, so around 7 years earlier than A.E., perhaps arriving in time to find decent land still affordable.
The unusual but shared women's names? First, Elin Josephine Carlson Johnson was born near the Iowa-Minnesota border, in 1900, near the Dakotas. She was a year or two older than Herb, of "playing age" if she were ever taken to meet cousins and Herb was one. Second, that Elin who ended in Pequot Lakes named her eldest daughter Pearl, born around 1923-1924.
A.E. had two daughters with the same unusual names. Elin Josephine of the Iowa Carlsons was matched in name at A.E.'s house in Idaho, but with a more British-sounding spelling of Ellen Josephine. Another of his and Matilda/Tilly's younger daughters was shown as Eva Pearl on an early census, then became Evie Pearl. As an adult, family photos listed her only as "Pearl".
If these two Carlson fathers, the older Gus and the younger A.E., were brothers, perhaps their families named some children after the same beloved relatives left back in Sweden? Was A.E's mother or sister an Elin Josephine or a Pearl?
How would Elin and Herb find their way to the same small town of Pequot Lakes? It might imply an older Carlson relative already there, to attract them with letters or offers of help? We do not yet know who, if anyone, that party might have been. Anyone born around 1900 turned 30 just in time for the Great Depression, so people took job offers wherever they could find them. Perhaps enough "second growth" lumber existed so that the forests could now be re-harvested? Or...?
Why are Carl (Herb) Carlson and sons, being Swedish-descended, not also in the Lutheran cemetery? That's what's typically seen for the Swedish. That's what was done for Elin Josephine.
On the Peterson side, the Lutheran Church was not the state religion, but any vital records of their Swedish-born will be found in local churches in Sweden, not county courthouses. Some stayed Lutheran in America, in the next generation. Matilda's niece, Jennie Benson, married Canadian-born Ralph Hodgson in a Swedish Lutheran church in Brainerd in 1924, before moving to Portland, Oregon.
Somehow, somewhere, A.E. and Matilda/Tillie apparently lost the Lutheran religion of their ancestors. Their Oregon granddaughters have no memory of anything Lutheran.
Were the two already "free thinkers" when marrying? Or, did Idaho consistently not have its few Lutheran churches too scattered to attend, not having enough Germans or Scandinavians present to keep more of them going once started? These ancestors aren't here any longer, so we can't ask. The churches are too far away to see if a Lutheran church once tried to exist in Pocatello, Idaho, and then went out of business, due to an insufficient supply of the correct ethnics nearby. One granddaughter does remember Tillie often reading, but just her Swedish bible, its 1850ish publication date old enough to have made it her mother's bible. Did she find comfort in that, perhaps a way to remember whatever she treasured in her past in Sweden and Minnesota? A.E at some point discovered something like the Four Square Gospel church. He quit drinking, which would cause some in his family to give him a second chance, but then, sadly, continued with what some might call "dry drunk behavior", so other rejections followed. Somewhere through this, Matilda would divorce him, gave him a second chance, so married him again, only to divorce him again. Perhaps he met his 2nd wife at his new church, a widow that everyone thought was nice, just as they all had liked Matilda.
Back in Pequot Lakes, MN, Elin Josephine's church, name now changed to Our Savior's Lutheran, presumedly was never entered by Carl Herbert when under its old names, as he had not been raised Lutheran. Elin's church began in 1895, not pretending its members were of the British Isles, but truthful about their ancestry, calling themselves the "Lunde Scandinavian Lutheran Congregation".
Scandinavian? While men worked outside the home and children went to school, both sets thus learning English, no "magic language fairy" tapped "stay-at-home" grandmothers on the head at naptime, so they could understand English once awake.
The ethnic name of Elin's church thus was a clear signal that:
(a) Things would be made understandable for Scandinavian-speaking grandmas present, but perhaps not for German- or Finnish- or French- or Ojibway-speaking grandmas, who were expected to start their own church if not understanding anything at this one, and that
(b) The religious culture could be ethnic. (An example? the lovely Santa Lucia ceremony, symbolizing light that could relieve even the darker winters of the Scandinavian north, and, at the same time, the darker nights of the soul.)
The larger town of Brainerd, where A.E. once lived, some miles from Pequot Lakes, could afford to specialize even more. Their old situation was not one church, broadly Scandinavian, but three churches, split into Swedish vs. Finnish. vs. Norwegian, all Lutheran, the language split continuing as late as 1924, when Tillie's niece, Jennie Benson, was married in the Swedish Lutheran church.
Once the Scandinavian grandmas died, these churches would lose their ethnic names, unless vandalism and arson by nativist groups coerced them earlier into involuntarily "hiding" behind some British-sounding name, as did happen in some places.
Why no more Swedish grandmas? The immigration gates increasingly slammed shut, despite quotas grandfathering in a bit more of some previously allowed ethnicities.
Then, more importantly, Sweden improved, so its local young adults no longer wanted to leave. The country dismantled the old aristocracy's most outrageous special rights and privileges, broadened land ownership, and created other economic opportunities so the working class could become middle class.
Back in the US, though church names might stop being language-specific, the affected churches might often keep the best of their ethnic customs. This writer has Swedish in-laws who, once in Texas, combined the Santa Lucia ceremony of the Swedish Lutheran Brotherhood with local Methodist revivalism, liked for its new songbooks and enthusiastic organ playing, calling the result the Swedish Methodist church.
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Copyright by JBrown (Julia Brown, Austin, TX), Sept., 2015, revised Oct., 2015. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
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...Photo Notes (scroll down to see)
...Family Grave List
HIS SWEDISH PLACES--
1) BIRTHPLACE. Linkoping, Linköpings kommun, Östergötlands län, Sweden.
The clerk hand-filling his WW II registration form, in 1942, to be signed by AE, misheard his birth place as Lindkoping, with a D. A doctor typically examined men to see if they'd be eligible physically for any draft or conscription, should there not be enough volunteers. Though men his age, over 60, would not likely be needed, his details were taken "Just in case". No prior injuries or other issues were named. (The registering included both questions that federal officials and the local draft board wanted answered.
Unlike some places, their county draft board did not ask if he was anyone's sole support. He named as his emergency contact his second wife Edith. (All details viewable at FamilySearch.org.)
In his and Edith's marriage record, he named his parents, but Britishized their names. He gave his mother as Anna Johnson (Jonsdottir?). He kept his father's name more Swedish in form, as Gustav Carlson. For Adolph to be a Carlson, Adolph's father needed to be a Carl Somebody. (maybe Carl Gustave or Carl Gustavsson?).
2) PORT OF RETURN, 1920. Göteborg. It's English name, Gothenberg, was given on his passport application as his ship's expected port of entry. (His passport application, of May, 1920, was made at the district court in Caldwell, Idaho. The passport was needed if wanting to return to the States.)
The full Swedish name of the place is found at FamilySearch:
Göteborg, Göteborgs kommun, Västra Götalands län, Sweden
Västra meant "west", so the Swedish port's county was "western Gothland", up semi-high on Sweden's west coast, more northish than first wife Tillie's places when her family came from Sweden, their places more Danish. In contrast to the port being Västra, or "west", his birth place was Öster, or "east". The "-koping" inside Linkoping meant a market town, other places like it also ending in -koping. Each had designated market days where farmers might come in for the day, bringing produce to sell, traveling merchants could show their wares, rural families could shop before returning home.
With no big seaport, his birth area was the one more rural, less work there than, say, at better-connected Gothenberg.
FamilySearch names the Linköping's county, or "lan". Östergötlands referred to "eastern Gothland". We might imagine long ago Goths, tribes that left Sweden in times of drought/famine, headed for Rome and other places in south Europe, said to be more interested in Christianity on their arrival, than had been tribes that remained in Sweden or came into Sweden later.
THE TRIP OF 1920. His surviving granddaughters, as of 2015, remembered the family long ago discussing "his big trip". Decades after it happened, proof that it had happened, lay in the old photos in an album owned by granddaughter Lola, of an age to have her own grandchildren, with Lola deceased since this writing.
When A. E. took his trip back to Sweden, some decades after arriving in America, he stated he planned to visit his mother, with two reasons made for the trip in ink more faded than the rest. Photos show her with her house, a young brother with his family at his house,, a family get-together, maybe for a wedding, with carpenter sawhorses and equipment off to the side.
