The Family Tree Scandinavian Genealogy Guide

By David A. Fryxell

Trace your Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish ancestors! This convenient guide will help you discover your Northern European family history while optimizing your research time.

Highlights include:

   • Strategies for identifying immigrant Scandinavian ancestors, plus how to trace them back to Europe from North America
   • Methods for locating Swedish genealogy records, Norwegian genealogy records, or Danish genealogy records within your family's town of origin
   • Detailed guides to finding and decoding common Scandinavian records, including: church records, civil registration records, census returns, property deeds, military records, and many more
   • Quick guides to Scandinavian history, geography, and language
   • Historical timelines, sample records, and resource lists that will bring your family history to life

If your family tree includes Swedish roots, Danish roots, or Norwegian roots, The Family Tree Scandinavian Genealogy Guide is a must-have for your genealogy research.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Dec 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780593190906

Book preview

Introduction

When you have a last name like Fryxell, you learn early on the origin of such an unusual and unpronounceable (it’s Frick-SELL) surname. Even when I was a child, that story cemented my identity as a descendant of Scandinavian immigrants: When conscripts entered the Swedish military, they chose or were assigned an army name to differentiate them from the similarly surnamed Jonssons, Svenssons, and other -sons in the unit. My great-great-uncle, who had been Sven Johan Magnusson, chose Fryxell in honor of a Swedish poet and historian who’d been an exception to the patronymic naming scheme. He kept the army name after discharge, and when John Fryxell and my great-grandfather Gustav Magnusson came to America in 1876, the brothers inexplicably decided to both become hard-to-spell Fryxells.

I grew up in the Scandinavia-infused Midwest, where lutefisk and lefse were as familiar as hot dogs and pizza and everyone told Ole and Lena jokes and said "Uff da!" As a Swede attending a Norwegian college that celebrated Syttende Mai—May 17, Norwegian Constitution Day—I joked about wearing a black armband to protest that beginning of Norway’s push for independence. But when I married my half-Norwegian wife, we agreed we would joke only about the Danes. Since my favorite cousin is half Danish, however, we decided to just make fun of the Finns instead.

As I learned more about our families’ Scandinavian heritage, I came to appreciate how much their story is a truly American tale. Like Americans of so many ethnicities, these Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes came to Nordamerika with little or nothing and overcame daunting hardships. As a child in Sweden, my great-grandfather lost his coat one winter and so couldn’t go outside until spring, because his family couldn’t afford to buy him a replacement. Another winter, the family’s only cow froze to death. My wife’s Erickson ancestors from Norway were the first to break the sod in the bleak patch of South Dakota prairie where they settled.

By our parents’ generation, however, not only was farming left behind, but my dad and my cousin’s Danish-American father became college professors. John Fryxell’s son Fritiof and grandson Roald were renowned geologists, after whom an Antarctic lake and a crater on the moon are named, respectively. In 2018, the humanities building at Augustana University in South Dakota—that Norwegian college I attended—was renamed for my parents, so it now bears a Swedish name.

Whatever your own Scandinavian-American story, this book will help you discover the details and bring it to life. Once you identify your immigrant ancestors and link them to locations in Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, you can tap a rich resource of church records and other sources dating back centuries. Unlike in many European countries, Scandinavia’s essential records largely escaped damage from wars and fires. Today, with everything from Swedish church records to Norwegian censuses to Danish emigrant registrations available online, it’s never been easier to explore your Scandinavian family tree.

David A. Fryxell

July 2018

<vikinggenealogy.com>

1

Your Scandinavian Heritage

The first Scandinavian immigrants to North America came in Viking ships, captained by Leif Eriksson, about a thousand years ago. But that early settlement of Vinland failed to take. The seafaring Scandinavians abandoned the New World and didn’t return for more than six hundred years, giving an Italian latecomer named Columbus the chance to hog the credit.

If you have Scandinavian ancestry, you might not be directly descended from Vikings, but you are certainly related to them. While the rest of the country celebrates (or protests) Columbus Day every year, you can proudly salute Leif Eriksson Day each October 9.

Those far-roving Vikings left indelible marks across Europe, but it was their descendants centuries later—many of them humble farmers or fishermen in the old country—who helped build the United States. From Chicago to Seattle, through Minneapolis and the Great Plains, Scandinavians laid the rails and broke the sod in America. They founded Lutheran churches and colleges and introduced their own cultural traditions long before the arrival of IKEA. Scandinavian-Americans flew over the Atlantic and landed on the moon, built speedboats and made movies, rallied union workers and sculpted Mount Rushmore.

