My dad and my mom used to tell me family stories, some of which I used to think were tall tales…
I eventually found out they were mostly true, only the details being slightly bent in the oral history.
I found out, for instance, that my father came from a family that had been very determined to keep family records, before and after coming to America.
And that my mother had a grandmother who’d lived a real western adventure.
And that my parents both grew up in Oklahoma during the wild days, just after the state came into the Union.
The outlaw Cole Younger, associated with Jesse James, had a nephew who worked on my mother’s parents’ farm. And it was this gentle-spoken young man who introduced my mother to my father. Cole Younger himself had been in prison in Stillwater, MN, and had been released, to spend his final years in Missouri. Most of Cole Younger’s family had been killed in the violence of the post-Civil War period in Kansas—it was a bad place and a bad time. But one of his brothers or sisters apparently lived long enough to have a son, whose name was Bill or Bob, as my mother recalls, who worked on the family farm in Anadarko OK, and who apparently visited his uncle in Stillwater. When my father admired my mother from a distance, Younger, acquainted with both, managed an introduction. My father worked at the Anadarko ice house, and my mother began to insist on doing the drive into town after ice that summer. They were secretly married in El Reno OK, and didn’t tell relatives on both sides until some months later.
My maternal great-grandmother was the survivor of an accident that drowned or separated her family as they were crossing a major river on the move west. Her name was Missouri Duff. But in my searching census records, I found her on an old census report from before the accident, and I found, in the next census, her mother and a brother living in a town near the Missouri river. Evidently they’d survived, her father and other children had drowned—and she’d survived, taking the name of Missouri and moving first to Kansas and then to Oklahoma, to grow up and marry with never a notion she had living relatives.
My grandfather was a cowboy turned salesman as Indian Territory became settled towns. His mother was Louisiana Carolina Boone, and my father named me after her. She was one of those Boones, and she came into Indian Territory out of Texas with her husband, my great-grandfather, and ended up living with my grandfather, then taking care of my father when he was very small.
When she died, my father went to live with other relatives, an uncle, and only came home to live with my grandfather when he married my step-grandmother, a spectacularly gracious lady, in every sense of the word.
Well, I got all the family stories—including the night St. Elmo’s fire turned up on a herd of cattle when my grandfather was riding herd in an impending thunderstorm: horns and hooves glowed—the herd spooked, and if you remember the song “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” it must have been like that.
A part of my family is Dutch, and used to own a major slice of New Jersey and Manhattan: they became bankers, and one a Supreme Court judge—but half that family broke off and went down to Virginia and the Carolinas. That was my half, poor as church mice, and working in farming, from Virginia to Nebraska during the Civil War and down to Kansas in the Bleeding Kansas days, then on into Oklahoma.
But when I got seriously into genealogy, I began to fill in the pieces of various things. I found Missouri Duff’s missing family. I found how we connect to Daniel Boone’s father, Squire Boone, and how we connect, though part of the Boone family fiercely disputes it, through a dubious union, to the de Bohuns, one of the kingmaking families in England. Whether or not the Boone line does connect—I’m related to the de Bohuns down another line as well. And here’s an interesting point: these families keep connecting and reconnecting: geographical closeness, and social circles: availability of potential good matches, strengthening economic and political ties, in an era of arranged marriages. When you have a nest of connections that keep reiterating, I think it likely that relationship is true.
A great number of my forbears came over from England: read: ran for their lives to get out of England during the English Civil War. A lot of them were Charles I’s supporters. My ancestors were not fans of our Pilgrim fathers, quite on the other side of the political fence.
I’ve been able to trace relations going back and back and back…a lot of lines through those English emigres…
And here’s the kicker. It turns out Jane and I are related to each other—back in England. One of her folk married one of the de Bohuns, both of us in direct descent.
One of the really fun things is going through Wikipedia finding out about these people. Mine had a penchant for getting involved in royal politics and getting caught on the losing side—many were very creatively executed in a very brutal age.
Fortunately, they managed to reproduce before meeting their nasty end.
Not all were saints. I’m related to Hugh the Despenser—-reputed as one of the most corrupt men in England. And to William Marshal, reputed as one of the most honest.