When he applied for his passport in April 1 of 1920 in Caldwell, Idaho, he referred to himself as farming in Melba. His application stated he had emigrated to America on the ship Etruria on Mar. 1, 1899, that he had become naturalized on Sept. 6 of 1910, in Pocatello, Idaho, that he now planned to leave America for six months, to sail out of NY on May 25, 1920, on the ship called Stockholm:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9X3-968Y
Such a trip would cause him to be absent from his own family's 1920 Census, at his stated address of Melba, Idaho.
Was the passport needed merely to go to a wedding? Or, was that trip perhaps a reconciliation? A last chance to see a mother who might not be around much longer?
Everybody wants to feel loved. He would have been no different?
LEAVING SWEDEN. In 1898, at around age 19, a dark-haired young man photographed with a moustache, freshly emigrated from Sweden, headed first for Minnesota, a common destination for Swedish people. He arrived later than many.
By the 1900 Census, he was in Brainerd. It was still in boom mode as a railroad center, shipping local lumber out. The boom was about to go bust, however, once the lumber supply ran out, and the railroads moved their boxcar repairs shops down to Oelwein, Iowa. Perhaps locals did not understand that yet? They lingered too long before leaving? Or, figuring out how to farm and stay?
His 1900 US Census there listed him as "Adolph", born Oct. 1878. He gave his occupation as "day laborer", perhaps using his carpentry s skills. Unlike his future wife, he boarded alone, apart from anyone in his own family, his landlords on June 14 being the "Kjillquist" family:
SOURCE: "1900 US Census", handwritten image archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-6PW9-HVT?
He had no roommate, no obvious kin close-by, in the same boarding house or down the street. In the next year or two, he would marry his opposite, Matilda Peterson, aka Tilly/Tillie
He would quickly take her to Idaho, away from her closely-knit family, to a new railroad center, one along Idaho's Snake River, called Pocatello. It was an uncommon destination for the Swedish. How to explain all that?
Perhaps the lumbering boom was a moving one. The railroads moved the boom's path ever westward, with the boom in Minnesota to end after its best timber had been cut, but to be followed by a later boom in Idaho?
What else?
His children, born in Idaho, were told that his family wanted A.E. to avoid the compulsory military draft back in Sweden. That was indeed a common reason in some countries, on top of the bigger one, economics. (Sweden had not yet made the social changes for which it later became famous. It still had very few in the middle class, as almost no one was permitted by the old aristocracy to rise past their parents' social class. That "failure to care" by aristocrats and business elites explained the sheer massiveness of their out-migration.)
But, was there more going on?
For one thing, his immigration was perhaps too early to have a fear of conscription. Sweden would not have compulsory military service (conscription) until 1901. The Swedish Navy, by then, was slated for coastline defense only, not for attacks on others, unlike the bygone Viking days. He left a few years in advance of that change.
He also left some brothers behind, seen in old photos of his later visit. If conscription was a problem, why did they not leave?
Contrast his situation with his in-laws, the Petersons.
One or two Peterson brothers left Sweden for Minnesota first. Then, all the surviving Petersons followed. (Most ended in or around Brainerd in Crow Wing County, Minnesota; one, out in California, the rest, across the county line from Brainerd, in more rural Cass County.) One geography professor told us that Swedish emigrants, unlike many Germans, rarely could afford to move whole families on the first trip. They moved pieces of the family instead, in just ones or twos, at the beginning.
Oldest brothers or young husbands often arrived in Minnesota first, frequently working as farmhands, saving money to bring more people, the process then repeating. The Petersons leaving Sweden fit this staged pattern. Future wife Tillie's widowed mother Lucia and her youngest two children, Matilda and Charley, came last, some years later than the eldest children, almost grown, now old enough to work, to re-pay the older brothers for buying their tickets.
MYSTERIES. Some of AE's granddaughters, now in Oregon, do remember the many Petersons. They have, however, no memory of any Carlson cousins in America.
Yet, A.E.'s and Matilda's first son, Carl Herbert Carlson, known as "Herb", left Idaho, returned to Minnesota once grown, married, had children. He did not return to his mother's Petersons around Brainerd. He instead went to Pequot Lakes, MN, is found buried there, with his sons, near other people who might be Carlson kin.
Swedish surnames are too common. Lots of people descended of some father named Carl are all called Carlson, though unrelated.
Passport excepted, we lack the birth and travel records in the same detail that was often seen back in Sweden. Our hope, instead, is that families, once here, have some unusual first names to track, with two odd first names better for tracking a family than one.
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ADOLPH'S PHOTOS. Again, not all of the sons in his family of Carlsons moved away from Sweden. Nor did his mother.
Consider his Swedish photos. Some perhaps were sent by mail to him, from Sweden. Most, very likely, were taken on his "big trip" back to Sweden, maybe 20-some years after immigrating here. His passport application, saved on microfilm, is partly illegible, but catchable words definitely included mother, wedding, and, perhaps, funeral. Some granddaughters say his daughters remembered him returning from Sweden with a "full money belt", consistent with his receiving an inheritance while there.
His photos show at least one brother who did not move to America. His photo is marked "1928". He stands tall, with handsome leather boots extending knee high, the kind a soldier or Russian Cossack might wear, breeches tucked in, a billed European peasant cap on his head, wearing a possibly blue-ish farmer's work blouse. His photo shows the capped brother standing by a Swedish-blond wife, with a braid down her back, and two small ones, the children both barefoot.
They are charming, informally placed, standing here and there in their farm yard. They'd not yet been taught they must follow the "please-gather-together and smile" rules of modern formal photography.
These treasured photos also include a formal group shot. Women and children tend to be seated in front, with a youngish couple at their center, more males standing in back, showing other brothers or male cousins about A.E.'s age, or younger. All seem present for a Swedish wedding. Why guess a wedding? The assumed groom, front and center, his assumed bride at his side, has a flower in the buttonhole of his "Sunday-best" coat. He would be the only one later photographed alone, not with his bride. No other men wore flowers.
Open each photo to enlarge and read the caption underneath. Open the photo's face, then click the ctrl key and the plus sign to enlarge and see more details.
These Carlsons seem to have had a specialized, family-taught skill (a nice carpenter's sawhorse stands near the groom in one photo). Carpentry was what A.E. did very well, when not farming, when local US economies were in boom mode, so carpenters were in demand.
Maybe the family back in Sweden was better-off than typical for Swedish migrants to the U.S.? They, thus, remained behind, did not need to move? Consider the Swedish houses he photographed, houses that looked more prosperous than the one his own children lived in, back in Idaho. His mother's house was painted a cheerful "barn red", contrasting to the typical "American white".
Did military demands not bother all of his male kin, so they could stay in Sweden? A.E. and maybe another brother or two would leave Sweden, but other male kin stayed behind. Was "something else going on", other than a future conscription a few years down the road?
Was there a need for the adventure of a new place?
Was there a family argument that pushed one or two out the family door?
Were those leaving "no longer needed" at home?
Is it significant that A.E.'s trip back to Sweden was after his father's death, that father not seen in any photos? His mother was agreeable, once his father had died, whereas his father would not have been welcoming?
FARMING & GAMBLING IN AMERICA. He immigrated to America in 1898, according to one Census, thus, showed up not long before his first Census, the 1900. He was housed as A.E. Carlson, inside the town of Brainerd itself, not in the surrounding countryside. A laborer then, this changed in the next several censuses. Once in Idaho, he would list himself as a "farmer", not in sufficiently wet Minnesota, but in distant and dry, unknown Idaho. How did that change happen? Did it work out?
Young Swedes in 1898 would be late arrivals by that year. They would find the most productive farm land in the Midwest had already been snapped up by earlier arrivals. The remaining land was too often "marginal", meaning borderline, meaning too sandy, too hilly, too cold. Some parts were too wet (think of poorly drained, marshy spots around Brainerd and its many gorgeous lakes). Some parts were too arid (think of Idaho, the beauty of its mountains having a price; mining and lumber long being the main jobs there, not farming, for a reason).
Any of these land problems could quickly translate into "lots of work, little pay". Sometimes the new farmers arriving late could "improve" their acreage somehow. A solution in southern Idaho was to use the waters of the Snake River for irrigating. Irrigating fruit trees took more money than harvesting hay from un-irrigated land. However, clear from the farm photos, there were no fruit trees or irrigation trees, but there were stacks of hay. A.E. did indeed call himself hay farmer", his household seen with a mortgage in censuses, economically on the edge, never an orchardist or fruit grower.
