Analysis of a Swedish Clerical Survey

This paper was submitted on August 3, 1990 as part of an independent study class at the University of Illinois.

Introduction

Purpose of the Study

Numbering in the tens of thousands and daunting in their detail, the Swedish clerical surveys (husförhörslängder) are a remarkably underutilized source of information for social historians and demographers. The surveys, which were first mandated by church law in 1686, were intended not only to determine a headcount but also to establish a schedule for ministers to "know their [parishioners'] progress and knowledge of the assigned sections of the catechism, and diligently admonish children, farm helpers, and servant maids to read in book and with their own eyes see what God bids and commands with his Holy Word" (Johansson, p. 88). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, when they began to take their modern form, the surveys had been expanded to include vital statistics about each parishioner, information about property ownership, and (quite importantly) records of each person's movements into, out of, and throughout the parish.

As historical documents, the surveys are unusual in their scope: unlike a typical government census, which records a "snapshot" of a place at a particular moment in time, the clerical surveys provide a continuous record of human activity; in some locations the surveys provide a depiction of parish life that stretches back, unbroken, for over three centuries. One of the most important aspects of the surveys is the meticulous accounting of movements from one parish to another (or even from one farm to another within the parish). These links to other sets of records are a genealogist's boon; they also provide some interesting possibilities in the field of social research. The "living" quality of the clerical surveys allows researchers to study not only broad trends that occur over time, but also the individual events that make up these trends.

I first became interested in Vättlösa Parish, the rural district in Västergötland that is the focus of this study, when I began researching my family's genealogy in 1976. Because it had been nearly a century since my immigrant ancestor left the homestead, I had no pretensions that I would be able to find out anything about my Swedish ancestors other than the sterile figures contained in the records. That was, until I discovered that a manuscript describing life in Vättlösa Parish and emigration to America existed in the hands of Fritiof Fryxell, professor of geology at Augustana College and a relative by marriage. Professor Fryxell's manuscript, augmented by details taken from the clerical survey, provided many important clues to why my own ancestor's family left for the New World and settled in Moline—a story I described in a journal article in 1988.

In proposing a detailed analysis of the Vättlösa Parish clerical survey, I hoped to be able to bring together my knowledge of Swedish language and history, my interest in genealogy, and my expertise in computers to extract some new information from an relatively untapped source. I selected the period from 1861 to 1874 for one main reason: the first peasant emigrants left the parish in 1868 (a date that is fairly late for that section of Sweden), and I wanted to better understand the conditions that existed in the parish that finally set the forces of emigration in motion. By comparing the data I found to information that I have been able to gather from other sources (both published sources and the Fryxell manuscript), I hoped to answer some of my own questions about Vättlösa Parish and perhaps at the same time develop some useful conclusions about clerical surveys in general.

Methodology

Like other clerical surveys of the period, the Vättlösa Parish husförhörslängder contain the following items of information about each person:

1. class or title (such as "farmer" or "servant")
2. first and last name
3. date and parish of birth
4. date of marriage
5. date of migration to the current locality and the locality from which the person migrated
6. date of death
7. date of migration from the current locality and the locality to which the person migrated
8. catechismal information
9. additional notations (usually having to do with handicaps or criminal charges)

Because of the volume of information involved (over 25,000 individual data items), I employed several techniques in sequence to convert the data found in the clerical survey into a format that could be read and processed by a computer:

1. I transcribed the data from the microfilm and entered it into a word-processing program in the order that it appeared in the survey. (This turned out to be a two-step process, involving transcription to paper and then entry into the word-processing program, which inevitably introduced errors into the database.)

2. The computer sorted the data by name, producing two separate lists of information. I checked these lists for obvious errors (such as misspelled names and impossible dates) and corrected them where necessary.

3. I searched the data for duplicate entries: that is, entries referring to the same person that occurred in different parts of the clerical survey listing. These entries were collated: the earliest entry became the main entry, while subsequent references were placed immediately after the main entry in the listing. In many cases these entries had not been in consecutive order in the original sorted listing, because either the first or last name was spelled differently.

