My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  But my grandfather’s favourite pastime of all was drawing. During his military service he discovered his ability as a quick, deft draughtsman, and he was trained as a military artist. Eric illustrated the first two books by Vilhelm Moberg, the author of a classic series about Swedish emigrants to the United States. He later travelled around to community halls and other venues to entertain the public.

  Eric also used his talent as a draughtsman to create maps, games and puzzles, and he pioneered visual pedagogy in Sweden. He also painted watercolours and, on occasion, large murals for public spaces. Most of his murals are to be found in Börjes, a low-cost department store in Tingsryd, a small town in the southern province of Småland. Eric lived there for a few years as a young, newly married primary teacher, and my father Göran was born there.

  One summer’s day I gather together my paternal uncle, a few cousins, my brother and one of his sons for a family reunion. We begin with coffee and a look at my grandfather’s murals in the cafeteria in Börjes. The owner, one of the sons of the original Börjes, shows us around. Having Bojs as a surname is a particular advantage here in the Tingsryd area, as my grandfather was clearly a local celebrity and very popular. The style of the pictures on the walls of the department store can be described as rural romanticism. They represent scenes from rural life, from my grandfather’s childhood and earlier centuries. Horses are the most frequent motif. Börjes started off by selling low-cost equipment for horses, and although it has now diversified, horses still have a central place.

  During my childhood Tingsryd was best known for its brewery and its beer, and today one of the major employers is a boat factory. Beer, horses and boats – I can’t help thinking that these form a particularly fitting combination for a family reunion taking us back to our roots. These, after all, were the three factors that drove agriculture and the Bronze Age, and which were instrumental in bringing our shared lineage to Småland.

  Eric was born on a medium-sized farm in Väckelsång, about 10 kilometres (6¼ miles) north of Tingsryd. According to family lore, his grandfather – my great-great-grandfather – began working life as a poor railway worker. But he met a girl whose father was a lay judge, who helped the young couple to buy the farm.

  In front of the church in Väckelsång stands a large model of a cow. It is an enlarged copy of a wooden toy that my grandfather made in his youth, during the short period when he and his brothers ran a toy factory together. According to family history, this cow came to be a symbol of the local dairy, which was eventually taken over by the dairy company Arla. So it is basically this cow that features on Arla’s milk packaging today. To see the original, you need to go to Väckelsång.

  From Väckelsång, we go on to Urshult, a few kilometres to the east. I have been helped by some family history researchers who were quick to discover that our paternal line actually came from that area – something we had no idea of.

  Urshult has no obvious signs of Eric Bojs, such as statues of cows or mural paintings. What it does have, however, is a very active local history society that has been helpful in putting me in touch with a local family historian. This man, Klas Samuelsson, turns out to be related to my family in various ways, though not through the paternal line, which is what we are looking into on this occasion.

  Klas Samuelsson leads us to a red farmhouse, Froaryd Södergård, which stands next to Lake Åsnen. A few cows belonging to the present owner are grazing along the shoreline. The grass is the intense green that comes only from many centuries of regular grazing. With the help of old court records, Klas Samuelsson has managed to find some information about our ancestor Måns Månsson, who was born here in the mid-seventeenth century. The family were originally tenant farmers who leased the farm from the Crown. In the eighteenth century Måns Månsson’s descendants were able to buy the farmhouse and its land.

  After some calculation, I work out that the youngest person in our group – my brother’s son – represents the eleventh generation in the direct line after Måns Månsson.

  In Måns Månsson’s time the farmhouse was presumably grey rather than red, and the roof would have been covered in turf or thatched in reed, rather than tiled. In other respects it probably looked much the same. Apple trees in the meadows sloping down towards the lake would have been covered in blossom in spring. Today, the area around the south side of Lake Åsnen remains famous for its apples, grown in meadowlands in the traditional way. Some growers actually receive EU grants for maintaining this old-fashioned type of cultivation, which is not particularly productive in terms of the apples’ economic value. But the meadows enable biodiversity to thrive – with a wealth of flowers, including many orchids – and they are viewed as very valuable in terms of cultural history.

