anders andersson (update)

I have been meaning to look at the household examination records on SVAR, the databases of the Swedish National Archives, to see if they made available online later years for Blidsberg. As I noted in my last blog post on Anders Andersson, Jeff's 3rd great grandfather, I was only able to find him in these records up to 1883 in Brunn, as Ancestry and Genline only had up to that year in their household examination records. I finally checked SVAR (you need to activate at least a 3 hour subscription on SVAR, so I was waiting until I knew I had at least a couple of hours in a row free). I was in luck, their household examination records for Blidsberg and Humla went up to 1900. Maybe now I would be able to find Anders' death date, as this would be listed in the household record if he died during his residence in one of the parishes.

I was not sure where to start to find Anders, as I did not know which village or farm within Blidsberg he had moved to. Sometimes you can find the village name if you find them in the "moving out" or "moving in" records, but these were not available online for the year 1883 for these parishes. My only choice was to start browsing through the pages of the household examination records for Blidsberg 1880-1900. Luckily I found them very quickly, on page 5, living in the location of "Sluntom" in Blidsberg. Their son, Frans Wilhem, soldier, and his wife are living in the same village or farm of Sluntom, listed right below Anders on the record. The record shows that Frans was living in Blidsberg with his parents until 1890, then they all moved to Humla for a short time, and Frans alone moved back to Sluntom, Blidsberg with his wife. Anders and Maja stayed in Humla after they moved there from Blidsberg in 1890.

When Anders moves to Humla in 1890, he is 65 years old. Anders and Maja were easy to find in the Humla household record as the page number was noted on the Blidsberg record when they left. They are found on page 96, living in the village of Storemberg? (difficult to read) A death date is given for Maja of November in 1898. Soon after, in 1899 at the age of 74, Anders leaves this village for another one in Humla, Odegard. Anders only lives without his wife for another year and a half, as I found his death record in Humla on May 18, 1900. He was 75 years old.

I wrote a little bit about the churches in Humla and Blidsberg in my last post. The church in Blidsberg was built in 1868. Since Anders moved back to Blidsberg in 1883, living there for 7 years, he and his wife would have attended the church that was built and is still standing today.

picture by Daniel E on kyrkokartan.se website

Since Anders also lived in Humla for the last 10 years of his life, he would have attended the new church there as well, built in the 1880s. I am guessing he also would have been buried here with his wife who also died in Humla. I do not know much about the burial customs in Sweden, but I think everyone was buried in the Church graveyard. I would assume this would get pretty crowded quickly, so I wonder if everyone gets a stone, or how they manage the amount of burials. Humla is not a very populated parish though, with only about 2-4 burials a year at that time; so perhaps this was not much of a problem.

picture by Ake Fagerlund on kyrkokartan.se website

Since I now know that Anders is living during the 1890 census, I checked it again to see if I could find him. This time I just did a search for Anders with a birth date of 1825, leaving out the parish of birth. I am actually not sure why I did not do this before, I guess I did not have as much confidence that he was living at this time and gave up too quickly. Anyway, he was listed in Humla with his wife Maja, with a birth place of Humla (which is incorrect). He was not listed in the 1900 census though; he must have died before it was taken. He was alive however to see his daughter Emma off to America in 1892. For some reason it makes me happy to think he knew about this big change in one of his children's lives. I have not found any other evidence that any of his other children moved to America. Two of his sons became soldiers and his other daughter married a soldier. Perhaps they felt an attachment to Sweden being in the military. The oldest son Johan was not a soldier, but was at least living in Blidsberg by 1891 according to the household examination records. (I did not find Anders' son Johan in the 1900 census).