Your notion of Scandinavian heritage probably falls somewhere between the Vikings of old and the Ya shur, you betcha! characters of the movie Fargo. As you discover your own Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian ancestry, however, you’ll likely learn there is a lot more to your heritage than meatballs, modernist furniture, or shouting "Skoal! at soccer games. While it’s always good not to take your heritage too seriously—referring to yourself as Scandihoovian" is perfectly fine—the stories you’ll uncover in the scratchy handwriting of church records and the scrolling columns of census returns are as dramatic as any novel. (Indeed, in 1927 Norwegian transplant Ole Rolvaag turned the early struggles of his fellow immigrants on the Great Plains into a gripping novel, Giants in the Earth.) Whether on the lonely prairie or in hectic cities, fishing the Pacific Northwest or building railroads, your Scandinavian ancestors were pioneers to be proud of.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

According to the Census Bureau’s 2007–2011 American Community Survey, nearly 11 million Americans claim some form of Scandinavian ancestry. Collectively, that puts Scandinavian-Americans seventh in numbers, behind Italian ancestry and ahead of Polish. Norwegian-Americans are the most numerous at 4,557,539, followed closely by Americans with Swedish ancestry at 4,211,644, individually those rank 14th and 15th overall. Danish-Americans add another 1,420,962, and 575,968 report their heritage as simply Scandinavian.

While these numbers lag well behind those of Americans tracing their origins to countries such as England, Ireland, and Germany, they are nonetheless notable given the comparatively small size of Scandinavian countries. In the primary years of immigration to the United States, from 1825 to 1925, about three million people left Scandinavia for America. The total number of Swedes who emigrated over those years was equivalent to about one-quarter of Sweden’s entire 1880 population; by 1910, almost one in five of the world’s Swedes lived in the United States. Thinly populated Norway, with fewer than two million people in 1885, saw a total of more than 800,000 emigrants catch America fever and depart during that time period as well. In the peak years of immigration to America in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Norway sent a greater percentage of its people to the United States than any nation except Ireland.

Scandinavian immigration was also notable for how its waves were self-propelling. Often a few family members or a group of two or three families from the same village would (literally) test the waters and set out for America. Three or five—or even ten years—might pass before the next group followed. Ultimately, however, whole villages were largely transplanted from Scandinavia to the United States. Between 1869 and 1892, for example, the small Swedish parish of Vättlösa sent 139 of its residents across the Atlantic.

In 1871, a Harper’s Weekly article described these strange-looking Scandinavian arrivals:

It is curious to see such a heterogeneous crowd. The Swedes are usually distinguished by their tanned leather breeches and waistcoats and their peculiar aforementioned exhalations . . . the Norwegians, in their curious national dress, consisting of a gray woolen stiff-necked jacket, which covers only about one-third of their back, while in front it slopes down to a greater length and is profusely ornamented with huge silver buttons, set so close together that they overlap each other. Their breeches, of dark woolen stuff, therefrom reach nearly up to their neck behind, only a small strip of jacket with an enormous stiff collar between. You cannot properly say a Norwegian in a pair of breeches, but a pair of breeches with a Norwegian in them.

WHERE THEY SETTLED

Although early immigrants settled in Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, arriving Scandinavians began to set their sights on the Midwest as early as the 1830s. The region offered opportunity and unclaimed land—especially after The Homestead Act of 1862—and its climate and landscape reminded them of home.

Chicago was both a destination and a jumping-off point for immigrants. The first Norwegian arrival in Chicago was a sailor, David Johnson, prior to 1834. Captain Olof Gottfried Lange, the first Swede to arrive, came to Chicago as early as 1838, the year after the city was incorporated. As the city grew, so did Little Norway and Little Sweden neighborhoods and, later, Scandinavian suburbs such as Andersonville. By 1910, Chicago was home to more Swedes than any city except Stockholm.

Swedes spread across the Midwest to Michigan, Iowa, and Nebraska. In Minnesota, railroad tycoon James J. Hill enlisted them to lay tracks across America: Give me snuff, whiskey, and Swedes, Hill declared, and I will build a railroad to hell. Some immigrants followed the rails all the way to the Pacific Northwest and California. Others wound up back east in Maine, which has towns named Stockholm and New Sweden.

Norwegians settled most heavily in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and South Dakota, then spread to California, Washington, Oregon, and even Texas. Towns today whose populations are more than half Norwegian ancestry include Northwood and Crosby, North Dakota; Fertile and Spring Grove, Minnesota; and Blair and Strum, Wisconsin.

