The Story of Jularp and Sörhagen

This account was written for my family in October 1981, in the days after Julie and I
returned from our trip to Europe. Please excuse my pretentious prose.

The original footnotes were added in September 1984. I added a few more in italics in 2025.

An Introduction

This story begins in 1975. The world had not yet been enlightened by Alex Haley’s incredible saga of Roots, and the word “genealogy” was basically a place-holder in the dictionary. That year, I undertook some basic research into our family’s history as a diversion. While I do not have a compulsive interest in my lineage, as many genealogists do, I was slightly intrigued by the question of who my ancestors might have been.

Every genealogist’s task is divided into two specific problems. The first is to start with oneself and work backward, finding as many ancestors as possible. The second is to start with pairs of ancestors, typically ancestors who immigrated to America, and uncover all their descendants, or the genealogist’s cousins of varying degrees. While the research of these two problems is often overlapping, the former task is usually the one which is attacked first.

To start, the easiest and most obvious method is to ask your parents and grandparents for any information they might be able to provide about their ancestors. Usually the women of the family are the record-keepers and will be able to give you the most details. In the case of this story, Grandma and Grandpa Johnson were queried. Grandma was able to provide me with information about her four grandparents and hints as to where they came from in the “old country.” Grandpa was unfortunately not able to recall many facts about his grandparents, who lived their entire lives in Sweden. It is the tale of these Swedish ancestors that I will attempt to relate.

Early Research

Grandpa’s parents were named John Gabriel Johnson and Elizabeth Peterson when they were married in 1898. This was about the limit of Grandpa’s knowledge, although he had heard that his mother had come from the province of Skåne and his father perhaps from Småland, and that one of these had debarked from Gothenburg on their journey to the new world. As to their actual Swedish names, Grandpa would not speculate. As to their parents’ names, he could not recall ever knowing.

Well, Småland is a big place, and if you’re looking for an ancestor named John Johnson, you had jolly well better do a little more research before you try to deal with the subtleties of Swedish archival work. The first clue came from the Rock Island County Clerk, who produced a copy of the marriage certificate of John and Elizabeth Johnson, complete with their parents’ names. John Johnson’s parents were John Gabrielson and Kajsa Johnson, according to the certificate. Elizabeth Peterson’s parents were Peter Nelson and Pernilla Hanson.

The investigation at this point ran into a brick wall. I had begun to learn Swedish by this time, and a modest perusal of genealogical literature had convinced me that if I could find the names of Grandpa’s parents’ home parishes, subsequent research through the Swedish archives would be simple. All efforts to learn the names of the parishes, however, proved fruitless.

In August 1978, I took a five-week vacation to Sweden. I was quite frustrated that I had not been able to find my ancestral home, especially since I had planned to do research in the archives during my trip. I made no effort to do any research while I was there.

A week after I returned home, I made a trip to Moline, and while I was there I visited the Swedish Lutheran Church almost as an afterthought. The clerk was helpful and allowed me to look at the church register from the late 1800’s. It didn’t take me long to realize I had made a tremendous blunder by putting off the visit. Each person who was a church member was listed, along with his or her birth date and place, and in traditional Swedish record-keeping style, the date of arrival in the new parish and the parish the member moved from. It didn’t take long to find Grandpa’s parents. Grandpa’s mother had arrived from Hör Parish in 1883. His father had immigrated from Wättlösa Parish in 1886. Now the search could begin in earnest.

A quick check of the map revealed some orthographic changes. Hör Parish is and was spelled Höör, but was probably misspelled by the church’s clerk, since the latter spelling is anomalous. Wättlösa Parish is now spelled Vättlösa, reflecting a common Germanic spelling change. As you can see from the enclosed map, the places lie in the southern third of Sweden, but are not close. Höör Parish does indeed lie in the province of Skåne, as Grandpa remembered, but Vättlösa Parish resides in the province of Västergötland, or Western Gothland. Småland lies between and slightly to the side of these two provinces.