  Unfortunately, things went downhill for our ancestors a few generations after Måns Månsson. His son’s son, Per Johansson, moved to a farm a few kilometres to the north, whose location is not at all as attractive or close to the water. The farmyard is messy, and a few hostile dogs bark at us. We have been warned that the current tenants have a criminal background.

  Per Johansson’s son, Johan Persson, also seems to have let things slide when he lived here in the late eighteenth century. Hard liquor may have had a hand in that. According to the notes taken by the pastor after his husförhör, a yearly visit to the farm to check on the inhabitants’ literacy and knowledge of the Bible and the Lutheran catechism, Johan Persson had ‘completely forgotten his Christianity’. The archives record a spell in the fortress at Karlshamn. Johan and his family were forced to leave the farm, after which they moved around from farm to farm within the area. Johan’s son, Nils, ended his days at the age of 59 in the poorhouse at Tävelsås. But it was that same Nils who fathered Peter Nilsson – the railway worker whose father-in-law helped him to buy the farm in Väckelsång where my grandfather Eric Bojs was born.

  My relatives and I had no idea there had been such ups and downs – deep downs – in our forebears’ history. We are a little overwhelmed when we take a seat in the yard outside Urshult’s open-air museum to digest what we have just heard. There have been turbulent swings in the family’s fortunes, with social mobility in both directions. But the location has remained more or less the same. Apart from a few minor moves, the family clearly remained within a radius of a few dozen kilometres – at any rate between the birth of Måns Månsson in Urshult in the 1640s and that of my father, Göran, in Tingsryd in 1931.

  And when I consult Peter Sjölund, the genealogy researcher who drew up the extensive genealogical tree showing the descendants of ‘Ragnar’, it turns out that our ancestors scarcely moved in the course of 4,000 years. They stayed at home when they had sons, in any event.

  The genealogical tree of men belonging to haplogroup R1a-Z284 has several branches, three of which are particularly prominent. One of these seems to have diverged early on from the west coast of Sweden towards Norway. This branch includes many of the men who became Vikings along the Atlantic coastline of Europe. The second branch shifted to the Mälaren Valley. But the third of these main branches went towards southern Sweden. Many of its offshoots remained on the southern side of the high plain of Småland for thousands of years.

  Even the expert DNA genealogist Peter Sjölund thinks that sounds odd, bearing in mind how people have travelled around in the course of history. But I get to thinking about a family reunion in Väckelsång’s community hall that I attended when my paternal grandfather and grandmother were still alive. All of my grandfather’s siblings were there. And it struck me that my grandfather was the only one in a big family to have left the region around Lake Åsnen. He was the most adventurous of them, moving away as far as Kalmar. A generation later, his children moved outside the confines of Småland to study in the university cities of Lund, Stockholm and Uppsala. And later on they ended up in Lund, Gothenburg and Kristianstad.

  The vast majority of my forebears and relatives stayed in the area where they were born. That, after all, is a fairly ordinary pat
tern. However, things look different on my paternal grandmother’s side.

  ***

  I explained earlier how the first farmers in Europe migrated from Syria, via Greece and the Balkans, to central and northern Europe. And I showed how the distribution of people with the same mutations in their mitochondrial DNA as my paternal grandmother reflects those migrations almost perfectly.

  When the DNA of some Stone Age farmers from Västergötland was published in Science, putting them in the global limelight, I experienced a small personal thrill. These farmers were exhumed only a few dozen kilometres away from the place near Falköping where my paternal grand­mother’s foremothers lived in the eighteenth century. It felt almost as if the researchers had exhumed members of my family and carried out DNA tests on them.