In 1836, the famous Danish author Hans Christian Andersen described what his countrymen expected to find in America: Ducks and chickens raining down, geese land[ing] on the table. But Danish immigrants began arriving in significant numbers somewhat later than their fellow Scandinavians. They settled in the farm country of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas before spreading from coast to coast. It’s no coincidence that today you will find towns named Denmark in Wisconsin, Maine, Nebraska, and Kansas, as well as Danevang in Texas and Daneville in North Dakota. In 1911 a group of Danes, tired of Midwest winters, founded Solvang (Danish for sunny field) in California. The town still reflects traditional Danish architecture and boasts a copy of the famed statue of Andersen’s Little Mermaid from Copenhagen.

According to the Library of Congress, Danes (more so than other Scandinavian immigrants) spread nationwide and comparatively quickly disappeared into the melting pot . . . The Danes were the least cohesive group and the first to lose consciousness of their origins.

Today, collectively, Minnesota has the most total residents with Scandinavian ancestry, followed by California, Washington, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Florida, Oregon, Iowa, and Utah. States with more than 10 percent of the population reporting Scandinavian ancestry are led by North Dakota at 36 percent and Minnesota at 32 percent, followed by South Dakota, Utah, Montana, Wisconsin, Washington, and Iowa. Images A, B, and C display concentrations of Americans with Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish ancestry, respectively.

A

Map showing the concentrations of Americans with Norwegian ancestry as of the 2000 census. (US Census Bureau)

B

C

Maps showing the concentrations of Americans with Swedish and Danish ancestry as of the 2000 census. (US Census Bureau)

WHAT THEY BROUGHT, WHAT THEY MADE

Although Scandinavian immigrants were as poor as other ethnic arrivals from Europe—or even more so—with relatively humble occupations, they excelled in literacy. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden all had official state Lutheran churches, which (as we’ll see) contributed crucially to genealogical records. Those churches also required that all children be taught to read and write. When Scandinavians arrived in America they exhibited an unusually high level of literacy, at least in their native languages.

That in turn encouraged a flowering of Scandinavian-language newspapers, magazines, and other publishing enterprises. More than a thousand Swedish-language publications were founded in the United States. Some of the most important Scandinavian periodicals, such as the Danish Bien and the Norwegian Decorah-Posten, achieved wide circulation and became de facto national newspapers for their ethnic communities. Copies of some of these newspapers are in the collections of historical societies and university libraries, especially in the upper Midwest. They may be valuable for learning more about your ancestors and their lives in America. You can search for holdings, including by language, at the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America project at <chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles>. A few titles, such as the Norwegian Minneapolis Tidende (image D), the Swedish Skaffaren, and the Danish St. Paul Tidende, all from Minnesota, have been digitized by the project.

D

Scandinavian-language newspapers published in the United States, such as the Minneapolis Tidende, can help you learn about your ancestors and your heritage. (Library of Congress)

Of course, the immigrants also founded churches and other religious institutions—mostly, but not entirely, Lutheran. By the turn of the century, for example, the Danish Lutheran church numbered fifty-six ministers and had established a theological school in Wisconsin, an immigrant mission in New York, and an orphanage in Chicago. Each country introduced its own church body to the United States, so the Danes founded what became the American Evangelical Lutheran Church. That merged with the ethnically Swedish (among others) Lutheran Church in America in 1961. The LCA in turn merged with the American Lutheran Church, which had previously incorporated the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America, in 1988 to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

These bewilderingly similar-sounding Lutheran churches are worth noting because in the early immigration years many kept up the assiduous recordkeeping their congregants had been subject to back home. In addition to baptisms, marriages, and burials, some recorded comings and goings much as their state-sponsored Scandinavian counterparts did. You might be able to find answers about your ancestors in these American records, kept at the ELCA archives (see appendix D). Many ELCA church records have been digitized and are available via the subscription Ancestry site <search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=61584> (image E).

E

Records of Scandinavian churches in America, available via Ancestry, can reveal an ancestor’s birth date and place back in Sweden as well as emigration information.

These churches, in turn, established colleges. In the nineteenth century, the Norwegians founded what are today Luther College in Decorah, Iowa; St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota; Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota; Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Pacific Lutheran University in Parkland, Washington. Danes founded Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa. Swedish colleges dating from the nineteenth century are Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois; Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas; Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota; Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota; and North Park University in Chicago (founded by the Evangelical Covenant Church).

In addition to churches, Scandinavian immigrants typically belonged to a village hall or other organization back in the old country, and they brought this tradition to America, too. These new social clubs included the Sons of Norway, the Danish Brotherhood, and the Swedish Vasa Order of America. In peak immigration years, these groups provided unemployment benefits to members, helped struggling families, and sponsored community centers.