4. I transferred the data to a database program and again checked for obvious errors (such as the date of in-migration occurring before the date of out-migration, or a female given name occurring with a patronymic ending in "son"), correcting them where necessary.

5. Using data fields associated with each entry, I divided the data into three separate databases:

a. A database of all clerical survey entries.

b. A database of unique persons (consisting of one entry for each individual who lived in Vättlösa Parish during the period 1861-74). c. A database of persons who lived in Vättlösa Parish on January 1, 1870.

When all these steps were complete, I was ready to begin processing the data according to different parameters. The results of these operations appear throughout this study.

Demographic Overview

Population

The transcription of the Vättlösa Parish clerical survey provided 2,483 separate line entries over the period 1861-74. Of course, many of these entries were duplicates created when persons and families moved from place to place within the parish. The total number of unique entries—individuals who lived in the parish for any length of time during the period of the study—was 1,845.

The actual number of persons living in the parish at any one time is slightly harder to determine, because in some cases entries were stricken without any date of out-migration being recorded (perhaps because the person left the parish without the proper authorization, or perhaps simply because of sloppy bookkeeping). I attempted to derive an accurate headcount for a single date, January 1, 1870. On this date, according to the clerical survey, 945 persons lived in Vättlösa Parish. Some 35 of these persons are problematic: they have been stricken without any date of out-migration. The entries that surround the problem entries provide some clues as to the approximate date of out-migration, and my best guess is that about 20 of them still lived in the parish in 1870. In any case, I have included all of these entries in the 1870 database.

The figure is in close agreement with totals derived from other sources. According to published statistics, Vättlösa Parish had 886 people in 1865 and 1,019 in 1880 (Sundbärg, p. 330). This represented the peak of population in the parish. The total fell to 846 in 1900 and by 1973, Vättlösa had only 456 citizens.

Gender

The breakdown of the different databases by gender reveals an interesting pattern:

	total	male	female
all entries	2,483	1,130 (45.5%)	1,353 (54.5%)
unique entries	1,845	843 (45.7%)	1,002 (54.3%)
1870 sample	945	449 (47.5%)	496 (52.5%)
national average		(48.4%)	(51.6%)

The 1870 sample indicates that women outnumbered men in Vättlösa Parish by a substantial margin, but the percentages are fairly close to the national average for that year. Overall, the percentage of women in Sweden dropped steadily during the 1800's: from 52.3% at the beginning of the century to 51.2% at the end.

In the other two databases, which do not represent a "snapshot" of the parish, there is an even greater difference in the numbers of entries denoting men and women. This is evidently the result of the high mobility among the servant class, which was even more pronounced among women. One woman in the study, Anna Andersdotter (born in 1841), was listed in the Vättlösa Parish rolls seven separate times, and during this time she also lived for two years in two neighboring parishes. By changing jobs more frequently than men, servant maids increased their representation in the clerical survey.

Births and Deaths

During the 19th century, separate lists of the births and deaths occurring within the parish were normally kept in special registers (födelselängder and dödslängder). These events were also recorded in the clerical survey—just one example of the redundancy built into the old Swedish record-keeping system. By comparing both sets of records, the researcher can gain additional clues about the persons in question and at the same time double-check factual information such as dates and places.

For Vättlösa Parish, the number of births and deaths as calculated from the clerical survey was as follows:

year	births	deaths	natural increase
1861	23	3	20
1862	25	14	11
1863	26	13	13
1864	30	20	10
1865	22	12	10
1866	25	11	14
1867	26	15	11
1868	22	12	10
1869	31	17	14
1870	22	17	5
1871	26	9	17
1872	32	14	18
1873	26	20	6
1874	24	12	12

The results show a steady natural growth rate of approximately 12 persons per year. (The unusually low death figure for 1861 is misleading. Deaths that occurred while the new parish register was being compiled that year were probably recorded only in the old register.)

Illegitimate births averaged about two per year. Children born out of wedlock were denoted as such throughout their childhood.