The kids had some nice things, on occasion, but, for too many of the too-late arrivals, this happened only in "the good years". The family photos, many to be added to his childrens' pages, show this.
Even struggling farmers could afford camera film in the good years, but the houses still look beat-up and dreary, the land too dry. A drought? A drop in crop yield or prices? While crop-planting costs and land prices rose? Mortgage payments came due. Good years too often and too quickly changed to bad.
The best situation for weathering bad years was to inherit land, so as not to have a mortgage to pay. Farm kids could then be better-off, more like "town kids". They might have new things to wear every Easter, not just one special Easter. Once grown, some went to town to work, guessing at "town ways" they had not been taught. These were at a disadvantage when guessing wrong. Having a loving family would certainly help. Some would "get lucky" and marry into in-laws with better land, who had arrived in earlier times, having the resources, finally, to make working hard and intelligently pay-off.
SWEDISH NAMES, A SIDE NOTE: Inheriting a last name would start with their children, once here. It was not true of the generation consisting of parents and grandparents, back there, but would start being true with his brothers who remained. A.E.'s brothers would share the Carlsson name, perhaps spelled Carlsson or Karlsson among their descendants. A.E.'s father and grandfather would only share the Carlson surname if the father of both had also been a Carl. That's a possibility, actually, as A.E. named his first son Carl. There may have been a string of Carl's back in Sweden, with A.E. not the eldest son. so not named that himself.
Nicknames could cause a last name to be spelled differently for the same person. His wife Tilly's father was a Peter, using the nickname Per. Per died before his widow Lucia left Sweden with daughter Matilda and son Charley/Charles Peterson, to follow older sons who had arrived early, who perhaps saved the money to buy their passage, with them working once here, to pay back the older brothers. Per's sons could just as easily have used Persson intead of Peterson, meaning "Per's son", which morphed into Parson over here. We do find Parson listed as if it were their mother's maiden name, even though that's not likely. A son's Minnesota death certificate reported his mother's maiden name as something else.
Spelling changes came into play in the late 1800s in Sweden. A "double s", not used in older records, made it clearer that a "Carlsson" was simply a "Carl's son". A "Petersson" was simply a "Peter's son". Also, modern Swedish spelling aimed for each sound to have just one letter. That was done to make the language more phonetic, easier to teach to children. This caused many a Carl to turn into a Karl over there. Thus, for anyone to find A.E.'s brothers and their descendants in the old country, they might have to check multiple spellings, Carlson/Carlsson/Karlsson.
===========================
Were there more Carlsons in America?
ELIN JOSEPHINE, PEARL & CHURCH. A woman, Elin, maiden name Carlson, married name Johnson, "of the right age" to be Herb's playmate in his youth, is found in the Lutheran cemetery that is adjacent to Herb's village cemetery, both graveyards in Pequot Lakes. Her name and her daughter's name were unusual ones also seen among A.E.'s daughters. Either it was a co-incidence for people using the same names to be buried in the same MN town, or the two sets were related.
Looking for her parents, her father would be listed officially as "Anders Gustaf" Carlson. In 1910, with five children, living near Spencer, Iowa, he went by a nickname, "Gust", and finally, at death, given a more British sound as just "Gus". Could he have been A.E.'s brother? Born 1871, about 8 years before A.E., he immigrated at around age 20, around 1891, so around 7 years earlier than A.E., perhaps arriving in time to find decent land still affordable.
The unusual but shared women's names? First, Elin Josephine Carlson Johnson was born near the Iowa-Minnesota border, in 1900, near the Dakotas. She was a year or two older than Herb, of "playing age" if she were ever taken to meet cousins and Herb was one. Second, that Elin who ended in Pequot Lakes named her eldest daughter Pearl, born around 1923-1924.
A.E. had two daughters with the same unusual names. Elin Josephine of the Iowa Carlsons was matched in name at A.E.'s house in Idaho, but with a more British-sounding spelling of Ellen Josephine. Another of his and Matilda/Tilly's younger daughters was shown as Eva Pearl on an early census, then became Evie Pearl. As an adult, family photos listed her only as "Pearl".
If these two Carlson fathers, the older Gus and the younger A.E., were brothers, perhaps their families named some children after the same beloved relatives left back in Sweden? Was A.E's mother or sister an Elin Josephine or a Pearl?
How would Elin and Herb find their way to the same small town of Pequot Lakes? It might imply an older Carlson relative already there, to attract them with letters or offers of help? We do not yet know who, if anyone, that party might have been. Anyone born around 1900 turned 30 just in time for the Great Depression, so people took job offers wherever they could find them. Perhaps enough "second growth" lumber existed so that the forests could now be re-harvested? Or...?
Why are Carl (Herb) Carlson and sons, being Swedish-descended, not also in the Lutheran cemetery? That's what's typically seen for the Swedish. That's what was done for Elin Josephine.
On the Peterson side, the Lutheran Church was not the state religion, but any vital records of their Swedish-born will be found in local churches in Sweden, not county courthouses. Some stayed Lutheran in America, in the next generation. Matilda's niece, Jennie Benson, married Canadian-born Ralph Hodgson in a Swedish Lutheran church in Brainerd in 1924, before moving to Portland, Oregon.
Somehow, somewhere, A.E. and Matilda/Tillie apparently lost the Lutheran religion of their ancestors. Their Oregon granddaughters have no memory of anything Lutheran.
Were the two already "free thinkers" when marrying? Or, did Idaho consistently not have its few Lutheran churches too scattered to attend, not having enough Germans or Scandinavians present to keep more of them going once started? These ancestors aren't here any longer, so we can't ask. The churches are too far away to see if a Lutheran church once tried to exist in Pocatello, Idaho, and then went out of business, due to an insufficient supply of the correct ethnics nearby. One granddaughter does remember Tillie often reading, but just her Swedish bible, its 1850ish publication date old enough to have made it her mother's bible. Did she find comfort in that, perhaps a way to remember whatever she treasured in her past in Sweden and Minnesota? A.E at some point discovered something like the Four Square Gospel church. He quit drinking, which would cause some in his family to give him a second chance, but then, sadly, continued with what some might call "dry drunk behavior", so other rejections followed. Somewhere through this, Matilda would divorce him, gave him a second chance, so married him again, only to divorce him again. Perhaps he met his 2nd wife at his new church, a widow that everyone thought was nice, just as they all had liked Matilda.
Back in Pequot Lakes, MN, Elin Josephine's church, name now changed to Our Savior's Lutheran, presumedly was never entered by Carl Herbert when under its old names, as he had not been raised Lutheran. Elin's church began in 1895, not pretending its members were of the British Isles, but truthful about their ancestry, calling themselves the "Lunde Scandinavian Lutheran Congregation".
Scandinavian? While men worked outside the home and children went to school, both sets thus learning English, no "magic language fairy" tapped "stay-at-home" grandmothers on the head at naptime, so they could understand English once awake.
The ethnic name of Elin's church thus was a clear signal that:
(a) Things would be made understandable for Scandinavian-speaking grandmas present, but perhaps not for German- or Finnish- or French- or Ojibway-speaking grandmas, who were expected to start their own church if not understanding anything at this one, and that
(b) The religious culture could be ethnic. (An example? the lovely Santa Lucia ceremony, symbolizing light that could relieve even the darker winters of the Scandinavian north, and, at the same time, the darker nights of the soul.)
The larger town of Brainerd, where A.E. once lived, some miles from Pequot Lakes, could afford to specialize even more. Their old situation was not one church, broadly Scandinavian, but three churches, split into Swedish vs. Finnish. vs. Norwegian, all Lutheran, the language split continuing as late as 1924, when Tillie's niece, Jennie Benson, was married in the Swedish Lutheran church.
Once the Scandinavian grandmas died, these churches would lose their ethnic names, unless vandalism and arson by nativist groups coerced them earlier into involuntarily "hiding" behind some British-sounding name, as did happen in some places.
Why no more Swedish grandmas? The immigration gates increasingly slammed shut, despite quotas grandfathering in a bit more of some previously allowed ethnicities.