Letters to the archives in Gothenburg and Lund confirmed this information. From Gothenburg came word that Johan Gabriel Johansson’s parents were Johannes Gabrielsson, born in Hangelösa Parish, and Maja Cajsa Johansdotter, born in Vättlösa Parish at the farmstead of Stora Kärret (or Big Kärret; this name is pronounced like “share it”). The archives in Lund were even more helpful: they wrote that in the parish of Höör at Hjularp 7, there lived Per Nilsson and Pernilla Hansdotter, both born in the parish of Södra Rörum, and then listed their seven children, the last of which was Elise Persdotter (a name three steps removed from “Elizabeth Peterson”).

Finding Contacts in Sweden

One of the first things which I did after receiving these elucidating clues was to try to make contact with someone in the parish itself who might have a good knowledge of the villages involved. Although I was uncertain exactly how this might be accomplished, I figured that anything was worth one try and addressed two letters, one to “a responsible person” at Kärret, the other to Hjularp. Then I waited.

To my satisfaction, I received answers quickly. The first came from a man named Evert Persson, who stated that he was the owner of Kärret and that he would appreciate hearing my information so that he could check his records to see if they checked out. The second letter was from a fellow named Åke Palm, who stated that he was the owner of the old school in Jularp, as it is now spelled, and that he would also check around if I sent him the pertinent details. This I did without hesitation.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of facts was flowing in from the Swedish archives. Thanks to a system of record-keeping that was established in many parishes as early as 1700, genealogical research in Sweden is comically easy. Hardly a week went by that a new ancestor was not found, until research moved back into the early 1700’s. You can survey the current state of the family tree on the enclosed chart.

Soon a reply came from Evert Persson. He had hunted through some papers that his father had retrieved from the attic many years before. There he found the original purchase contract of Kärret in 1808, when our ancestor Petter Andersson had bought the farmstead from a larger farm owned by the government. The farm passed into the hands of his son-in-law, Johannes Johansson, in 1824. His daughter, Maja Cajsa, is Grandpa’s grandmother. In 1851, Evert’s great-grandfather bought the estate from Johannes Johansson.

The history of our family’s life of Kärret firmly established, the remaining question was then: What happened to Maja Cajsa (and her husband Johannes Gabrielsson) after they left Kärret? The answer would have to wait.

Åke Palm asked around Jularp. In particular, he quizzed one older gentleman who seemed to know a lot about Jularp’s past. This man seemed to remember a couple of houses that were known as Jularp 7, and no one seemed to remember Per Nilsson and Pernilla Hansdotter or any of their descendants. The search had, for the time being, cooled off.

Some time later, Bob Rush, my wife Julie Kistler, and I began making plans for another Swedish voyage. Included would be stops at Kärret and Jularp, and the archives in Lund and Gothenburg. In this respect Bob was most accommodating, as his Swedish friends lived in (did you guess?) Lund and Gothenburg.

This decided, the search for more information about the immigrants Johan Johansson and Elise Persdotter grew. Approximately two months before we were to depart, I checked the Champaign phone book for a Mormon Branch Library, not expecting to find one in the middle of Baptist corn country. To my surprise, not to mention my dismay, there was one less than a mile from our apartment. I had wasted six years of possible research because I never thought to check.

I quickly ordered several microfilms of the parish records in question and found some interesting facts. Up in Vättlösa Parish, Johannes Gabrielsson and Maja Cajsa Johansdotter had gotten married, moved to the next parish for a while, and then moved back into Vättlösa Parish and resided at Sörhagen. It was there that Grandpa’s father presumably was born. Down in Höör Parish, many of Elise Persdotter’s siblings had begun to move away, although perhaps just temporarily. And then the microfilms ended in 1880.

Looking for the Ancestral Homes

Bob, Julie, and I left O’Hare Airport on August 6, 1981. After brief stays in Iceland and Frankenthal, West Germany, we were off to Lund in our speedy European train. While staying with Bob’s friend Ulla Jacobsson, we decided to make the trek to Höör, 20 miles away, to meet Åke Palm and visit Jularp.