Nativity

Almost one half of the persons who lived in Vättlösa Parish during the 14 years of the study were born there, as shown in the following table:

 parish	    total    percentage
 Vättlösa		807		44.3%
 Holmestad		105		 5.8%
 Ledsjö		 66		 3.6%
 Husaby		 65		 3.6%
 Götene		 64		 3.5%
 Forshem		 52		 2.9%
 Björsäter		 40		 2.2%
 Berg			 34		 1.9%
 Lerdala		 34		 1.9%
 Varnhem		 33		 1.8%
 Källby		 26		 1.4%

As might be expected, the majority of the rest of the sample came from nearby parishes, which can be seen when the totals are broken down by pastorat, the next largest administrative unit. The following table summarizes persons born in Vättlösa's pastorat and its five neighbors:

pastorat	main parish	direction     total    percentage
  54C		Vättlösa		    - 		995		54.6%
  54E		Ledsjö		southwest		186		10.2%
  54B		Forshem		northwest		 95		 5.3%
  61D		Berg			east			 73		 4.0%
  61C		Varnhem		southeast		 69		 3.8%
  60C		Ullervad		northeast		 11		 0.6%
 other								394		21.6%

The statistics indicate a couple of interesting trends. The largest numbers of "non-native" parishioners were from the neighboring parishes of Holmestad and Ledsjö, areas which, like Vättlösa, are almost completely rural. Götene Parish, of which Vättlösa was officially an annexforsamling (an adjunct) does not provide as many parishioners as one might have expected. Götene's population was about a third the size of Vättlösa's, and consisted mainly of the village of Götene; perhaps there was less movement, especially among the servant classes, from villages to farms.

The number of persons born in Forshem Parish is slightly harder to explain. Forshem lies about eight miles north of Vättlösa, on Lake Väner; it seems unlikely that Vättlösa, located in the middle of a vast plain, would have been the recipient of a mass exodus from a fishing region. But there are also, of course, many farms in Forshem Parish, and it would not have taken the transfer of more than two or three families to skew the data. Nine of the Forshem natives lived at Ingelstorp, where the farmer Carl Wilhelm Tiselius brought his household from Götene in 1871.

Eight individuals born in Stockholm also called Vättlösa Parish their home at one time or another between 1861 and 1874. Four of these were foster children; two others were maids. Another was Carolina Olsson, the wife of the assistant minister, and the last was Mamsell Tekla Carolina Charlotta Sandberg (born in 1845), who lived on the crown estate at Lilla Bjurum.

There was also one foreigner living in Vättlösa Parish: Karen Helene Gullensdotter, born in the Norwegian parish of Madum. She came to Vättlösa in 1872 with her husband, Johannes Carlsson, a worker from the nearby parish of Berg.

Marriages

There were 77 marriages in Vättlösa Parish in the 13-year span ending in 1873, an average of almost six weddings per year. There were no divorces recorded in the Vättlösa clerical survey during the period of the study. According to national statistics, there were only 59 divorces in the entire län (county) of Skaraborg during the period 1881-90. Assuming that such a divorce rate was also typical for Vättlösa Parish during the period of the study, one would expect to find about 0.2 divorces during the 14-year span, or about one divorce per century. Finding a divorce would therefore have been a much bigger surprise than not finding one.

Social and Economic Patterns

Social Divisions

By 1870, Vättlösa Parish was becoming overcrowded with landless peasants. As family holdings were subdivided into smaller and smaller pieces, young men were faced with some unenviable choices: to work as a tenant farmer with the hope of one day purchasing or inheriting a farm, to move to the city, or to emigrate. More than half of the heads of household in Vättlösa did not own a farm (51%), which was well above the national average of about 43% (Lindberg, p. 98). And those farmers that did own their land generally owned smaller tracts than their fathers had had, although it was often possible to clear new ground for farming.

In Vättlösa itself, the number of parcels of one mantal (a taxing unit equivalent to an average-sized farm) or more had dropped from eight in 1750 to only two in 1865, while the total number of ägare (farm owners) rose from 25 to 74. And 46 of those 74 parcels were less than one-quarter of a mantal, barely enough to subsist on under any circumstances (Sundbärg, p. 161).