Then, more importantly, Sweden improved, so its local young adults no longer wanted to leave. The country dismantled the old aristocracy's most outrageous special rights and privileges, broadened land ownership, and created other economic opportunities so the working class could become middle class.
Back in the US, though church names might stop being language-specific, the affected churches might often keep the best of their ethnic customs. This writer has Swedish in-laws who, once in Texas, combined the Santa Lucia ceremony of the Swedish Lutheran Brotherhood with local Methodist revivalism, liked for its new songbooks and enthusiastic organ playing, calling the result the Swedish Methodist church.
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Copyright by JBrown (Julia Brown, Austin, TX), Sept., 2015, revised Oct., 2015. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
UPDATED 2022, 2023: Two Swedish places are now found in his records. Linköping, only recently found, is named as his birth place, not the same as the port city of Gothenberg, his expected arrival port for a return trip (cited in his passport application of 1920).
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...Photo Notes (scroll down to see)
...Family Grave List
HIS SWEDISH PLACES--
1) BIRTHPLACE. Linkoping, Linköpings kommun, Östergötlands län, Sweden.
The clerk hand-filling his WW II registration form, in 1942, to be signed by AE, misheard his birth place as Lindkoping, with a D. A doctor typically examined men to see if they'd be eligible physically for any draft or conscription, should there not be enough volunteers. Though men his age, over 60, would not likely be needed, his details were taken "Just in case". No prior injuries or other issues were named. (The registering included both questions that federal officials and the local draft board wanted answered.
Unlike some places, their county draft board did not ask if he was anyone's sole support. He named as his emergency contact his second wife Edith. (All details viewable at FamilySearch.org.)
In his and Edith's marriage record, he named his parents, but Britishized their names. He gave his mother as Anna Johnson (Jonsdottir?). He kept his father's name more Swedish in form, as Gustav Carlson. For Adolph to be a Carlson, Adolph's father needed to be a Carl Somebody. (maybe Carl Gustave or Carl Gustavsson?).
2) PORT OF RETURN, 1920. Göteborg. It's English name, Gothenberg, was given on his passport application as his ship's expected port of entry. (His passport application, of May, 1920, was made at the district court in Caldwell, Idaho. The passport was needed if wanting to return to the States.)
The full Swedish name of the place is found at FamilySearch:
Göteborg, Göteborgs kommun, Västra Götalands län, Sweden
Västra meant "west", so the Swedish port's county was "western Gothland", up semi-high on Sweden's west coast, more northish than first wife Tillie's places when her family came from Sweden, their places more Danish. In contrast to the port being Västra, or "west", his birth place was Öster, or "east". The "-koping" inside Linkoping meant a market town, other places like it also ending in -koping. Each had designated market days where farmers might come in for the day, bringing produce to sell, traveling merchants could show their wares, rural families could shop before returning home.
With no big seaport, his birth area was the one more rural, less work there than, say, at better-connected Gothenberg.
FamilySearch names the Linköping's county, or "lan". Östergötlands referred to "eastern Gothland". We might imagine long ago Goths, tribes that left Sweden in times of drought/famine, headed for Rome and other places in south Europe, said to be more interested in Christianity on their arrival, than had been tribes that remained in Sweden or came into Sweden later.
THE TRIP OF 1920. His surviving granddaughters, as of 2015, remembered the family long ago discussing "his big trip". Decades after it happened, proof that it had happened, lay in the old photos in an album owned by granddaughter Lola, of an age to have her own grandchildren, with Lola deceased since this writing.
When A. E. took his trip back to Sweden, some decades after arriving in America, he stated he planned to visit his mother, with two reasons made for the trip in ink more faded than the rest. Photos show her with her house, a young brother with his family at his house,, a family get-together, maybe for a wedding, with carpenter sawhorses and equipment off to the side.
When he applied for his passport in April 1 of 1920 in Caldwell, Idaho, he referred to himself as farming in Melba. His application stated he had emigrated to America on the ship Etruria on Mar. 1, 1899, that he had become naturalized on Sept. 6 of 1910, in Pocatello, Idaho, that he now planned to leave America for six months, to sail out of NY on May 25, 1920, on the ship called Stockholm:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9X3-968Y
Such a trip would cause him to be absent from his own family's 1920 Census, at his stated address of Melba, Idaho.
Was the passport needed merely to go to a wedding? Or, was that trip perhaps a reconciliation? A last chance to see a mother who might not be around much longer?
Everybody wants to feel loved. He would have been no different?
LEAVING SWEDEN. In 1898, at around age 19, a dark-haired young man photographed with a moustache, freshly emigrated from Sweden, headed first for Minnesota, a common destination for Swedish people. He arrived later than many.
By the 1900 Census, he was in Brainerd. It was still in boom mode as a railroad center, shipping local lumber out. The boom was about to go bust, however, once the lumber supply ran out, and the railroads moved their boxcar repairs shops down to Oelwein, Iowa. Perhaps locals did not understand that yet? They lingered too long before leaving? Or, figuring out how to farm and stay?
His 1900 US Census there listed him as "Adolph", born Oct. 1878. He gave his occupation as "day laborer", perhaps using his carpentry s skills. Unlike his future wife, he boarded alone, apart from anyone in his own family, his landlords on June 14 being the "Kjillquist" family:
SOURCE: "1900 US Census", handwritten image archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-6PW9-HVT?
He had no roommate, no obvious kin close-by, in the same boarding house or down the street. In the next year or two, he would marry his opposite, Matilda Peterson, aka Tilly/Tillie
He would quickly take her to Idaho, away from her closely-knit family, to a new railroad center, one along Idaho's Snake River, called Pocatello. It was an uncommon destination for the Swedish. How to explain all that?
Perhaps the lumbering boom was a moving one. The railroads moved the boom's path ever westward, with the boom in Minnesota to end after its best timber had been cut, but to be followed by a later boom in Idaho?
What else?
His children, born in Idaho, were told that his family wanted A.E. to avoid the compulsory military draft back in Sweden. That was indeed a common reason in some countries, on top of the bigger one, economics. (Sweden had not yet made the social changes for which it later became famous. It still had very few in the middle class, as almost no one was permitted by the old aristocracy to rise past their parents' social class. That "failure to care" by aristocrats and business elites explained the sheer massiveness of their out-migration.)
But, was there more going on?
For one thing, his immigration was perhaps too early to have a fear of conscription. Sweden would not have compulsory military service (conscription) until 1901. The Swedish Navy, by then, was slated for coastline defense only, not for attacks on others, unlike the bygone Viking days. He left a few years in advance of that change.
He also left some brothers behind, seen in old photos of his later visit. If conscription was a problem, why did they not leave?
Contrast his situation with his in-laws, the Petersons.
One or two Peterson brothers left Sweden for Minnesota first. Then, all the surviving Petersons followed. (Most ended in or around Brainerd in Crow Wing County, Minnesota; one, out in California, the rest, across the county line from Brainerd, in more rural Cass County.) One geography professor told us that Swedish emigrants, unlike many Germans, rarely could afford to move whole families on the first trip. They moved pieces of the family instead, in just ones or twos, at the beginning.
Oldest brothers or young husbands often arrived in Minnesota first, frequently working as farmhands, saving money to bring more people, the process then repeating. The Petersons leaving Sweden fit this staged pattern. Future wife Tillie's widowed mother Lucia and her youngest two children, Matilda and Charley, came last, some years later than the eldest children, almost grown, now old enough to work, to re-pay the older brothers for buying their tickets.
MYSTERIES. Some of AE's granddaughters, now in Oregon, do remember the many Petersons. They have, however, no memory of any Carlson cousins in America.
Yet, A.E.'s and Matilda's first son, Carl Herbert Carlson, known as "Herb", left Idaho, returned to Minnesota once grown, married, had children. He did not return to his mother's Petersons around Brainerd. He instead went to Pequot Lakes, MN, is found buried there, with his sons, near other people who might be Carlson kin.
Swedish surnames are too common. Lots of people descended of some father named Carl are all called Carlson, though unrelated.
Passport excepted, we lack the birth and travel records in the same detail that was often seen back in Sweden. Our hope, instead, is that families, once here, have some unusual first names to track, with two odd first names better for tracking a family than one.
==========================
ADOLPH'S PHOTOS. Again, not all of the sons in his family of Carlsons moved away from Sweden. Nor did his mother.