  In my memories of my childhood and youth, there is a very special aura surrounding my paternal grandmother, Hilda. In appearance, at least, she might well have been one of Europe’s earliest farmers. She had dark hair and brown eyes, and with her fine features, she was strikingly beautiful. She also had a fine singing voice; she would recount with pride how she used to sing solos in church as a child. Her father was a cantor at the church in Öjaby near Växjö. He was strict, with numerous children and a low income. One day a wealthy couple from Stockholm came by to ask whether they could take the pretty little girl home with them for a consideration. But the cantor was furious; poor though he might be, he had absolutely no intention of selling his children. I never really established whether my grandmother was happy to be able to stay with her family and her strict cantor of a father, or whether she fantasised about the turn life might have taken in a well-to-do Stockholm family.

  The children of Öjaby were only able to attend school for half days, as the schoolteacher also had to cycle over to the neighbouring parish of Härlöv to teach there. But little Hilda was allowed to ride on the back of the teacher’s bike and go to school in Härlöv too. After an excruciating year as a downtrodden nursemaid in an officer’s family in Stockholm, she managed to train as an elementary teacher at the teacher training college in Växjö, where she met my grandfather. As the mother of two children she proposed to my grandfather that she provide for the whole family through her work as a teacher. That would have enabled him to throw himself fully into training as an artist. He had taken a preparatory course, and several of the participants had subsequently become well-known artists. But my grandfather turned down my grandmother’s offer to take over as the breadwinner. He never became a famous oil painter, but continued his long career as a teacher and amateur artist. Grandmother Hilda stopped working a few years later and remained a housewife for the rest of her life.

  When I was six years old and about to start school, she travelled over from Kalmar to Gothenburg for my first day. My little brother was a baby at the time, and my mother needed help. I also recall some magical Christmases in Kalmar and a number of Easter weekends. The blue anemones made a particularly big impression on me, and so did the sago pudding in my grandmother’s kitchen. There were no blue anemones and no sago pudding at home in Gothenburg. When I was 12 or so she taught me how to darn socks. We repaired the runs in my nylons together. Thrift was deeply imprinted in her. When you peeled potatoes, the peel should be as thin as you could possibly manage, she taught me.

  After the age of 12, it was many years until I saw my paternal grandparents again. My grandmother never forgot to send Christmas and birthday presents – mostly clothes, sometimes simple jewellery. Her choice of gifts always showed perfect taste and great thoughtfulness.

  As soon as I was on my way to adulthood, I got in touch with my paternal grandparents again of my own accord, after which I visited them in Kalmar several times. My grandmother continued to live a frugal, thrifty life well into her eighties. She would go on long walks, pick mushrooms and cycle over the new bridge all the way to Öland to look at the blue anemones there.

  Now I do not imagine for a moment that the genetic material which determined my grandmother’s appearance remained unadulterated all the way from Syria to Småland. It is quite clear to me that she was a mix of Stone Age farmers and hunters just like all of us, and that a great deal has happened since the first farmers left Syria nearly 10,000 years ago. One need only go back two generations to see that my grandmother was descended from four different people. A few generations further back, and her forebears can be reckoned in the thousands. What traits are passed on is the result of chance.

  But all this has to do with feelings as well. For me, there is a particular symbolism in the fact that mothers and daughters followed each other in a long, unbroken line for thousands of years and that it is now possible, thanks to DNA technology and mitochondria, to see what paths they took.

  There are about 400 generations between me and the women farmers in the ancient Syrian graves – those who also belonged to haplogroup H, whom, for simplicity’s sake, we can call ‘Helena’s clan’. Eight generations separate me from the oldest documented female ancestor on my paternal grandmother’s side. She was called Katarina Eriksdotter and was married to a shoemaker called Petter Andersson. They and their children lived in the little village of Storskogen in the parish of Dala, about 10 kilometres (6¼ miles) north of Falköping.