The mix of occupations, as recorded by the church clerk, was fairly typical for a rural parish in 1870. There was a lord (Herr Eric Haldan Gullstrand) and a lieutenant (Lars Adolf Hjärta) on the estate at Bolaholm; a captain (Albert Ossian Hall) overseeing the crown estate at Lilla Bjurum; an assistant minister (Carl Oscar Nordahl) at Nya Stommen. There were the 75 landed farmers and just two men listed as tradesmen, a miller and a tailor. There were seven soldiers and three retired soldiers in charge of households (a few others lived in the parish with sons or daughters). At the bottom of the came the tenant farmers and the workers.

The heads of household in 1870 are summarized in the following list:

 title				Swedish			total
 gentleman			herre			  1
 captain			kapten			  1
 lieutenant			löjtnant			  1
 assistant minister	komminister		  1
 parish clerk		klockare			  1
 landowner			ägare		 	 74
 farmer				brukare			  1
 miller				mjölnare			  1
 tailor				rockmakare		  1
 retired sergeant		f.d.	sergeant		  1
 retired soldier		f.d. soldat		  1
 pensioner			gratialist		  1
 soldier			soldat			  7
 crofter			torpare			 27
 crofter			arrendator		  5
 crofter			backstugusittare	 24
 dependent tenant		inhyses(hjon)		  5
 cotter				statdräng			  5
 married farmhand		gift dräng		  7
 worker				arbetskarl		 12
 lodger				hyresgäst			  2

Religion

Most of the flock in Vättlösa Parish followed the Lutheran church, which was the state church, to varying degrees. There were, however, seven parishioners who were officially registered as Mormons. At least four of these people eventually emigrated to North America. The Mormon family at Hästhagen consisted of Johannes Svensson and his wife Lena Jonsdotter. Their daughters, Anna Christina, 16, and Lovisa, 9, who were not listed as Mormons in the clerical survey, were the first peasants to emigrate to America directly from Vättlösa Parish, in 1868. The parents followed two years later. At Stenhagen, Lars Svensson and his son Sven Johan Larsson emigrated in 1874. Interestingly, both Johannes and Lars Svensson (they were not brothers) were inhyseshjon, one of the poorest classes of landless workers. An additional remark characterized Lars as a lösdrivare (vagrant). It was unusual of persons of such meager circumstances to find the means to emigrate, especially when they had families.

Migration Patterns

Intra-Parish Migration

Migration within the parish is one of the least studied and least understood aspects of the migration phenomenon. Sune Åkerberg classifies it as "normally unregistered" and "a difficult item to treat" in his essay "Theories and Methods of Migration Research" (Runblom and Norman, p. 22), but these local movements are unregistered only in the sense that they are not kept track of in separate lists (as are births, marriages, deaths, and inter-parish migrations). In fact, the clerical surveys contain all the information necessary to make a fairly complete study of the smallest movements on the migration hierarchy.

The table below summarizes the movements made by persons from one point in the parish to another:

year	in-movements	out-movements	error
1862	31	33	-2
1863	38	34	+4
1864	26	35	-9
1865	29	23	+6
1866	46	49	-3
1867	52	55	-3
1868	33	29	+4
1869	18	22	-4
1870	25	26	-1
1871	37	38	-1
1872	27	22	+5
1873	66	62	+4
average	32.9	32.9

In theory, the figures in the columns labeled "in-movements" and "out-movements" should be identical. In practice, there are several possible reasons why they do not: the clerk may have failed to record the movement properly, or I may have transcribed it improperly or been confused about whether the place involved is inside or outside the parish. The totals are identical, though, which is a hopeful sign. On average, about 33 persons (or about 3% of the population) moved to another place within the parish every year. The year 1868, with exactly 33 in-movements recorded, provides an example of the activity during a typical year in Vättlösa Parish:

Eight young men moved to neighboring farms to work as hands; three women found new work within the parish as maids. Four young men and four young women returned home after working for a year (or more) as farmhands or maids. One torpare moved his family and took over a plot as a backstugusittare. Two new wives and one new son-in-law were welcomed into their respective households. And perhaps somewhat unusually, two recent widows, one with one dependent child and the other with three, were installed in the fattighus (poor house).