I’ve found answers to family mysteries: the family story is that we came over from Ireland, when most geneologies try to make us German. Well, we’re right: our guy, John Cherry, married to Bridgett Haney, was of British origin, but had been living in Ireland, and his wife was apparently Irish—when they, or he, immigrated to the states. And that was the origin of the story. That family came over from Normandy, but not in the invasion: the name(of, originally de Cerisy, has a ‘de’ (of)—which is the sort of thing that ordinarily denotes some lordly family, but in this case I think it simply means “from the village of Cerisy”, a little place in Normandy, France, no nobility involved, and not one of William the Conqueror’s lot, just a guy from a French village who came to England.
And—a very interesting update: research in French records gives another story—not de Cerisy, ‘from the village of Cerisy’, but de Chery, from the town of ‘Chery,’ in the Centre district of France. It seems that one Jean de Chery held property in Normandy, or had some ancestral rights in William the Conqueror’s land, but that one could not at that time enter Normandy from the rest of France without a royal permit—which Jean de Chery sought from his king, Charles. King Charles, now called Charles the Mad, had once been known as Charles the Good, but he had had a mental breakdown, what they call the glass syndrome, becoming convinced he could shatter, literally, and convinced that assassins were on his track.
Actually, re Charles’ paranoia, it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you, and it wasn’t a bad guess. There were three contenders for the French throne: the Capets, descended from Charlemagne, the Burgundians, who claimed southern central France as their ancestral domain, and had allies clear across France; and the de Courtenays, who contended they should be kings of France. Burgundy was assassinating people who stood in his way.
And there is a document which indicates that the de Cherys were a) in charge of the substantial town of Chery, and b) closely tied to the de Courtenays who were c) increasingly split as to where their fortunes would best advance, in William’s enterprise, or in France, trying to succeed the failing Charles Capet the Mad…that Burgundy was intent on killing and supplanting. There was a de Courtenay branch, the lords of Arrablay, one of whom, I think also named Charles, is documented to have married his neighbor, one Jeanne de Chery; so there were marriage ties between the de Cherys and the vastly powerful de Courtenays.
Burgundy began to gain ground, and while the de Courtenays didn’t sail with William the Conqueror, a number of them went over to England after the Conquest—possibly because they were feeling the heat from Burgundy and Charles the Mad was, well, mad…
The de Courtenays who emigrated to England set up a castle with William’s permission, in Leicestershire, central England.
Well, now we have one Jean de Chery (the male form of John/Jeanne) who at a certain point seeks the permission of Charles the Mad to go visit his properties in Normandy, after which he vanishes from history, and the de Chereis turn up in Leicestershire…attached to the de Courtenay branch that had established in England. It was, thanks to William, *no* trouble to get ship from Normandy to England in that time.
And Burgundy was busy assassinating his rivals, and King Charles was getting crazier, and the de Courtenays in France finally dwindled down to a few, one female unable to pass the title, and virtually powerless, though they still existed.
Part of the de Chereis family moved from Leicestershire and set up in the south, at Maidenhead and Bray, in Berkshire, and those folk by then are spelling it Cherry, and still marrying people of some substance, to judge by the graves, the literacy, and the constant interweaving of spouses of some indication of wealth, even title. Then from Bray, a Cherry (they all tended to be named John and David and Thomas) went over to northern Ireland, and after a few generations, a John and his son David emigrated to Virginia, in a time of religious unrest and civil war. So my little guy from de Cerisy may instead be a much more politically connected guy skipping out of the town of Chery, in central France to go join the de Courtenays in Leicestershire, before the king who was his patron went entirely over the brink.
