My European Family

by Karin Bojs

  If I lower my requirements still further to a difference of two mutations from a perfect match, I find more partial matches. But still none of them are from Västergötland or anywhere else in Sweden. Most of my relatives are clustered in Scotland and northern England.

  Mutations occur entirely at random. On average, they become a permanent feature of a lineage once in a thousand years at most. So the DNA results suggest that my paternal grandmother and the Scottish matches had a common foremother who lived about a thousand years ago. She seems to have lived in Scotland. If this is so, my foremother appears to have been on her own in leaving Scotland and settling in Scandinavia.

  I realise I am in speculative territory now, but I have a theory about how that could have come about. It’s not an agreeable theory. In fact, it saddens me. But I suspect that my grandmother’s foremother travelled from Scotland to southern Scandinavia on board a Viking ship. She may conceivably have come as the lawful spouse of a successful Viking. But she may also have been a slave woman – a victim of the human trafficking of the day. It is common knowledge that the Vikings engaged in slave trading. Along with furs, slaves were probably their main export product.

  The Arab writer Ahmad Ibn Fadlan tells of a tenth-century burial among a group of traders on the Volga, whom he refers to as ‘Rūs’ or ‘Rūsiyyah’. This group probably consisted at least partly of people from the eastern part of Sweden. In any event, Ibn Fadlan’s text is frequently cited as one of the oldest written descriptions of Vikings. He describes their ‘perfect physique’, for instance; they are tall and stately like date palms, fair-haired and ruddy, and extensively tattooed. Their personal hygiene, however, leaves a great deal to be desired by Arab standards.

  In the same text, Ibn Fadlan also describes how a slave girl is burned on a pyre together with her dead master. First the Rūsiyyah pour large quantities of alcohol down her throat. Several of the men have intercourse with her, one after the other, and just before the fire is lit she is subjected to gang rape. All the while, the onlooking men beat their shields hard, making a din to prevent other slave girls from hearing her screams. She is killed when an older woman, known as ‘the Angel of Death’, plunges a dagger into her breast, while two of the men pull a noose tight around her neck. When the girl is dead and everything is finished, they light the funeral pyre.

  Should we be sceptical of Ibn Fadlan’s account, in the name of source criticism? Some historians are, pointing out that it might have been in his interest to depict the Vikings as brutal and sexually degenerate. But there is also support for his account from various quarters. In Viking times it was common for the dead – particularly the wealthy and prominent – to be burned on ships. They were accompanied by rich grave gifts, including dogs, horses and, very probably, human sacrifices. In a number of cases, archaeologists have interpreted human remains on burnt ships as thralls (slaves) who had been killed. There are some particularly clear examples in graves on the Isle of Man, but Scandinavia, too, has a number of sites which suggest that thralls – together with dogs, horses and other animals – were put to death when their master died.

  A Norwegian study of a number of double and triple burials where only one of the corpses in the grave still had its head was published recently. The other individuals appear to have been beheaded. Archaeologists already suspected that the beheaded individuals were thralls. Now, new DNA analyses confirm that they were of different genetic origin from the individuals who were interred with their heads. In addition, the individuals thought to be thralls had a different diet. Isotopes in bones and teeth indicate that the people who were buried intact had a more varied diet, including a good deal of meat from land animals. The thralls, on the other hand, ate mostly fish.

  Dublin, now the capital of the Republic of Ireland, was originally built by Vikings, and was a major slave-trading market. In the Annals of Ulster, an unknown writer reported for the year AD 821 that ‘Étar was plundered by the heathens, and they carried off a great number of women into captivity.’ For the year AD 871, the Annals of Ulster tell how ‘Amlaíb and Ímar returned to Áth Cliath from Alba with two hundred ships, bringing away with them in captivity to Ireland a great prey of Angles and Britons and Picts’ (the Picts were a people who lived in Scotland and subsequently disappeared, without their language being preserved).