In- and Out-Migration

During the period of the study, the patterns of migration to and from places outside the boundaries of the parish were very similar to migration within. In most cases, the moves registered in the clerical survey measured only a mile or two, usually to a farmstead in a neighboring parish. Long-distance moves were almost unheard of, with the obvious exception of the increasing migration to the North American continent. Occasionally a parishioner would move to Stockholm; a trickle also found their way to Göteborg, with the likely intention of emigrating.

The table below summarizes the yearly migration into and out of Vättlösa Parish:

year	in-migration	out-migration	change
1862	64	55	9
1863	65	69	6
1864	59	65	-6
1865	63	66	-3
1866	66	61	5
1867	52	50	2
1868	35	60	-25
1869	60	46	14
1870	73	57	16
1871	60	39	21
1872	64	55	9
1873	98	65	33
average	58.4	52.9	5.5

The figures indicating a net migration increase of 5.5 persons per year are misleading. Census figures indicate that the population of Vättlösa Parish increased at an average rate of about 8.9 persons per year from 1865 to 1880. The natural increase (births minus deaths) during the period of my study was 12.2 persons per year. One would therefore expect a migration decrease of about 3.3 persons per year to arrive at the correct population. What accounts for the difference?

The missing persons are a reminder that even in such an intricate system as the Swedish clerical survey, there will always be individuals who fall through the cracks. In fact, over the 14-year duration of the survey, 58 persons were stricken from the parish rolls without any forwarding address—and without any date given for their departure. Whether these people left the parish without gaining the required utflyttningsbetyg (migration permit) or were simply forgotten in the rush of daily business cannot be determined by looking at the clerical survey itself.

Emigration to North America

From 1868 to 1893, a total of 140 persons appeared at the church in Vättlösa and asked for permission to emigrate to North America. The yearly totals were as follows:

 year	   total		year	    total
 1868		 3		1881		  4
 1869		13		1882		  9
 1870		 9		1883		 10
 1871		 0		1884		  5
 1872		 3		1885		  3
 1873	 	 0		1886		 10
 1874		 0		1887	 	  9
 1875		 2		1888		  6
 1876		 2		1889		  9
 1877		 0		1890		  6
 1878		 0		1891		  9
 1879		 5		1892		  6
 1880		 7		1893		 10

Available statistics indicate that the emigration in Västergötland started in the parishes surrounding Skara in the late 1850's and early 1860's and spread outward, eventually pushing northward into Vättlösa Parish. The clerical survey confirms that emigration in Vättlösa began rather late—the first peasant emigrants (the aforementioned sisters Anna Christina and Lovisa Johansdotter) did not leave until May of 1868. There was, however, a seminal emigrant from Vättlösa Parish. According to the clerical survey and genealogical records, Ivar Alexis Hall (born in 1832) made his way to America twice, in 1850 and again in 1858. The young aristocrat was the son of Herr Birger Hall, a general who lived on the crown estate at Lilla Bjurum. His second immigration was apparently his last, and he died in America in 1892. Although they make an interesting footnote, Hall's travels probably had little to do with the later emigrations of his fellow parishioners. The great family emigrations that swept through Sweden during the 1850's and 1860's never occurred in Vättlösa Parish. In fact, this phenomenon was pretty well confined to the single year of 1869, which marked the beginning of continuous trickle of emigrants from the parish but the only instance of a mass exodus.

During the entire nineteenth century, the only large party of emigrants to leave Vättlösa departed on or about March 31, 1869. The group included one family from Anders-Bengtsgården: Anders Andersson, his wife Christina, and their son Johan. Also along were Carl Petter Johansson, who had sold his farm at Amfinnsryd. Traveling with him were his wife, Anna Stina Johansdotter, and five of their six children, Ida Soffia, Frans August, Anders Niklas, Carl Otto, and Gustaf Herman. Rounding out the group of twelve were Anna Nilsdotter, a farmer's daughter from Åsbotorp, and her 3-year-old illegitimate child, Emma Stina.