Jane’s family name, possibly originally Faucher, may, according to one name-origin, have come from the Limoges area of France, then to London, then to the Americas, which is kind of generic information and not easy to attach to individuals, but there is new information, too—indicating a substantial house in England, the house at Fanshawe Gate, which is now a beautiful garden showplace in Derbyshire—and a connection of her very definite ancestor, via records in Massachusetts, to a Fanshawe from the house at Fanshawe Gate who went from that Derbyshire hall down to London: that ancestor married one Eunice Bouton, who seems like a quiet New England lady of French ancestry—until you get into her past, and figure that—ironically enough—that lady’s ancestors run back to the dukes of central France, back before the Norman Invasion. Both these possible connections are still under investigation—but they do answer some interesting questions and fill in some gaps; and they are better connected to specific individuals whose time and place we can say match and intersect. It’s worth more study, at very least. The de Chereis are in Burke’s Peerage.
Anyway, hunting ancestors one of my favorite winter-evening hobbies. I was amazed that I could trace anybody by real, checkable records, but the computer age has made it an easy-chair kind of hobby; you can access, almost instantly, every digitized census report and village record, not just in the States, but in Britain, Italy, France, and now apparently into Japan and Germany, the Netherlands, you name it. They open up more of these every month, and if they ever digitize Creek County, OK, I may be able to open up a whole new part of the tree by finding my paternal great-grandmother. That could happen.
The software system I use is www.ancestry.com and if you’ve ever wanted to get into this, it’s a marvelous way to learn history: it gets pretty personal when you know it was your great-great-great-great grandfather in that battle…
For any of you who are in the Ancestry network, our tree is “It’s the Eleventh Century and We’re All Barbarians…”, a quote from our favorite Christmas movie, The Lion in Winter, which is appropriate on so many grounds.
Curses, just what I need, another thing to suck away hours. Took a stab at it a few years ago, not much luck. Finding more now but haven’t validated the “Cherokee” connection unless the woman in question was wearing an Anglo name.
Finding that heavily documented collateral relatives, like First Ladies, pretty much ensure nobody has recorded your direct ancestor yet. Irony? And have a problematic unrecorded *grandfather* of all things. You’d THINK someone who was born after 1900 would show up Someplace! AGH!
@chakaal: not likely! I have more gaps in the later generations than the earlier. The more stringent privacy rules are causing a lot of things to be taken off the web.
There’s a point to that. Turns out Grandma AND the LDS conflict with the census records. What a mess… And with so many 2nd and 3rd marriages (or maybe firsts!) popping up everywhere, I’m glad I’m Pastafarian (if not pastatarian) because otherwise the flying spaghetti would be too much for me.
Anything you get from the LDS sites should be taken with a very large grain of salt. I’ve found that their error rates are higher than most other sites, and where there is a conflict, they’re more likely to be in the wrong.
As for differences between what Grandma says and what the censuses say… how much do you trust your grandmother? And please remember that censuses were self-reported, so people might fudge their answers for all manner of reasons, ranging from (ie., for ages) ‘I don’t remember, so I’ll round the date off to what looks good’ to ‘I am not admitting to being born in that year, so I’ll shave a few off…”
I have a great-great-grandmother who was born in 1841. The first time she shows up in the censuses, she’s only two years younger than that. By the last time she shows up, she’s over a dozen years younger than that…
I figure LDS data is also self reported, or for the benefit of ancestors who didn’t convert in their lifetimes. So Grandma’s people probably reported “Ada Ann” to the LDS while Ada MAE’s people reported Ada Mae to the census.
Relatives closer to you do not have as MANY descendants doing genealogy and putting them into the databases—simple matter of math. My immediate paternal grandmother is unfindable—NOT that she may not be in the database, or that her ancestors may not be, but the link is a bear to establish. She’s cost me a lot more effort than most of mine—because a) she married (or did not marry) my grandfather back when Oklahoma was only 3 years a state, she gave her child (my father) to his paternal grandmother to bring up, and did not even name the baby, she popped up now and again and was known to my father, but it took me 20 years to get her maiden name out of my grandfather, and at her death, she was buried under yet another name, having married somebody else (but no divorce from my grandfather, leading me to believe that there was no marriage, either)—and is buried in a cemetary which was allowed to go to ruin and which has now been taken over by the small town. I know where she is buried, but not under what name and not at what exact date. I know where her family eventually lived, but I have not yet turned up any record of them.
Now, my other relatives kept meticulous records, family Bibles, and our Dutch branch even showed up in Oklahoma tracking what had happened to their descendants, plus having a book of all sorts of relations. That helps.