I had determined from the archives in Lund that the family’s home in Jularp had stayed in the family until at least 1900, when the archives’ records terminated. At that time, the property was occupied by Elise’s brother Nils, his wife Ingrid, and their four children. Further research had to be done at Höör’s church in person, and thus we were slightly disappointed to find that the pastor had already gone home at 3 pm and that the clerk didn’t feel qualified to look through the books. We continued on to Åke’s.

Åke Palm is an ambitious and congenial man in his early forties who owns a sports uniform factory on the edge of Höör, the factory which until recently resided in Jularp’s old school. He lives with his second wife Ann-Britt and son by his first marriage in a beautiful new home in Höör, a sparkling little town of about 3000. He proposed that we take a drive around Jularp before it got dark, and we eagerly agreed.

We were mildly surprised when we reached Jularp, just a mile or so north of Höör. Most of the province of Skåne bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Champaign area—flat and completely cultivated. As we left Höör and entered Jularp, we realized that the village was in a hilly pine forest. In fact, this village is not so much a village at all, but rather a collection of perhaps 50 small farms, all well spread out in the forest, and one old school. The roads are strictly gravel, if that. The people who live there do some dairy farming, although most of the houses are now simply summer cottages for people from the city. The biggest surpise of all came when Åke showed us the first house suspected of being Jularp 7: it lay inside the boundaries of Skåne’s Djurpark, an animal park visited by thousands of Scanians each year!

We drove on to the second possible ancestral home, a farmstead laid out in typical Swedish fashion, with the house, the barn, and other outbuildings forming three sides of a square, with the open end facing the road and providing a central work area, usually liberally decorated with flowers and plants along the driveway and pathways. The oldest building was built in 1850, exactly matching our ancestors’ move from the next parish. I was sure we had found our target, but again, as we talked to some of the people from the area, we found that no one remembered the occupants of 1900. We needed to do some more research.

We came back a few days later to stay a night at Åke’s house. Before we met him, though, we went to the church to finish our survey of the Höör Parish records. We found that Nils Persson’s daughter Gerda had married and retained the farm, and had lived there until 1956. Their two daughters had moved away in the 1930’s. Thus our family in Jularp had been extinguished. I wrote down the names of the daughters and the parishes they had moved to on the off chance that they might still be there. Then we traced ownership of the property, by this time subdivided into Jularp 7:10, forward to the present day. A man named Jan Pernton was noted as living there currently.

Later that day, after we met Åke, we went out to meet Jan Pernton. He lived directly outside the gate of the animal park, but when asked, he told us that the house that Gerda Persson and her husband Peter Svensson lived in was down the hill a ways, but he wasn’t sure where because he had moved in only recently. He did suggest that we talk to another couple in the area, just nearby, who might remember better. This couple could not remember either, but they were sure that the man’s mother would. She was called but was not home.

Admitting defeat at least temporarily, we retreated to Åke’s house for dinner. During dinner we received a call from the man’s mother. She was a niece of Nils Persson’s wife, Ingrid, and remembered the house they lived in way back when. It had burned down in 1905. Thereafter, they lived in Jularp’s school until the house could be rebuilt. And she had some letters from America that might be of interest to us. We resolved to meet her later in the trip.

Later, I looked in the phone book for one of Gerda’s daughters, Inga, who married a lawyer named Helmer Wåhre and moved to a nearby town. She was not listed.

Our journey continued to Skövde, where we met Evert Persson and his wife Anna-Lisa at the train station. Evert is a diminutive man in his fifties and today he raises hundreds of pigs at Kärret. In addition, they grow 80 acres of grain and tend 80 acres of forest. We were met at the door by a barrage of cakes and cookies. Then we went out in search of Sörhagen and Sörtorp, where Grandpa’s aunt Ida Johansson lived until she died in 1942.