Carl Petter Johansson, known as Charley Johnson in the U.S., was Fritiof Fryxell's great-uncle. Professor Fryxell's manuscript, which he developed from his father's narrations, provides an excellent account of the chain-reaction emigration that followed. Once established in Tomkins Cove, New York, two of Charley's nephews, including Johan (Magnusson) Fryxell, Fritiof's father, joined the family in 1876. Another Fryxell brother followed in 1879, with a sister and her family arriving in 1880.

All of these people settled in Moline, Illinois, by 1885, and soon the flow of emigrants between Vättlösa and Moline became a steady stream. My own great-grandfather arrived in 1886; his two sisters came over about the same time, one of them marrying Carl Fryxell soon after her arrival. And others followed: Carl Ekstedt, who had lived at Amfinnsryd, in 1889; Frans Carlsson, a friend of the family, in 1892. By my own count, at least 21 of the first 140 emigrants from Vättlösa settled in Moline or Rock Island; the actual total is almost certainly higher.

Practically all of the later immigrants came in ones or two; only three of the parties contained as many as four persons. They were, for the most part, young, single, and poor, either working as farmhands or doing the same chores on their father's farms. Of the first 140 emigrants, 89 (or 64%) were male.

Re-Migration from North America

Only one person, other than Ivar Alexis Hall, is known to have returned to Vättlösa Parish from North America during the period of the study. His name was August Larsson (born in 1846), a farmer's son from Amfinnsryd. His father owned a different portion of the same farmstead that was also owned by Carl Petter Johansson (mentioned in the previous section) and his two siblings. Larsson moved to Berg Parish in 1867, traveled to America sometime after that, and returned to Vättlösa from America in 1874 to assume ownership of the farm after the death of his father (in January, 1873). Could Larsson have been an additional link in the emigration chain?

Two later emigrants also returned to the parish: Anders Gustaf Olsson (emigrated 1888, returned 1890), and Carl Johan Andersson (emigrated 1891, returned 1893). Re-migration did not become a serious factor in the emigration equation until the American recession of 1893 (Runblom and Norman, p. 212).

Naming Patterns

Patronymics

Swedish names before the twentieth century were notoriously homogeneous, but within a single parish they were even more so. Nearly one-fourth of the persons in Vättlösa Parish were named Johansson (or -dotter) or some variant thereof. The top ten patronymics accounted for almost 80% of the total population; the eleventh most popular last name was not a patronymic, but the clerical name Tiselius. The most frequent patronymics found in Vättlösa Parish are listed in the table below:

 name			total    total	  percentage
 Johansson		 314		436		24.0%
   Jonsson 		  86
   Jeansson 		  16
   Jansson 		  11
   Jaensson  	   8
   Jonasson  	   1
 Andersson		 293 	293		16.1%
 Larsson		 157  	157		 8.6%
 Svensson		 145  	146		 8.0%
 Pärsson	 	  66  	104		 5.7%
   Pettersson 	  30
   Petersson 	   6
   Persson  	   	   2
 Carlsson	 	  98  	102		 5.6%
   Karlsson  	   4
 Nilsson 		  73		 73		 4.0%
 Olofsson	 	  37  	 55		 3.0%
   Olsson  		  15
   Olausson 	 	   3
 Gustafsson 		  51  	 51		 2.8%
 Magnusson	 	  20		 20		 1.1%
 Bengtsson	 	  16		 16		 0.9%

Three women used the masculine patronymic (ending in "son") rather than the feminine (ending in "dotter"): Mamsell Hulda Amanda Andersson, the minister's wife Carolina Augusta Olsson (born in Stockholm), and the maid Mathilda Josephina Andersson (also born in Stockholm). No matronymics were found in the Vättlösa clerical survey during the period of the study.

Given Names

Male given names generally follow the patronymics very closely, but a few exceptions should be noted. The table that follows summarizes the top ten masculine names. The name August looks out of place in fifth position on the list—although 77 men had that name, only 3 persons in the parish were named Augustsson or Augustsdotter. The reason is that in this locality, anyway, August was used almost exclusively as a middle name. About 62% of males had more than one given name, with the most frequent pairings being Anders Gustaf (30), Lars Johan (25), and Carl Johan (24).