So I feed what I know into the Mormon database—as many people do who have good information; I have a background in history, so I can weed out the bad info; and if you use the internet you can look up what was going on in what year in what place, so you get clues that help you establish whether, say, Cold Ashton was a village or a manor house. Village. That gives you a clearer picture. When you begin to figure out your relative was there having moved from Gloucester in the same year the King and the Parliamentarians were shooting cannon at Gloucester, that gives you a clue your ancestor may have made a move for his health, and if you look at his parentage or his wife’s, you figure, gee, grandma Smith lived in Cold Ashton, recently deceased, but—wife had a sister, who, yes, married a guy from here. So when the shelling started, our couple made a strategic move to visit wife’s sister in Cold Ashton. These kids grew up with their cousins in Cold Ashton. A whole picture develops…because you look up the history. You can’t swear to it, but it’s got a reasonable chance, because it’d be odd if the sisters both lived in a very small village and DIDN’T speak. Often.
I’m doing a different kind of genealogy, based on my tree, trying to decipher the personal histories of various folk based on their neighbors, their times, their likely associations—all the stuff a tree has no room for, but which IS there to be pulled in; and it also helps you find the oopses, like the 80 year old who produces a child. Clearly the date is wrong or the person is. So you can start ferretting out the problem relationship.
When you are working with the LDS International Genealogical Index (IGI) you get fairly good results if you stick to the transcriptions done from parish registers that are not patron submitted. Try Hugh Wallis’ site for a search using batch numbers – http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~hughwallis/ . Each batch is a parish or part of a parish. It’s not up to date but it is still a start although it hasn’t been updated since 2002.
Their new family search pilot has great possibilities – http://pilot.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#start . They have stopped the old batch system and this is the replacement. You have to use both searches and will probably have to do so for a number of years to come until they integrate the databases.
Thanks for the links, I shall try them out.
The LDS Library also has a new beta site with possibilities: http://library.fsbeta.familysearch.org/ . Printing from this site doesn’t give an easy to read result but, it’s still beta and things are in flux.
The links in the latest front-page post and the following comments (re: ancestry.com and looking at people die) kinda hit hard today. I’m trying to find a gg-grandmother’s family from (I think) Ontario, Canada, and have been reconstructing every Mallory family I can find in the area, since nothing else seems to be working.
Today, ran across one such family with four kids dead in five days. Diptheria.
Ow. OWOWOWOW. Every child in that family 8 or younger, gone. This isn’t likely my grandmother’s family–the timing of the dates aren’t right–but if they were her cousins? They’d be her age-mates.
Ow…
The helplessness people must have felt in the plague years, in the diptheria epidemics, in the Spanish flu—when the doctors (if any) couldn’t do a thing, and the stuff is going like wildfire through the family—
We should be duly thankful we have modern medical care. The discovery of smallpox vaccine and Jonas Salk’s discovery of the polio vaccine—I remember having to stay indoors in hot un-airconditioned summers in Oklahoma when there was a polio outbreak in town…and nobody even knew how it spread, or what carried it. Swimming pools would close. Theater was out. And that’s a disease that doesn’t have the virulence of some of the others…
Chakaal, you are right about the self reporting nature of the LDS or “Mormon” databases. Most of that information was entered by rank amateurs who had a love of knowing who their ancestors are, even if they were mistaken from time to time. This is why the Mormon Church has begun a massive overhaul of the data in the “Granite Vault” in the mountains east of Salt Lake City. The New FamilySearch program that Tulrose speaks of is a way to unify and correct all the entries of the last 150 years.
My wife and I have found several errors, like the when some kind-hearted cousin of hers had entered her stillborn brother as a girl. We had a very difficult time correcting that obvious error. It didn’t help that he had an androgynous name, Lynn, that was used again as my wife’s middle name!
Now, this could make it sound like using the LDS database is nothing but trouble. However, as smaller, independent genealogical societies coalesced around the world wide, existing LDS one, the forms established by nineteenth century Mormon Temple clerks became the common thread. The modern standard now used by international Genealogy societies world wide including the name GEDCOM are Mormon in origin. We could very well have said these are our sacred records and therefore are none of your business. But, we’ve understood that if our goal is to unite the Family of Man, living and dead, then we could use the help of others, our brothers and sisters. So, we share and hope others will share with us.