  I shall never know for sure how my paternal grandmother’s maternal lineage came to Sweden. However, the suspicions aroused in me when I saw the DNA results have dispelled any romantic notions I might once have harboured about the Viking Age.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The Mothers

  My maternal grandmother, Berta, died of breast cancer several years before I was born. Yet she was a very definite presence throughout my childhood. My mother told me a good deal, and Berta’s background was the part of my family history that affected me most. As a child and teenager, I was fascinated by life in the forests of Värmland and the powerful influence of music and poetry.

  Berta Gottfriedz, née Turesson, came from Arvika but worked throughout her adult life as an infant school teacher in Tullinge, at that time a small industrial town south of Stockholm, which was dominated by Alfa Laval’s separator factory. She was married for a short time, had a daughter, but divorced early on and lived as a single mother in a small flat above the school where she worked. As a child, she had such fiery red hair that she was teased and called names. In later life, her hair was thick, glossy and more coppery than red. At any rate, that is what I’ve been told; I’ve only seen black-and-white photos myself. Throughout her life she struggled with surplus weight to some extent, and photos show her in roomy dresses.

  ‘Cheerful’ and ‘kind’ are the words that crop up most often when people describe her, along with the phrase ‘she took everyone by storm’. She was always ready to lend others a helping hand. Not long ago I became acquainted with a lady called Dagmar who was 102 when I met her, but still had a crystal-clear memory. As a teenager, Dagmar lived under harsh conditions with unkind relatives in the north of the country. Berta got to hear about this. She intervened, sent money for a train ticket and let Dagmar live with her for a long period of time.

  The tears well up in my eyes when Dagmar describes the scene 85 years ago, when my sunny-natured grandmother met her at Stockholm Central Station. What touches me especially are the mentions of constant outbursts of hearty laughter that Dagmar and others come back to when describing my grandmother. My own mother rarely laughed.

  Botkyrka Church was full to capacity for my grandmother’s funeral. In the address he gave at her graveside, the minister recalled how she was always prepared to offer support to others, be they children in need of help or poor artists.

  There wasn’t often money for fancy food in my mother’s childhood home. Berta preferred to invest in books and original paintings. Several of those paintings are in my possession today.

  She was a local councillor in Tullinge for a while. But issues like drains and other practical matters weren’t really her style. Her interests ran more to art, literature and poetry. One of her sisters was married to the artist from whom she bought most paintings. Another went out with the singer Ruben Nilsson for a while. And her eldest sister, Olga, was married to the poet Dan Andersson. He died when my grandmother was only 22, but left an impression that lasted for the rest of her life. Dagmar, the 102-year-old, told me how Berta, when she was married and lived in a house, turned a whole room into a Dan Andersson museum.

  My grandmother and her sisters were very close. They rang each other every day. And they met in summer at the home of my maternal great-grandmother, Karolina, who lived in Brunskog near Arvika. As a child, my mother spent several summer holidays in Brunskog. Sadly, I could never get her to tell me very much about Karolina.

  Going back one generation further to my grandmother’s grandmother, Kajsa Gullbrandsdotter, two letters have been preserved. Kajsa wrote them to her granddaughter Berta – my grandmother – when Berta was training to be a
teacher in Stockholm. Her handwriting is clear and neat. The spelling and grammar are almost faultless, although Kajsa only attended primary school for a few years. In her letters, she wrote that the winter had been hard, with a great deal of snow. Though Kajsa’s husband had managed to reach the village and get to the post office on snowshoes, he had suffered from serious back pain for a long time. However, the two old people had not been completely cut off, as they had had some woodcutters lodging in their cottage for a while.

  I find out a little more about my grandmother’s grandmother, Kajsa Gullbrandsdotter, in a book by my grandmother’s brother, Gunnar. Gunnar Turesson was a ballad singer. One of the poets whose work he performed was his late brother-in-law, Dan Andersson. Gunnar was very popular in the twenties, thirties and early forties. He played the lute, sang and set to music many of the most popular songs of the time, such as ‘Jag väntar vid min mila’, ‘Flicka från Backafall’ and ‘En ballad om franske kungens spelmän’. But after the Second World War, the Swedes’ interest in folk songs cooled off. Gunnar moved back to Värmland and researched folk traditions for a while. He travelled around from village to village with a tape recorder and recorded people singing ancient folk songs and yodelling to call the cows home and keep trolls away. Unfortunately, he wiped the tape clean as soon as he had noted the melodies down, so there are no longer any recordings, they tell me at the Swedish Folksong Archives.