It's interesting to note that some ancient variants were still quite popular. The Greek influence is still prominent in the names Johannes and Andreas, while Olaus, the Latin version of Olof, was much more popular than its native form. In patronymics these variants almost always reverted to their Swedish bases (Johansson, Andersson, and Olsson).

Among the aristocracy and the ägare (farm owners, the highest class of the peasantry), there was considerably more variation in naming.

The most original name in Vättlösa Parish during the period was one Johan Waldemar Polycarpus Hellstadius (born 1859), the son of a farm owner at Spåretomten.

 name			total    total	  percentage
 Johan			 192  	293		22.2%
   Johannes		  83
   Jonas		   7
   Jean 		   5
   Jaen  		   2
   Jan  		   2
   Janne  		   1
   John  		   1
 Anders			 110  	117		 8.9%
   Andreas		   7
 Carl	 		  89  	 99		 6.7%
   Karl 		  10
 Gustaf	 		  94  	 94		 7.1%
 August	  		  77  	 77		 5.8%
 Pär		 	  33		 63		 4.8%
   Petter  		  17
   Peter  		   6
   Petr.  		   3
   P.  			   2
   Pehr   		   2
 Niklas	 		  28  	 61		 4.6%
   Nils 		  13
   Klas/Clas		   9
   Claes/Claës 	   4
   Nikolaus/Nicolaus 4
   Nic(k)las		   2
   Claus  		   1
 Sven	 		  56  	 60		 4.5%
   Svante  		   3
   Svan   		   1
 Lars	 		  58  	 58		 4.4%
 Olaus	  		  20  	 27		 2.0%
   Olof  		   7

Female names showed slightly more variation. The most frequent pairing of names were Maja Stina (32), Anna Maja (25), and Anna Stina (24).

More so than with the men, certain names carried with them connotations of age. Betty, borrowed from English, was usually seen among women born after 1850, while the names Annika and Kerstin belonged almost exclusively to women born before 1810. (Both names have since enjoyed a resurgence.) Other "old names" for women included Ingjärd and Ingjäl.

The following table summarizes the most popular female names:

 name			total    total	  percentage
 Maja			 171		235		16.4%
   Maria	  	  64
 Stina		 	 101		213		14.9%
   Christina 	  63
   Kristina 	 	  39
   Christine  	   9
   Kerstin  	  	   1
 Anna		 	 167		175		12.2%
   Annika  		   8
 Cajsa		  	  59		119		 8.3%
   Cathrina 		  25
   Kajsa  		  15
   Cattrina/Catrina 13
   Katrina  		   5
   Karen  		   1
   Catharina  	   1
 Charlotta		  48		 79		 5.5%
   Lotta 		  31
 Lisa		  	  44		 64		 4.5%
   Elisabeth   	   7
   Betty  		   6
   Elisabet  	   5
   Elisa  		   1
   Elise  		   1
 Greta		  	  50	      57		 4.0%
   Margret(h)a   	   5
   Margaret(h)a  	   2
 Emma		  	  51		 51		 3.6%
 Johanna	  	  51		 51		 3.6%
 Britta		  	  47		 48		 3.3%
   Brigitta   	   1

Conclusions

The purpose of this study was to attempt to uncover, through the analysis of the Vättlösa Parish clerical survey, new information about the parish and the people that lived there. In the course of the study, I found that many of my preconceptions about rural Swedish life during the nineteenth century were either partially or completely wrong.

For instance, I imagined rural parishes as relatively insular, inbred colonies. This proved to be a completely false assumption—the nativity and migration statistics prove that there was a high degree of mobility throughout the area. In retrospect, this seems less surprising—Vättlösa lies in the middle of a broad plain that provides relatively easy access from one parish to the next, unhindered by mountains or large rivers or vast forests. The population of Vättlösa was and is fairly well spread out from one end of the parish to the other, with no villages and only the church at the western end to provide any kind of anchor to the community. It is possible that parishioners of the 1870's felt as much a part of the larger region between the two great lakes as they did to the parish itself.