The 4th of the Major Mormon temple ceremonies is call “Sealing,” meaning sealing the heart of the husband to the wife and the child to the parent. When you see a “Mr & Mrs Smith” as the parents of a “William Smith,” it means that the names of William’s parents were unknown. So, “Mr & Mrs Smith” was used as a substitute in a Mormon temple to seal William as a son to his parents. You can think of it as Mormon shorthand for “I can’t go any further on this line.” And you should take it as a personal challenge to find the name of this missing Couple on your own.
Mormon Records are done the way they are for particularly Mormon reasons. But, if you can find your own meaning in them, go ahead, you’re welcome to look, add to and correct if necessary.
HRHSpence, this is why I like to stick to the controlled extraction files. There are errors there, of course, but one can usually go back to the film to see the original image.
I agree with you there. The Temple files are merely a place to look for hints. But within the next 10-15 years, most of the errors in FamilySearch sites should be taken care of.
Interesting, Spence, and good to know. I had really wondered about the Mrs and Mr when I got to relatives that really didn’t tend to do Misters.
Mrs. Ivar the Boneless does tea with Mrs. Robert the Devil…sort of conjures this winsome image, sort of like the Capital One commercials.
Have you got a why-for regarding the Y Somme Picardie entry that crops up in so many of my ancestors’ records? One opines that if we could only have told them to avoid the Somme River and never visit Picardie, they might have lived longer!
But honestly the Mormons are due some real, sincere thanks for opening these files to the world. I never could have tracked down my great-gran’s line without it; and I couldn’t have gotten across the pond, either, except in one instance. It is soooooo easy compared to visiting courthouses and parishes, and think of it this way—if ONE person has the right info and can make it look authentic, it will proliferate through the database.
Plus one way to help find the errors is to intersperse your collection from the db with sitting down and doing the math—plus know the culture: the likelihood of a woman bearing a child in her 40’s is not high in 1300. The possibility of a girl of 15 being married in Holland in the 1300’s is not that unlikely. There is an interesting strict convention about Dutch names, for instance, that made it proverbial that a Dutch couple getting married already knew the names of their children…the first boychild after the paternal grandfather, the girl after the maternal grandmother, the third, etc, etc,…in a very set pattern. Plus if a child died before the next ’round’, its succeeding sib got exactly the same name as the lost child. And Dutch people followed the Nordic pattern of naming until Napoleon insisted they come up with last names…etc. You can learn a lot that will help you figure what COULD have been the child’s grandfather’s name, if you know you’re in the region that followed that custom.
So yes, cultural knowledge can help a lot.
But I am surprised and very glad that the Mormons opened up this gift to the world at large…and they’ve gotten a lot of history from the general public, all around the world, not to mention willing hands to enter old, fading records. And personal records: we loaded in, for instance, the contents of a family Bible’s records, which weren’t in the db; and people know about births that weren’t recorded… My parents weren’t born where there were doctors or records, except as an afterthought—a stillborn child or one that died after a few days (a great-uncle of mine) just wouldn’t be recorded under these circumstances: there’s a headstone in the cemetary, but no name, and no county record. So those records can only come from family history.
Question to all you genealogy folks: I may have found ship records for some great-grandparents. The names are right, the ages are right, the country is right… but the times are off, and marital status. These are ships coming from Sweden to the US, which list my grandparents as US citizens and are about 30-40 years after I think that they actually emigrated. And great-grandma and great-granddad are on different ships, he’s listed as single and she is marked as a widow. What’s the odds that these are people who went home for some reason, and this is their return to the US? They were in their late 60s at the time, in the 1930’s, so I am thinking that they may have traveled home for a funeral or final visit to family in the old country. And that the marital status is just sloppy reporting, since they were traveling apart. Thoughts?