  In his autobiography Visor och skaldeminnen (‘Folksongs and the Memories of a Poet’) Gunnar Turesson recounts how he and my grandmother Berta – at the thoughtful Berta’s behest, of course – walked several dozen kilometres to help their grandmother Kajsa for a few weeks in the summer of 1917. She had just been widowed, but still had some cows and sheep that she would call home every morning and evening. One day, several years later, Kajsa was so stiff with rheumatism that she was unable to take her birch-bark backpack off in the evening, but had to sleep with it strapped to her back all night. At that point, my grandmother’s mother, Karolina, decided to take Kajsa home to Brunskog. She was bedridden for three years before her death. The hearse came to fetch the body, and that was the first time Kajsa ever went anywhere by car.

  Gunnar Turesson told of how, as a child, he learned Finnish words and expressions from his grandmother. In the book, he describes how she taught him where ‘our Finnish forebears with rye in their mittens had settled after making their way on foot from Savolaks (Savonia) to Gunnarskog’. My mother, too, said we were supposed to be descended from Forest Finns – a group of people who migrated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from Savolaks and the forests of Karelia to Sweden, to practise swiddening, or slash-and-burn farming. ‘Your grandmother had a lot of Finnish blood in her veins. That’s where you get your high cheekbones from,’ I was told on more than one occasion.

  But is that really true? At the Gothenburg Book Fair a few years ago, I came across a stand where some genealogy researchers were exhibiting. Perhaps it was there and then that the whole book project started. I asked them to look up my maternal grandmother and great-grandmother. The lightning speed with which they clicked through the register, using my vague information, was impressive. In just a few seconds they managed to find my maternal grandmother Berta, my great-grandmother Karolina, my grandmother’s grandmother Kajsa, and her mother, Karin Svensdotter. And that was it. The register had no information about the place of birth of Karin Svensdotter, the mother of my grandmother’s grandmother.

  But now my curiosity was aroused. A few months later, I consulted the fellow student from my journalism course, the prominent genealogy researcher Håkan Skogsjö. He sat down and took another look. And, in a roundabout way, Håkan managed to discover what the researchers at the book fair had failed to find. He was able to show that Karin Svensdotter was the illegitimate daughter of a woman called Annika Svensdotter, who was born at Hillringsberg Manor, south of Arvika. Sadly, this Annika Svensdotter died at the early age of 45, and by that time she was ‘penniless’ according to the note in the church records. Annika, in her turn, was the daughter of another woman called Karin, just like me.

  One summer day in 2012 I travelled to Hillringsberg to find out more about Karin Gudmundsdotter, the mother of my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, born in 1735. Hillringsberg lies on Glafsfjorden, an oval lake that derives its name from the beauty of its glittering waters. They glitter as much as ever. The large white manor house has an exceptional setting, with its broad veranda looking out over the water.

  In the eighteenth century Hillringsberg was an iron foundry producing mainly malleable iron and nails. There were also mills and saws, and Karin Gudmundsdotter is supposed to have lived in a place called Nedre sågen (‘Lower Saw’). This lay next to the waterfall, very close to the manor house and the lake. I wandered about in the area for a while, trying to picture how it would have been in the eighteenth century, when Karin Gudmundsdotter lived here. The booming of the waterfall went right through me, sounding just as it must have back then. The old workers’ cottages have burned down and the smithy is gone. It has been replaced by a plant producing solar panels for roofs – one of Scandinavia’s largest.