I also had to change my idea of the economic structure of the parish, which was wrong in a couple of respects. Far more persons owned land than I thought; I had imagined that practically all the heads of household in the parish were torpare or backstugusittare, but in fact they had only recently become a majority. That doesn't mean that the farm owners (ägare) had an easy life: their farms were not necessarily large enough or fertile enough to support their families, and owning a small plot of land certainly did not assure financial security. Fritiof Fryxell's grandfather inherited one third of the family farm at Amfinnsryd but was forced to sell it after nine years to pay off his accumulated debts. The situation was not uniformly negative, however; there were still opportunities to better one's lot, and the torpare were not necessarily doomed to remain landless. At least two of Vättlösa's tenant farmers became owners during the 14-year period.

I was surprised to find that there were virtually no tradesmen in the parish. Of course, the farmers and their wives performed a variety of tasks that could be considered trades in addition to their farming duties, but still it seemed unusual to find no cobbler, no blacksmith among the thousand or so residents. With the village of Götene so close, perhaps it was just as easy for residents of Vättlösa to find these services in town.

Most of my questions had to do with the circumstances of emigration and the events leading up to it. The evidence suggests that the religious factors that sparked the earliest emigrations from Sweden were also present at the beginning of the exodus from Vättlösa, but were apparently unrelated to the reasons that drove the vast majority of the emigrants. Instead, it was a steady stream of young, single men and women who left during the 1870's, 80's, and 90's. Why did they leave?

In Vättlösa, as in the rest of Sweden, the primary force behind the emigration was economic. The size of the average farm holding in the parish had decreased 73% in the previous hundred years, and while there was always the possibility that additional land could be cleared for farming, the situation was clearly becoming desparate. The landless sons and daughters rejected, for the most part, migration to the cities of Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmö (at least during the 1860's and 1870's) and chose emigration as the alternative that offered the greatest opportunity. It is more than a bit ironic that a large percentage of these rural emigrants, who resisted becoming part of Sweden's urban population, ended up living in the industrial cities of the Midwest.

The chain-reaction nature of the emigration is not surprising and has been well documented (Norman 1974 and Ostergren, for example). One aspect that I had failed to assess correctly was how the chain managed to include persons well outside of the immediate family—servants, neighbors, or simply other acquaintances within the parish. The Fryxell manuscript and other published sources indicate that Swedish-Americans, once established in their new surroundings, were often quite capable of financing the voyages of several more persons from the old country, without many worries about whether the debt would be paid off.

As far as the practical aspects of analyzing the clerical survey, I can make a number of recommendations. Clearly, the labor-intensive nature of the analysis makes it unsuitable when other sources are available, such as when studying birth or death records. And the nature of the records—entered, re-entered, corrected, and crossed out by several different clerks—makes transcription an error-prone task. A serious researcher should never have to copy records twice (one by hand and once by keyset) as I did—it just provides far too much opportunity for error.

Still, there are subjects that would be well addressed by an exhaustive analysis of clerical surveys. Because of the continuity that is built into the surveys, a study of the migration patterns of a Swedish community could be constructed in the most intricate detail. Such a study could include migration both between parishes and within parishes. In conjunction with the economic details included in the clerical survey, such as the enumeration of land holdings and the indication of each person's class, it would be possible to compile a fairly extensive matrix of migrational behavior.

Another possible topic would be an analysis of the relationships within a household (including not only family members but also hired hands and boarders). The members of each farmstead are clearly recorded in the clerical survey, and by observing dates and places, these relationships can be examined over time.

And finally, some parting words. This analysis has proved to be far more complicated and time-consuming that I envisioned it. Despite all my technological expertise, I was not able to overcome the first rule of research: it is impossible to know everything. Unless I had the manpower and money of, say, the Mormon Church, I'd choose a smaller subject with a smaller sample next time, but despite the shortcomings, I am happy with the discoveries I made. Now, on to bigger and better things!

Bibliography

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Fryxell, Fritiof. The Story of John Fryxell. Unpublished manuscript.

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