I’ve found that ages and marital status on passenger lists are frequently “iffy”. They are 2nd hand information anyway. Are the passport applications available? I know little about US genealogy. Can you find the passenger list from the US to Sweden? That would help. I’ve found various people on shipping manifests that travelled back to the “old country”, sometimes only staying 10 days or so. And this was Australia to England, 4-5 weeks travel. My guess is that there was some legal work that necessitated an appearance in person.
First of all, write down every particular you can for that particular record, plus any serial number that record has. these things have a way of disappearing back into the dark and they’re hard to recover. If you have enough of its peculiar info in a lump, you can often get it to come back up.
These records are on little postcard-sized file cards, and first it would be very easy for a modern person to make a guess at what is there in handwriting, which can put a few decades onto a date. There may be a stamp for the date, and the ink on it may or may not be wearing down. There is a requirement in US law that if you are standing for naturalization you cannot leave the country during a certain period—but if they’re already citizens, no trouble. If you can find the original card as an image, it will tell you spouse, dob, birthplace, destination, purpose of trip, where you will be staying in the US (if non-citizen) and who’s traveling with you, among other things—like how much money you’re carrying. I wish I could remember the exact names of the naturalization documents—but there is 1) the application, then some time later 2) the actual judge-signed citizenship-granting document, with any name change if made, and there is a third document, 3) the oath of allegiance. The first 2 are most informative, followed closely by the ship-card.
I think the Y Somme Picardie problem was a goof up on the part of ancestry.com. I think their computers put that on a lot of names on accident. I understand it may be cleared up. You might want to check. I mean when a computer goof up, you can get spectacular errors.
I found it so often in the Tipton line, I began to wonder if one of my lateral Tipton relatives was a complete idiot…I am still finding it, but finding it less frequently. Another one is Span, Georgia…which I think is because if you knock the < off the span command in HTML, then you get the name of a town in Georgia. The ones that really get me--lately---are the number of people who do not know that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two...and that this makes it very unlikely that Avice de Hamperduster died in Virginia in 1483.
Here’s a couple of sites to bookmark:
http://www.archive.org/details/genealogy
and
http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc/index.php
The Brigham Young site is also referenced in the Archive site. They were mentioned this morning in Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings blog.
Some of my favorites are in the “Find Famous Relatives” feature of Ancestry.com. I mean, I wouldn’t mind being a 22nd great grandson of Robert Peel (1788-1850), but it seems to have required time travel to fit that many generations into 170 years. Somehow, one of his great-great-grandsons born in 1906 managed to have a granddaughter born in 1432, and she had a daughter born in 1415.
Blink, Blink. OK.
Ow.
That’s as bad as some of the trees I’ve seen, where people are linked as their own ancestors.
Right now, having uploaded my file to Ancestry (carefully cleaned of information other than names for everyone after 1930), I’m filling in the historical records (censuses, mostly) for everyone it can recognize.
(It’s also a way of getting the information into the file, since the hard drive the data was on died a month ago, and took three months of work with it. Back up, and back up *externally*.)
(for the curious: Theo’s Tree)
As further detail of my question about ships and emigration, here’s the info that I have:
There is a record in the Swedish emigration files for an Ellen Phillips, recorded Sept 26, 1934, going from Goteborg/Gothenborg to NY,NY. The age is right, but it says that her place of origin is the US. The ship record on Oct 5, 1934 says that she’s a widow, and lives in Washington state, and in the “Naturalized” column has something that looks like D O May 1, 1934 94237.
There is also a ship record for Charles Sandeen, on Aug 27, 1934, sailing from Gothenborg, saying he’s single, naturalized in Minneapolis, Sept 11, 1915, No. 574187, and saying that he lives in Minneapolis.
Now, my great-granddad Charles Sandeen was married to Ellen Phillips. So the fact that these two names are sailing between the same ports within months of each other makes me think it’s my great-grandparents. But I don’t know why they have her living in Washington. Although I also got to thinking… wouldn’t she be using her married name? So maybe I need to look for records under that name?