Consider his Swedish photos. Some perhaps were sent by mail to him, from Sweden. Most, very likely, were taken on his "big trip" back to Sweden, maybe 20-some years after immigrating here. His passport application, saved on microfilm, is partly illegible, but catchable words definitely included mother, wedding, and, perhaps, funeral. Some granddaughters say his daughters remembered him returning from Sweden with a "full money belt", consistent with his receiving an inheritance while there.
His photos show at least one brother who did not move to America. His photo is marked "1928". He stands tall, with handsome leather boots extending knee high, the kind a soldier or Russian Cossack might wear, breeches tucked in, a billed European peasant cap on his head, wearing a possibly blue-ish farmer's work blouse. His photo shows the capped brother standing by a Swedish-blond wife, with a braid down her back, and two small ones, the children both barefoot.
They are charming, informally placed, standing here and there in their farm yard. They'd not yet been taught they must follow the "please-gather-together and smile" rules of modern formal photography.
These treasured photos also include a formal group shot. Women and children tend to be seated in front, with a youngish couple at their center, more males standing in back, showing other brothers or male cousins about A.E.'s age, or younger. All seem present for a Swedish wedding. Why guess a wedding? The assumed groom, front and center, his assumed bride at his side, has a flower in the buttonhole of his "Sunday-best" coat. He would be the only one later photographed alone, not with his bride. No other men wore flowers.
Open each photo to enlarge and read the caption underneath. Open the photo's face, then click the ctrl key and the plus sign to enlarge and see more details.
These Carlsons seem to have had a specialized, family-taught skill (a nice carpenter's sawhorse stands near the groom in one photo). Carpentry was what A.E. did very well, when not farming, when local US economies were in boom mode, so carpenters were in demand.
Maybe the family back in Sweden was better-off than typical for Swedish migrants to the U.S.? They, thus, remained behind, did not need to move? Consider the Swedish houses he photographed, houses that looked more prosperous than the one his own children lived in, back in Idaho. His mother's house was painted a cheerful "barn red", contrasting to the typical "American white".
Did military demands not bother all of his male kin, so they could stay in Sweden? A.E. and maybe another brother or two would leave Sweden, but other male kin stayed behind. Was "something else going on", other than a future conscription a few years down the road?
Was there a need for the adventure of a new place?
Was there a family argument that pushed one or two out the family door?
Were those leaving "no longer needed" at home?
Is it significant that A.E.'s trip back to Sweden was after his father's death, that father not seen in any photos? His mother was agreeable, once his father had died, whereas his father would not have been welcoming?
FARMING & GAMBLING IN AMERICA. He immigrated to America in 1898, according to one Census, thus, showed up not long before his first Census, the 1900. He was housed as A.E. Carlson, inside the town of Brainerd itself, not in the surrounding countryside. A laborer then, this changed in the next several censuses. Once in Idaho, he would list himself as a "farmer", not in sufficiently wet Minnesota, but in distant and dry, unknown Idaho. How did that change happen? Did it work out?
Young Swedes in 1898 would be late arrivals by that year. They would find the most productive farm land in the Midwest had already been snapped up by earlier arrivals. The remaining land was too often "marginal", meaning borderline, meaning too sandy, too hilly, too cold. Some parts were too wet (think of poorly drained, marshy spots around Brainerd and its many gorgeous lakes). Some parts were too arid (think of Idaho, the beauty of its mountains having a price; mining and lumber long being the main jobs there, not farming, for a reason).
Any of these land problems could quickly translate into "lots of work, little pay". Sometimes the new farmers arriving late could "improve" their acreage somehow. A solution in southern Idaho was to use the waters of the Snake River for irrigating. Irrigating fruit trees took more money than harvesting hay from un-irrigated land. However, clear from the farm photos, there were no fruit trees or irrigation trees, but there were stacks of hay. A.E. did indeed call himself hay farmer", his household seen with a mortgage in censuses, economically on the edge, never an orchardist or fruit grower.
The kids had some nice things, on occasion, but, for too many of the too-late arrivals, this happened only in "the good years". The family photos, many to be added to his childrens' pages, show this.
Even struggling farmers could afford camera film in the good years, but the houses still look beat-up and dreary, the land too dry. A drought? A drop in crop yield or prices? While crop-planting costs and land prices rose? Mortgage payments came due. Good years too often and too quickly changed to bad.
The best situation for weathering bad years was to inherit land, so as not to have a mortgage to pay. Farm kids could then be better-off, more like "town kids". They might have new things to wear every Easter, not just one special Easter. Once grown, some went to town to work, guessing at "town ways" they had not been taught. These were at a disadvantage when guessing wrong. Having a loving family would certainly help. Some would "get lucky" and marry into in-laws with better land, who had arrived in earlier times, having the resources, finally, to make working hard and intelligently pay-off.
SWEDISH NAMES, A SIDE NOTE: Inheriting a last name would start with their children, once here. It was not true of the generation consisting of parents and grandparents, back there, but would start being true with his brothers who remained. A.E.'s brothers would share the Carlsson name, perhaps spelled Carlsson or Karlsson among their descendants. A.E.'s father and grandfather would only share the Carlson surname if the father of both had also been a Carl. That's a possibility, actually, as A.E. named his first son Carl. There may have been a string of Carl's back in Sweden, with A.E. not the eldest son. so not named that himself.
Nicknames could cause a last name to be spelled differently for the same person. His wife Tilly's father was a Peter, using the nickname Per. Per died before his widow Lucia left Sweden with daughter Matilda and son Charley/Charles Peterson, to follow older sons who had arrived early, who perhaps saved the money to buy their passage, with them working once here, to pay back the older brothers. Per's sons could just as easily have used Persson intead of Peterson, meaning "Per's son", which morphed into Parson over here. We do find Parson listed as if it were their mother's maiden name, even though that's not likely. A son's Minnesota death certificate reported his mother's maiden name as something else.
Spelling changes came into play in the late 1800s in Sweden. A "double s", not used in older records, made it clearer that a "Carlsson" was simply a "Carl's son". A "Petersson" was simply a "Peter's son". Also, modern Swedish spelling aimed for each sound to have just one letter. That was done to make the language more phonetic, easier to teach to children. This caused many a Carl to turn into a Karl over there. Thus, for anyone to find A.E.'s brothers and their descendants in the old country, they might have to check multiple spellings, Carlson/Carlsson/Karlsson.
===========================
Were there more Carlsons in America?
ELIN JOSEPHINE, PEARL & CHURCH. A woman, Elin, maiden name Carlson, married name Johnson, "of the right age" to be Herb's playmate in his youth, is found in the Lutheran cemetery that is adjacent to Herb's village cemetery, both graveyards in Pequot Lakes. Her name and her daughter's name were unusual ones also seen among A.E.'s daughters. Either it was a co-incidence for people using the same names to be buried in the same MN town, or the two sets were related.
Looking for her parents, her father would be listed officially as "Anders Gustaf" Carlson. In 1910, with five children, living near Spencer, Iowa, he went by a nickname, "Gust", and finally, at death, given a more British sound as just "Gus". Could he have been A.E.'s brother? Born 1871, about 8 years before A.E., he immigrated at around age 20, around 1891, so around 7 years earlier than A.E., perhaps arriving in time to find decent land still affordable.
The unusual but shared women's names? First, Elin Josephine Carlson Johnson was born near the Iowa-Minnesota border, in 1900, near the Dakotas. She was a year or two older than Herb, of "playing age" if she were ever taken to meet cousins and Herb was one. Second, that Elin who ended in Pequot Lakes named her eldest daughter Pearl, born around 1923-1924.
A.E. had two daughters with the same unusual names. Elin Josephine of the Iowa Carlsons was matched in name at A.E.'s house in Idaho, but with a more British-sounding spelling of Ellen Josephine. Another of his and Matilda/Tilly's younger daughters was shown as Eva Pearl on an early census, then became Evie Pearl. As an adult, family photos listed her only as "Pearl".
If these two Carlson fathers, the older Gus and the younger A.E., were brothers, perhaps their families named some children after the same beloved relatives left back in Sweden? Was A.E's mother or sister an Elin Josephine or a Pearl?
How would Elin and Herb find their way to the same small town of Pequot Lakes? It might imply an older Carlson relative already there, to attract them with letters or offers of help? We do not yet know who, if anyone, that party might have been. Anyone born around 1900 turned 30 just in time for the Great Depression, so people took job offers wherever they could find them. Perhaps enough "second growth" lumber existed so that the forests could now be re-harvested? Or...?