The Sons of Norway <www.sofn.com> remains a vibrant nationwide organization, with a magazine, financial products, and cultural offerings. The Vasa Order of America also continues, and has an archive that might benefit your research (see appendix A). Although the Danish Brotherhood in America no longer functions as a nationwide organization, its surviving membership rolls are one of the most important sources for clues to family origins in Denmark and to original name spellings. A death index of members is online at , and the original records are held at the Danish American Archive and Library in Blair, Nebraska (see appendix D).

WAVES OF SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANTS

Colonial Arrivals, 1619–1783

After the Vikings, the earliest Scandinavian seafarers to return to the New World were the sixty-four men aboard two ships captained by Danish explorer Jens Munk (1579–1628). Munk reached Hudson Bay in 1619, then returned to Denmark with plans to establish a colony, Nova Dania (New Denmark), on his next voyage. But Munk fell ill, and his dreams of a Danish colony were abandoned.

Instead, Danish and Norwegian colonists joined the Dutch settlers in New Netherland, which the Dutch had established in the mid-Atlantic region beginning in 1614. Both Denmark and Norway were trading partners and allies with Holland and supplied timber for their ships that sailed to America. Some sources say that half the early settlers of New Netherland were Danes. Norwegians settled at Fort Orange (present-day Albany), in New Amsterdam (today’s New York City), and later in Pennsylvania.

Among the first waves of Danish immigrants were several groups of religious refugees seeking to escape the state Lutheran church. These included Mennonites, other Anabaptists, and Moravians who believed the Lutherans back home were too lax in their faith, as well as Roman Catholics. In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church in Denmark was banned for more than three centuries, until the constitution of 1849.

At the other extreme of the Americas, Danish explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering (1681–1741) sailed the northern Pacific Ocean on behalf of the Russians. He discovered the strait that’s now named for him and was the first European to reach present-day Alaska.

The Bronx’s Scandinavian Roots

The early history of New York City is most associated with the Dutch, but its borough of the Bronx was actually named for a Scandinavian. Jonas Jonasson Bronck hired a ship called De Brandt van Troyen (Fire of Troy) to bring ninety immigrants to New Amsterdam in 1639. For his trouble, Bronck received a grant of 680 acres that became known as Bronck’s Farm (number 43 on this map), then Broncksland, and ultimately (misspelled) the Bronx. He wrote of his new home: The invisible hand of the Almighty Father, surely guided me to this beautiful country, a land covered with virgin forest and unlimited opportunities. It is a veritable paradise and needs but the industrious hand of man to make it the finest and most beautiful region in all the world.

Although Jonas Bronck went to school in Denmark and early histories identified him as Danish, subsequent research concluded he was born about 1600 in Komstad, Småland, a historic province of Sweden adjacent to the then-Danish province of Skåne. The Bronx Historical Society now states that he was Swedish.

Map (circa 1639) showing Manhattan, with number 43 representing the Bronck homestead. (Library of Congress)

THE RISE AND FALL OF NEW SWEDEN

Not content with simply joining the Dutch outposts in America, the Swedish government set out to establish its own New Sweden. It hired Peter Minuit, who had led the founding of New Netherland for the Dutch before being dismissed in an internal dispute, and set up the Swedish West India Company. In March 1638, two ships under Minuit’s command, the Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip, arrived at the site of today’s Wilmington, Delaware with fifty colonists. They named the settlement Fort Christina, after the young Swedish queen, and Reverend Reorus Porkillus established the first Lutheran congregation in America there.

In the next few years, eleven more ships brought about six hundred Swedes along with Finns. The arrivals extended New Sweden along both banks of the Delaware River, pushing into present-day Pennsylvania, where they founded the settlement of Upland on the site of today’s Chester and Kingsessing. They also settled at Varkens Kill in New Jersey and Strandviken in Delaware.

In 1655, however, Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of New Netherland, decided he’d had enough of the Swedes on his southern flank. He arrived with a formidable armada and took New Sweden by force. The settlements remained Swedish in character, nonetheless, until 1681, when William Penn claimed much of the area and the towns were assimilated into the colonies of Pennsylvania and Delaware.

If you have ancestors among these earliest Swedish immigrants, you can learn more about New Sweden from The Swedish Colonial Society and at sites including The Order of the Founders and Patriots of America <www.founderspatriots.org/articles/swedish.php>. For genealogy information, including names of Swedish-American forefathers, see articles from the FamilySearch Research Wiki , RootsWeb [inactive], and Geni .

The First Wave, 1825–1860

The American Revolution (1775–1783) interrupted the trickle of settlers from Scandinavia. Though Sweden and Denmark (which then controlled Norway) were officially neutral, popular opinion in Scandinavia favored the rebellious colonists. The Swedish