  My family history expert, Håkan Skogsjö, thinks it quite possible that my maternal lineage may go back to the Forest Finns who came to Sweden some centuries ago. Glava, as this parish was called, was one of the areas where Finns settled in the seventeenth century. That is why I have arranged to meet K.-G. Lindgren, a local historian and family history researcher who has written several books about Forest Finns. The most recent, called Där finnar bröt och röjde (‘Where Finns Broke and Cleared the Soil’), explores old crofts and farms in the Arvika area that were once home to Forest Finns.

  But K.-G. Lindgren cannot find any evidence at all that Karin Gudmundsdotter might have been the daughter of Forest Finns. On the contrary, he explains that Swedes and Finns lived totally separate lives: the Finns up in the forests and the Swedes down in the valleys, where there was arable land.

  What he has found is that Karin Gudmundsdotter was married to a miller who worked at Hillringsberg. Before that marriage, she had been married to another miller at another industrial settlement, but he died of pneumonia after only one and a half years of marriage, when Karin was 26. Karin’s father, Gudmund, from whom she inherited the patronymic ‘Gudmundsdotter’, was a soldier from nearby Fors farm. He went to war with Karl XII’s army in Norway, and after the king’s death, Gudmund was appointed parish clerk and organist in Stavnäs, on the other side of Glafsfjorden. That shows he must have been literate and that he must have had a good singing voice. There are only a few kilometres between Stavnäs and Hillringsberg if you take the direct route over the water or the ice. But the usual way to travel was probably to take the ferry over the water a few kilometres further south, where Glafsfjorden is at its narrowest.

  On my return from Värmland, I ask Håkan Skogsjö to double-check K.-G. Lindgren’s findings. And everything seems to be right. Karin Gudmundsdotter was a miller’s wife at Hillringsberg, and she was born at the home of the Stavnäs parish clerk, the daughter of Gudmund and his wife Märta. There is little information about Märta, but she seems to have been born in 1698. Håkan also finds a brief note in church records about the ‘mother-in-law’ who also lived in the Stavnäs homestead towards the end of her life. She must have been Märta’s mother, though she is not mentioned by name.

  There is not a word to suggest that any of them might have been Forest Finns. So I go back to my DNA results. I turn to the leader of a Norway-based DNA project for family history researchers with Forest Finns among their ancestors. But the project has no record of anyone with mitochondrial DNA anything like my own rare group, U5b1b. Some participants belong to the special subgroup that is so common among Sami people, U5b1ba. However, most of the people in the Forest Finns group whose DNA has been tested belong to haplogroups that spread through Europe in connection with farming, such as H, J and T. That tells us something about the origins of the Forest
Finns, but it adds nothing to my personal family history.

  So there is absolutely no indication that I might be descended in the maternal line from Forest Finns. I suspect that the singer Gunnar Turesson may have embroidered on real life a little in his book, particular as regards the background of his maternal grandmother, Kajsa Gullbrandsdotter. He probably thought it was more exotic and interesting to be a Forest Finn in Värmland. It’s clear he was fascinated by Finnish cultural traditions. In his autobiography, he writes vividly of how the Forest Finns in Värmland worshipped the forest god Tapio, and how they nailed bears’ skulls to fir trees after the hunt. Gunnar Turesson was very probably right in thinking there were Forest Finns among our Värmland ancestors – but they were not part of the matrilineal ancestry I am investigating now.

  ***

  I am still curious about where Karin Gudmundsdotter’s mother Märta, the wife of the Stavnäs parish clerk, came from, and who the ‘mother-in-law’ was. But Håkan Skogsjö can find no further information. He advises me to contact Peter Olausson, a family historian friend of his who is now a professional historian at Karlstad University, specialising in local Värmland history.

  A few days after emailing Peter Olausson, I receive a friendly response. He agrees to look in the archives and see if he can find any more clues about Karin Gudmundsdotter’s mother Märta, and her mother, the ‘mother-in-law’ who lived at Stavnäs.

  This was in the autumn of 2012. Silence ensued. Nearly two years later, in June 2014, I received another email from Peter Olausson, which began: ‘You’ve probably abandoned all hope of hearing from me, and justifiably so. There simply hasn’t been any time to look for information about your ancestor. I hope you’ve got some help from someone else.’