Why are Carl (Herb) Carlson and sons, being Swedish-descended, not also in the Lutheran cemetery? That's what's typically seen for the Swedish. That's what was done for Elin Josephine.
On the Peterson side, the Lutheran Church was not the state religion, but any vital records of their Swedish-born will be found in local churches in Sweden, not county courthouses. Some stayed Lutheran in America, in the next generation. Matilda's niece, Jennie Benson, married Canadian-born Ralph Hodgson in a Swedish Lutheran church in Brainerd in 1924, before moving to Portland, Oregon.
Somehow, somewhere, A.E. and Matilda/Tillie apparently lost the Lutheran religion of their ancestors. Their Oregon granddaughters have no memory of anything Lutheran.
Were the two already "free thinkers" when marrying? Or, did Idaho consistently not have its few Lutheran churches too scattered to attend, not having enough Germans or Scandinavians present to keep more of them going once started? These ancestors aren't here any longer, so we can't ask. The churches are too far away to see if a Lutheran church once tried to exist in Pocatello, Idaho, and then went out of business, due to an insufficient supply of the correct ethnics nearby. One granddaughter does remember Tillie often reading, but just her Swedish bible, its 1850ish publication date old enough to have made it her mother's bible. Did she find comfort in that, perhaps a way to remember whatever she treasured in her past in Sweden and Minnesota? A.E at some point discovered something like the Four Square Gospel church. He quit drinking, which would cause some in his family to give him a second chance, but then, sadly, continued with what some might call "dry drunk behavior", so other rejections followed. Somewhere through this, Matilda would divorce him, gave him a second chance, so married him again, only to divorce him again. Perhaps he met his 2nd wife at his new church, a widow that everyone thought was nice, just as they all had liked Matilda.
Back in Pequot Lakes, MN, Elin Josephine's church, name now changed to Our Savior's Lutheran, presumedly was never entered by Carl Herbert when under its old names, as he had not been raised Lutheran. Elin's church began in 1895, not pretending its members were of the British Isles, but truthful about their ancestry, calling themselves the "Lunde Scandinavian Lutheran Congregation".
Scandinavian? While men worked outside the home and children went to school, both sets thus learning English, no "magic language fairy" tapped "stay-at-home" grandmothers on the head at naptime, so they could understand English once awake.
The ethnic name of Elin's church thus was a clear signal that:
(a) Things would be made understandable for Scandinavian-speaking grandmas present, but perhaps not for German- or Finnish- or French- or Ojibway-speaking grandmas, who were expected to start their own church if not understanding anything at this one, and that
(b) The religious culture could be ethnic. (An example? the lovely Santa Lucia ceremony, symbolizing light that could relieve even the darker winters of the Scandinavian north, and, at the same time, the darker nights of the soul.)
The larger town of Brainerd, where A.E. once lived, some miles from Pequot Lakes, could afford to specialize even more. Their old situation was not one church, broadly Scandinavian, but three churches, split into Swedish vs. Finnish. vs. Norwegian, all Lutheran, the language split continuing as late as 1924, when Tillie's niece, Jennie Benson, was married in the Swedish Lutheran church.
Once the Scandinavian grandmas died, these churches would lose their ethnic names, unless vandalism and arson by nativist groups coerced them earlier into involuntarily "hiding" behind some British-sounding name, as did happen in some places.
Why no more Swedish grandmas? The immigration gates increasingly slammed shut, despite quotas grandfathering in a bit more of some previously allowed ethnicities.
Then, more importantly, Sweden improved, so its local young adults no longer wanted to leave. The country dismantled the old aristocracy's most outrageous special rights and privileges, broadened land ownership, and created other economic opportunities so the working class could become middle class.
Back in the US, though church names might stop being language-specific, the affected churches might often keep the best of their ethnic customs. This writer has Swedish in-laws who, once in Texas, combined the Santa Lucia ceremony of the Swedish Lutheran Brotherhood with local Methodist revivalism, liked for its new songbooks and enthusiastic organ playing, calling the result the Swedish Methodist church.
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Copyright by JBrown (Julia Brown, Austin, TX), Sept., 2015, revised Oct., 2015. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
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...Photo Notes (scroll down to see)
...Family Grave List
HIS SWEDISH PLACES--
1) BIRTHPLACE. Linkoping, Linköpings kommun, Östergötlands län, Sweden.
The clerk hand-filling his WW II registration form, in 1942, to be signed by AE, misheard his birth place as Lindkoping, with a D. A doctor typically examined men to see if they'd be eligible physically for any draft or conscription, should there not be enough volunteers. Though men his age, over 60, would not likely be needed, his details were taken "Just in case". No prior injuries or other issues were named. (The registering included both questions that federal officials and the local draft board wanted answered.
Unlike some places, their county draft board did not ask if he was anyone's sole support. He named as his emergency contact his second wife Edith. (All details viewable at FamilySearch.org.)
In his and Edith's marriage record, he named his parents, but Britishized their names. He gave his mother as Anna Johnson (Jonsdottir?). He kept his father's name more Swedish in form, as Gustav Carlson. For Adolph to be a Carlson, Adolph's father needed to be a Carl Somebody. (maybe Carl Gustave or Carl Gustavsson?).
2) PORT OF RETURN, 1920. Göteborg. It's English name, Gothenberg, was given on his passport application as his ship's expected port of entry. (His passport application, of May, 1920, was made at the district court in Caldwell, Idaho. The passport was needed if wanting to return to the States.)
The full Swedish name of the place is found at FamilySearch:
Göteborg, Göteborgs kommun, Västra Götalands län, Sweden
Västra meant "west", so the Swedish port's county was "western Gothland", up semi-high on Sweden's west coast, more northish than first wife Tillie's places when her family came from Sweden, their places more Danish. In contrast to the port being Västra, or "west", his birth place was Öster, or "east". The "-koping" inside Linkoping meant a market town, other places like it also ending in -koping. Each had designated market days where farmers might come in for the day, bringing produce to sell, traveling merchants could show their wares, rural families could shop before returning home.
With no big seaport, his birth area was the one more rural, less work there than, say, at better-connected Gothenberg.
FamilySearch names the Linköping's county, or "lan". Östergötlands referred to "eastern Gothland". We might imagine long ago Goths, tribes that left Sweden in times of drought/famine, headed for Rome and other places in south Europe, said to be more interested in Christianity on their arrival, than had been tribes that remained in Sweden or came into Sweden later.
THE TRIP OF 1920. His surviving granddaughters, as of 2015, remembered the family long ago discussing "his big trip". Decades after it happened, proof that it had happened, lay in the old photos in an album owned by granddaughter Lola, of an age to have her own grandchildren, with Lola deceased since this writing.
When A. E. took his trip back to Sweden, some decades after arriving in America, he stated he planned to visit his mother, with two reasons made for the trip in ink more faded than the rest. Photos show her with her house, a young brother with his family at his house,, a family get-together, maybe for a wedding, with carpenter sawhorses and equipment off to the side.
When he applied for his passport in April 1 of 1920 in Caldwell, Idaho, he referred to himself as farming in Melba. His application stated he had emigrated to America on the ship Etruria on Mar. 1, 1899, that he had become naturalized on Sept. 6 of 1910, in Pocatello, Idaho, that he now planned to leave America for six months, to sail out of NY on May 25, 1920, on the ship called Stockholm:
FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9X3-968Y
Such a trip would cause him to be absent from his own family's 1920 Census, at his stated address of Melba, Idaho.
Was the passport needed merely to go to a wedding? Or, was that trip perhaps a reconciliation? A last chance to see a mother who might not be around much longer?
Everybody wants to feel loved. He would have been no different?
LEAVING SWEDEN. In 1898, at around age 19, a dark-haired young man photographed with a moustache, freshly emigrated from Sweden, headed first for Minnesota, a common destination for Swedish people. He arrived later than many.
By the 1900 Census, he was in Brainerd. It was still in boom mode as a railroad center, shipping local lumber out. The boom was about to go bust, however, once the lumber supply ran out, and the railroads moved their boxcar repairs shops down to Oelwein, Iowa. Perhaps locals did not understand that yet? They lingered too long before leaving? Or, figuring out how to farm and stay?