  I take advantage of my trip to Falköping – to interview the archaeologist who excavated the Gökhem farmers – to fit in a visit to Dala. The house in Storskogen where Katarina Eriksdotter once lived no longer exists. The old village of Storskogen is now a dense fir plantation. However, the rolling green landscape that surrounds it looks as it must have done in the eighteenth century, with plenty of old oaks and other deciduous trees, and cows grazing in the fields.

  Unlike the old village, the manor house to which the shoemaker’s home belonged has survived. It still stands right next to the church, with which it is linked by a private passageway. ‘A good illustration of the proximity of temporal power and Church,’ observes my local informant, a family history researcher and a former member of the local council for the liberal agrarian Centre Party.

  The owner of the Stora Dala estate in Katarina Eriksdotter’s day was one Peter Tham, whose family had become wealthy thanks to the East India Company. The estate is supposed to have been one of the largest and richest in the whole of Västergötland, which is saying something, as this is a particularly fertile farming area.

  The shoemaker’s small homestead in Storskogen also seems to have been relatively prosperous. According to the list of personal effects drawn up on Katarina’s death, she owned two gowns of grogram, one black, the other blue; a brown satin jacket; a cloth jacket lined with leather; striped stays; a mohair cap; a silken cap; and several other garments. The farm included four red cows, a brown mare, and several sheep and pigs. The house contained looking glasses, a wall clock, brandy pans, liquor glasses and silver goblets; moreover, Katarina and Petter owned assets amounting to around 100 Swedish riksdaler.

  According to the earliest traces of Katarina Eriksdotter in the church records, she moved to the parish of Dala to work as a maid on Häggestorp farm in 1766. She was apparently 26 years old at the time. The shoemaker Petter Andersson moved to Häggestorp in the same year, and the two married the year after. The marriage book states that Katarina was born in Odensåker, over 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Dala. For me, 40 kilometres, or 25 miles, sounds like a long way for a young woman to move in the eighteenth century. I imagine that the Tham family’s large farm provided employment opportunities that were lacking at home in Odensåker.

  According to Dala’s church records, Katarina was born around 1739, possibly in 1740 or 1741. Her father was apparently called Erik Jonsson. But no such birth seems to have been recorded in Odensåker. All traces of Katarina end there.

  The person who helped me to research Katarina’s back­ground is a fellow student from my journalism course, Håkan Skogsjö. These days he is a writer, publisher and local historian in the Finland–Swedish archipelago of Åland. He has been researching family
history since his teens and is one of the foremost researchers in the field throughout the Swedish-speaking area. If Håkan Skogsjö cannot identify Katarina’s childhood home, that means it must be extremely hard to find her, and maybe just impossible. I also write to the local family history association in Mariestad, the municipality Odensåker belongs to, but there is no information to be had there either.

  My only clue for the time before 1766 is DNA – and that proves baffling as well. Not a single person with absolutely identical mitochondrial DNA is registered in the databases where family historians record their results.

  If you go back thousands of years, on the other hand, my paternal grandmother and I have huge numbers of relatives. Parts of their mitochondria have the same DNA set. Many people have put on record that they belong to the particular branch of the genealogical tree beginning with ‘Helena’ (a woman from the group of early farmers) known as haplogroup H1g1. They can trace their historical origins back to Greece, Albania, Croatia, Serbia, Hungary, Germany and Belgium, and, on the other side of the English Channel, to England and Scotland.

  Many other family history researchers find hundreds of people whose mitochondria have identical DNA sets. There is a perfect match, with no differences arising from mutations. But when I search for perfect matches with my paternal grandmother’s DNA set, I cannot find a single one: not in Västergötland, not in Sweden, not in Europe – in fact, nowhere in the world. It looks as if my paternal grandmother’s forebears differed from those of my paternal grandfather in not living and working within a small, confined area for thousands of years.

  However, once I’ve toned down my requirements and started looking not for a perfect match, but for people with a DNA set that differs by a single mutation, some matches turn up. I find 20 test subjects with a partial match. Their earliest known foremothers are not from Sweden; nearly all are from Scotland.