Rarely is there a mention of a maiden name on ship’s records. I’ve seen it only a couple of times in the hundreds I’ve entered. I’d say look for Ellen Sandeen, naturalized on that same date, which would not be unusual. Wives and children were generally treated as an of-course and dealt with in conjunction with the husband’s case. If Ellen Phillips is a widow in 1934, she was likely married to a Phillips who lived in Washington. D O eludes me, but it could be that number refers to her husband’s naturalization record or passport; it could be a departure date from the US and a passport number. The only ship records I’ve handled have been non-citizens, so I don’t know what data they may have had in the blanks on a US citizen. It is not impossible, if Goteburg is the city of origin, that the Sandeen given actually is a relative, so don’t totally despair of that record proving significant; but I’d look for all the Sandeens you can find around that birthdate, from that origin, and in Minnesota. There may be many (I’ve got some relatives named Smith) but what you need is one distinguishing characteristic that may be buried in family stories, something that’s always mentioned that never made sense, or maybe a census record from Minnesota that gives just one little datum re origin.
Can you find out how they got to Sweden from the US? I took a quick look at passengers leaving England between 1890 and 1960 with the name Sandeen and there were none there heading to Sweden. My thinking was that they may have gone via England.
Very easily so, too. When I visited Norway, I was quite amazed to discover how close to Norway and Sweden I had been during several prior trips to the UK. There is convenient ferry service these days, and probably has been. If their original emigration path took them over to England or the Netherlands—they could have come on a British or Dutch boat. I know some of my British ancestors did a stopover in the Netherlands, possibly because they could get a better price for passage, who knows?
The mercator projection maps favoured by the British Empire tend to give people
a badly distorted sense of the northlands.
Easy to understand the impulse to be larger than life and use a map to confirm
the feeling. I’ve found that in history the farther back you go the distinctions
between Dutch, Germans of various types, and English get really blurry. There
was a lot of mobility as the various noble houses juggled properties around.
The Reformation and subsequent settlement by treaties tried to patch up what
the armies had ruined. I’ve run into the name change and move to avoid the
authorities in tracing family members. Sometimes the last name becomes the first
but it is pretty hard to make the jump without other records.
We’ve come a long way in a short time and I for one would hope we never go back
to the good old days of infant mortality, it still hurts to read those handwritten
family histories. The phrase “children that lived” used by the elders when I was
a kid turned out to mean lived to be 13 years old. What we think of as gossip
turned out when I examined it later to be the auditory record keeping system
used by the women with mnemonic cues to the timeline of events and people that
was refreshed by the discussions while quilting or some other activity. If it
didn’t get passed around it wasn’t knowledge.
I have no clue how they got back to Sweden. I know that they were Swedish, and that my grandfather was born in the US in 1907, so they were living here then. Which has me puzzled as to why the Swedish emigration records list her as emigrating in 34. Although if it’s not the same person, that would make sense. It’s just odd to me that there would be two people so close to my relatives traveling at the same time. Although that’s why coincidences always seem significant.
Ancestry says it’s bought a Swedish genealogical database site, so those records may become more easily available in the future. (Probably won’t help me, as my Swedish immigrants are way early, somewhere around 1650.)
One set of my great-grandparents was from Norway, and when I researched them, I found that there was a regular service for immigrants from Norway going to the United States. The route was Oslo to Hull, England, to Liverpool, to New York. Ship names (MAJESTIC of the White Star Line was the Liverpool-New York leg), times, even cargo carried, all of these are readily available online. You can even get a description of the first class passenger lounge…!
The Digitalarkivet is the source for genealogical records, including shipping data, out of Norway in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. The link is at http://www.arkivverket.no/ but an English page is available at http://www.digitalarkivet.no/cgi-win/WebFront.exe?slag=vis&tekst=meldingar&spraak=e
Yes, much of the material is in Norwegian, but some is in English. I found even the Norwegian records to be pretty clear; if you know ‘k’ is for ‘kvinne’ and means ‘girl/woman/female’, you can go a long way…
To satisy yourself you will probably have to prove that these are NOT your relatives and that’s often more difficult than proving they are yours.
And the fact that your grandfather was born in the US in 1907 means your gt grandma was here at that time but gt grandpa may not have been. There are a lot of reasons why he may have been away from home during that period of 1907.