His 1900 US Census there listed him as "Adolph", born Oct. 1878. He gave his occupation as "day laborer", perhaps using his carpentry s skills. Unlike his future wife, he boarded alone, apart from anyone in his own family, his landlords on June 14 being the "Kjillquist" family:
SOURCE: "1900 US Census", handwritten image archived at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-6PW9-HVT?
He had no roommate, no obvious kin close-by, in the same boarding house or down the street. In the next year or two, he would marry his opposite, Matilda Peterson, aka Tilly/Tillie
He would quickly take her to Idaho, away from her closely-knit family, to a new railroad center, one along Idaho's Snake River, called Pocatello. It was an uncommon destination for the Swedish. How to explain all that?
Perhaps the lumbering boom was a moving one. The railroads moved the boom's path ever westward, with the boom in Minnesota to end after its best timber had been cut, but to be followed by a later boom in Idaho?
What else?
His children, born in Idaho, were told that his family wanted A.E. to avoid the compulsory military draft back in Sweden. That was indeed a common reason in some countries, on top of the bigger one, economics. (Sweden had not yet made the social changes for which it later became famous. It still had very few in the middle class, as almost no one was permitted by the old aristocracy to rise past their parents' social class. That "failure to care" by aristocrats and business elites explained the sheer massiveness of their out-migration.)
But, was there more going on?
For one thing, his immigration was perhaps too early to have a fear of conscription. Sweden would not have compulsory military service (conscription) until 1901. The Swedish Navy, by then, was slated for coastline defense only, not for attacks on others, unlike the bygone Viking days. He left a few years in advance of that change.
He also left some brothers behind, seen in old photos of his later visit. If conscription was a problem, why did they not leave?
Contrast his situation with his in-laws, the Petersons.
One or two Peterson brothers left Sweden for Minnesota first. Then, all the surviving Petersons followed. (Most ended in or around Brainerd in Crow Wing County, Minnesota; one, out in California, the rest, across the county line from Brainerd, in more rural Cass County.) One geography professor told us that Swedish emigrants, unlike many Germans, rarely could afford to move whole families on the first trip. They moved pieces of the family instead, in just ones or twos, at the beginning.
Oldest brothers or young husbands often arrived in Minnesota first, frequently working as farmhands, saving money to bring more people, the process then repeating. The Petersons leaving Sweden fit this staged pattern. Future wife Tillie's widowed mother Lucia and her youngest two children, Matilda and Charley, came last, some years later than the eldest children, almost grown, now old enough to work, to re-pay the older brothers for buying their tickets.
MYSTERIES. Some of AE's granddaughters, now in Oregon, do remember the many Petersons. They have, however, no memory of any Carlson cousins in America.
Yet, A.E.'s and Matilda's first son, Carl Herbert Carlson, known as "Herb", left Idaho, returned to Minnesota once grown, married, had children. He did not return to his mother's Petersons around Brainerd. He instead went to Pequot Lakes, MN, is found buried there, with his sons, near other people who might be Carlson kin.
Swedish surnames are too common. Lots of people descended of some father named Carl are all called Carlson, though unrelated.
Passport excepted, we lack the birth and travel records in the same detail that was often seen back in Sweden. Our hope, instead, is that families, once here, have some unusual first names to track, with two odd first names better for tracking a family than one.
==========================
ADOLPH'S PHOTOS. Again, not all of the sons in his family of Carlsons moved away from Sweden. Nor did his mother.
Consider his Swedish photos. Some perhaps were sent by mail to him, from Sweden. Most, very likely, were taken on his "big trip" back to Sweden, maybe 20-some years after immigrating here. His passport application, saved on microfilm, is partly illegible, but catchable words definitely included mother, wedding, and, perhaps, funeral. Some granddaughters say his daughters remembered him returning from Sweden with a "full money belt", consistent with his receiving an inheritance while there.
His photos show at least one brother who did not move to America. His photo is marked "1928". He stands tall, with handsome leather boots extending knee high, the kind a soldier or Russian Cossack might wear, breeches tucked in, a billed European peasant cap on his head, wearing a possibly blue-ish farmer's work blouse. His photo shows the capped brother standing by a Swedish-blond wife, with a braid down her back, and two small ones, the children both barefoot.
They are charming, informally placed, standing here and there in their farm yard. They'd not yet been taught they must follow the "please-gather-together and smile" rules of modern formal photography.
These treasured photos also include a formal group shot. Women and children tend to be seated in front, with a youngish couple at their center, more males standing in back, showing other brothers or male cousins about A.E.'s age, or younger. All seem present for a Swedish wedding. Why guess a wedding? The assumed groom, front and center, his assumed bride at his side, has a flower in the buttonhole of his "Sunday-best" coat. He would be the only one later photographed alone, not with his bride. No other men wore flowers.
Open each photo to enlarge and read the caption underneath. Open the photo's face, then click the ctrl key and the plus sign to enlarge and see more details.
These Carlsons seem to have had a specialized, family-taught skill (a nice carpenter's sawhorse stands near the groom in one photo). Carpentry was what A.E. did very well, when not farming, when local US economies were in boom mode, so carpenters were in demand.
Maybe the family back in Sweden was better-off than typical for Swedish migrants to the U.S.? They, thus, remained behind, did not need to move? Consider the Swedish houses he photographed, houses that looked more prosperous than the one his own children lived in, back in Idaho. His mother's house was painted a cheerful "barn red", contrasting to the typical "American white".
Did military demands not bother all of his male kin, so they could stay in Sweden? A.E. and maybe another brother or two would leave Sweden, but other male kin stayed behind. Was "something else going on", other than a future conscription a few years down the road?
Was there a need for the adventure of a new place?
Was there a family argument that pushed one or two out the family door?
Were those leaving "no longer needed" at home?
Is it significant that A.E.'s trip back to Sweden was after his father's death, that father not seen in any photos? His mother was agreeable, once his father had died, whereas his father would not have been welcoming?
FARMING & GAMBLING IN AMERICA. He immigrated to America in 1898, according to one Census, thus, showed up not long before his first Census, the 1900. He was housed as A.E. Carlson, inside the town of Brainerd itself, not in the surrounding countryside. A laborer then, this changed in the next several censuses. Once in Idaho, he would list himself as a "farmer", not in sufficiently wet Minnesota, but in distant and dry, unknown Idaho. How did that change happen? Did it work out?
Young Swedes in 1898 would be late arrivals by that year. They would find the most productive farm land in the Midwest had already been snapped up by earlier arrivals. The remaining land was too often "marginal", meaning borderline, meaning too sandy, too hilly, too cold. Some parts were too wet (think of poorly drained, marshy spots around Brainerd and its many gorgeous lakes). Some parts were too arid (think of Idaho, the beauty of its mountains having a price; mining and lumber long being the main jobs there, not farming, for a reason).
Any of these land problems could quickly translate into "lots of work, little pay". Sometimes the new farmers arriving late could "improve" their acreage somehow. A solution in southern Idaho was to use the waters of the Snake River for irrigating. Irrigating fruit trees took more money than harvesting hay from un-irrigated land. However, clear from the farm photos, there were no fruit trees or irrigation trees, but there were stacks of hay. A.E. did indeed call himself hay farmer", his household seen with a mortgage in censuses, economically on the edge, never an orchardist or fruit grower.
The kids had some nice things, on occasion, but, for too many of the too-late arrivals, this happened only in "the good years". The family photos, many to be added to his childrens' pages, show this.
Even struggling farmers could afford camera film in the good years, but the houses still look beat-up and dreary, the land too dry. A drought? A drop in crop yield or prices? While crop-planting costs and land prices rose? Mortgage payments came due. Good years too often and too quickly changed to bad.
The best situation for weathering bad years was to inherit land, so as not to have a mortgage to pay. Farm kids could then be better-off, more like "town kids". They might have new things to wear every Easter, not just one special Easter. Once grown, some went to town to work, guessing at "town ways" they had not been taught. These were at a disadvantage when guessing wrong. Having a loving family would certainly help. Some would "get lucky" and marry into in-laws with better land, who had arrived in earlier times, having the resources, finally, to make working hard and intelligently pay-off.