The search for Sörtorp took us down the road and into the woods. After Ida’s death, a neighbor down the road had bought her house and moved it to his property. Sörtorp is now overgrown by trees and shrubs. All that remains to identify it is a huge rock which used to stand in front of the house. It, one presumes, will be around for a while. The field that the crofters (or tenant farmers) of Sörtorp cultivated is across the street, and still being used. And Ida’s house, just down the road to the east, had been added to and is in wonderful condition.

Sörhagen does not exist anymore, either, but that did not stop us from trying to locate some ruins. We trapped over and under fences, through farmer’s fields, over creeks, under trees, but could not find so much as a stone from the foundation. The area is large, though, and I have no doubt that somewhere the remains of our ancestral home are waiting to be discovered.

These two places are within a mile of Kärret, as are several other farms which our ancestor Johan Johansson, Grandpa’s father, worked on. It was especially popular for sons and daughters of crofters to be sent away for a year to work on one of the larger estates. Many of these young people, without land, headed to the big cities eventually. In the 1800’s, even more headed to the United States.

That night we sat around the kitchen table in Kärret and looked at the documents that Evert’s father had salvaged from the attic. There were contracts and wills, and even a legal document from the 1850’s, when our ancestor Johannes Johansson sued Evert’s ancestor over a problem in the sale of Kärret.

Then Evert unloaded the bombshell: 75 photographs and 30 letters from America, which belonged to Ida and had been saved for 39 years by the man who bought her house. When Evert told him about our arrival, he had given them to Evert for our inspection. Mind you, the pictures are of people that this man had never seen nor heard of, and were not relations, and he had kept them for 39 years.

We were therefore understandably excited when we picked out a picture of Grandpa and his family when he was about four. Many others followed. Most of the pictures were of the Rockford branch of the family, Johan Johansson’s sister Anna and her children.

We returned to Kärret a week later after Bob had returned home and we had visited the archives in Gothenburg. It was then that I remembered the Fryxells. My research had uncovered that the Fryxell family had also come from Vättlösa Parish (Carl Fryxell married Grandpa’s aunt, Christina Johansdotter), so I figured we had better locate their homestead, too. To our pleasure, we found that they had lived next door to Sörtorp, on another tenant farm called Lunden or Lunkebo. This is all the more amazing when you are reminded that the Johnsons and Fryxells also lived next door to each other in the new world, at 2621 and 2625 Fifth Avenue in Moline.

Long Lost Relatives

Our trip through Sweden was now reaching its conclusion, and as I stayed with relatives from my mother’s side, I reviewed my notes. With horror I realized that I had looked in the phone book for Inga Wåhre, the daughter of Grandpa’s cousin, under the wrong city. But she can’t possibly still live in Eslöv after 49 years! Well, all tendencies to the contrary, she did. A meeting was hastily arranged by our host. On Monday, September 14, we met our Swedish cousin.

Inga Wåhre is 77 years old, but her spirit begs to differ. Her apartment walls are absolutely packed with paintings of local artists and bookshelves are jammed with works of every conceivable nature. Before she retired, she was a physical therapist. Her husband was a lawyer. Her sister was a dentist. Clearly, the farm homestead of her parents, Peter and Gerda Svensson, encouraged these girls to excel.

Inga has no children. In fact, she has no cousins on our side of the family, and only one sister, Margit. Margit, who died in 1964, had a son Staffan Ekström, who is an engineer living in Gävle in central Sweden. And Staffan has one daughter, Karin, 13. Old Nils Persson’s line has therefore been somewhat less than prolific, totaling only eight descendants in four generations.

As to the old family homestead, where Inga was born, we were close, but never saw the right house. It does lie inside the animal park today, but not near the entrance where we were. If you go inside the park, according to her, you can see the house but you can’t go up to it in person. It’s on the safari ride, and you must stay in your car or be devoured by lions.

That was the end of our Swedish visit. France was beckoning, so we weren’t able to meet Staffan, who is also interested in genealogy, but the lines of communication are open now, and we say, “That’ll be our next vacation!”

Notes from 1984