SWEDISH NAMES, A SIDE NOTE: Inheriting a last name would start with their children, once here. It was not true of the generation consisting of parents and grandparents, back there, but would start being true with his brothers who remained. A.E.'s brothers would share the Carlsson name, perhaps spelled Carlsson or Karlsson among their descendants. A.E.'s father and grandfather would only share the Carlson surname if the father of both had also been a Carl. That's a possibility, actually, as A.E. named his first son Carl. There may have been a string of Carl's back in Sweden, with A.E. not the eldest son. so not named that himself.
Nicknames could cause a last name to be spelled differently for the same person. His wife Tilly's father was a Peter, using the nickname Per. Per died before his widow Lucia left Sweden with daughter Matilda and son Charley/Charles Peterson, to follow older sons who had arrived early, who perhaps saved the money to buy their passage, with them working once here, to pay back the older brothers. Per's sons could just as easily have used Persson intead of Peterson, meaning "Per's son", which morphed into Parson over here. We do find Parson listed as if it were their mother's maiden name, even though that's not likely. A son's Minnesota death certificate reported his mother's maiden name as something else.
Spelling changes came into play in the late 1800s in Sweden. A "double s", not used in older records, made it clearer that a "Carlsson" was simply a "Carl's son". A "Petersson" was simply a "Peter's son". Also, modern Swedish spelling aimed for each sound to have just one letter. That was done to make the language more phonetic, easier to teach to children. This caused many a Carl to turn into a Karl over there. Thus, for anyone to find A.E.'s brothers and their descendants in the old country, they might have to check multiple spellings, Carlson/Carlsson/Karlsson.
===========================
Were there more Carlsons in America?
ELIN JOSEPHINE, PEARL & CHURCH. A woman, Elin, maiden name Carlson, married name Johnson, "of the right age" to be Herb's playmate in his youth, is found in the Lutheran cemetery that is adjacent to Herb's village cemetery, both graveyards in Pequot Lakes. Her name and her daughter's name were unusual ones also seen among A.E.'s daughters. Either it was a co-incidence for people using the same names to be buried in the same MN town, or the two sets were related.
Looking for her parents, her father would be listed officially as "Anders Gustaf" Carlson. In 1910, with five children, living near Spencer, Iowa, he went by a nickname, "Gust", and finally, at death, given a more British sound as just "Gus". Could he have been A.E.'s brother? Born 1871, about 8 years before A.E., he immigrated at around age 20, around 1891, so around 7 years earlier than A.E., perhaps arriving in time to find decent land still affordable.
The unusual but shared women's names? First, Elin Josephine Carlson Johnson was born near the Iowa-Minnesota border, in 1900, near the Dakotas. She was a year or two older than Herb, of "playing age" if she were ever taken to meet cousins and Herb was one. Second, that Elin who ended in Pequot Lakes named her eldest daughter Pearl, born around 1923-1924.
A.E. had two daughters with the same unusual names. Elin Josephine of the Iowa Carlsons was matched in name at A.E.'s house in Idaho, but with a more British-sounding spelling of Ellen Josephine. Another of his and Matilda/Tilly's younger daughters was shown as Eva Pearl on an early census, then became Evie Pearl. As an adult, family photos listed her only as "Pearl".
If these two Carlson fathers, the older Gus and the younger A.E., were brothers, perhaps their families named some children after the same beloved relatives left back in Sweden? Was A.E's mother or sister an Elin Josephine or a Pearl?
How would Elin and Herb find their way to the same small town of Pequot Lakes? It might imply an older Carlson relative already there, to attract them with letters or offers of help? We do not yet know who, if anyone, that party might have been. Anyone born around 1900 turned 30 just in time for the Great Depression, so people took job offers wherever they could find them. Perhaps enough "second growth" lumber existed so that the forests could now be re-harvested? Or...?
Why are Carl (Herb) Carlson and sons, being Swedish-descended, not also in the Lutheran cemetery? That's what's typically seen for the Swedish. That's what was done for Elin Josephine.
On the Peterson side, the Lutheran Church was not the state religion, but any vital records of their Swedish-born will be found in local churches in Sweden, not county courthouses. Some stayed Lutheran in America, in the next generation. Matilda's niece, Jennie Benson, married Canadian-born Ralph Hodgson in a Swedish Lutheran church in Brainerd in 1924, before moving to Portland, Oregon.
Somehow, somewhere, A.E. and Matilda/Tillie apparently lost the Lutheran religion of their ancestors. Their Oregon granddaughters have no memory of anything Lutheran.
Were the two already "free thinkers" when marrying? Or, did Idaho consistently not have its few Lutheran churches too scattered to attend, not having enough Germans or Scandinavians present to keep more of them going once started? These ancestors aren't here any longer, so we can't ask. The churches are too far away to see if a Lutheran church once tried to exist in Pocatello, Idaho, and then went out of business, due to an insufficient supply of the correct ethnics nearby. One granddaughter does remember Tillie often reading, but just her Swedish bible, its 1850ish publication date old enough to have made it her mother's bible. Did she find comfort in that, perhaps a way to remember whatever she treasured in her past in Sweden and Minnesota? A.E at some point discovered something like the Four Square Gospel church. He quit drinking, which would cause some in his family to give him a second chance, but then, sadly, continued with what some might call "dry drunk behavior", so other rejections followed. Somewhere through this, Matilda would divorce him, gave him a second chance, so married him again, only to divorce him again. Perhaps he met his 2nd wife at his new church, a widow that everyone thought was nice, just as they all had liked Matilda.
Back in Pequot Lakes, MN, Elin Josephine's church, name now changed to Our Savior's Lutheran, presumedly was never entered by Carl Herbert when under its old names, as he had not been raised Lutheran. Elin's church began in 1895, not pretending its members were of the British Isles, but truthful about their ancestry, calling themselves the "Lunde Scandinavian Lutheran Congregation".
Scandinavian? While men worked outside the home and children went to school, both sets thus learning English, no "magic language fairy" tapped "stay-at-home" grandmothers on the head at naptime, so they could understand English once awake.
The ethnic name of Elin's church thus was a clear signal that:
(a) Things would be made understandable for Scandinavian-speaking grandmas present, but perhaps not for German- or Finnish- or French- or Ojibway-speaking grandmas, who were expected to start their own church if not understanding anything at this one, and that
(b) The religious culture could be ethnic. (An example? the lovely Santa Lucia ceremony, symbolizing light that could relieve even the darker winters of the Scandinavian north, and, at the same time, the darker nights of the soul.)
The larger town of Brainerd, where A.E. once lived, some miles from Pequot Lakes, could afford to specialize even more. Their old situation was not one church, broadly Scandinavian, but three churches, split into Swedish vs. Finnish. vs. Norwegian, all Lutheran, the language split continuing as late as 1924, when Tillie's niece, Jennie Benson, was married in the Swedish Lutheran church.
Once the Scandinavian grandmas died, these churches would lose their ethnic names, unless vandalism and arson by nativist groups coerced them earlier into involuntarily "hiding" behind some British-sounding name, as did happen in some places.
Why no more Swedish grandmas? The immigration gates increasingly slammed shut, despite quotas grandfathering in a bit more of some previously allowed ethnicities.
Then, more importantly, Sweden improved, so its local young adults no longer wanted to leave. The country dismantled the old aristocracy's most outrageous special rights and privileges, broadened land ownership, and created other economic opportunities so the working class could become middle class.
Back in the US, though church names might stop being language-specific, the affected churches might often keep the best of their ethnic customs. This writer has Swedish in-laws who, once in Texas, combined the Santa Lucia ceremony of the Swedish Lutheran Brotherhood with local Methodist revivalism, liked for its new songbooks and enthusiastic organ playing, calling the result the Swedish Methodist church.
==========================================================
Copyright by JBrown (Julia Brown, Austin, TX), Sept., 2015, revised Oct., 2015. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
Gravesite Details
Cemetery recorded graves' location, but there is no marker. Buried with second spouse.
Family Members
Spouses
Children
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Carl Herbert "Herb" Carlson
1903–1979
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Anne Lorina "Anna" Carlson Williams
1904–1995
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Clarence Rainerd Carlson
1905–1989
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Henry Theodore Carlson
1907–1975
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Pearl Eva "Evey" Carlson White
1909–2003
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Grace K. Carlson Mitchell
1912–2013
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Ellen Josephine Carlson Henderson
1915–2012
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![]()
Melvin Spencer "Swede" Carlson
1917–2007
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