Family Ties

Greetings from Göteborg, Sweden! While I understand next to nothing of the language, I know that my roots (on my mother's side) are here in this country, with the last name of Lindeman. This has always been known to me, though not in great detail. Brother Jay had to do family tree projects a number of times in grade school, though I never did. Now things are known to me on a deeper level.

I've been staying with some e x t e n d e d family here in Göteborg: first with my mother's cousin, Mark Johnson, his wife, Kacka, their daughter, Ellen, and puppy dog, Twisty, in Göteborg's country suburb of Björsared, and now with Mark's stepson, Jack, in central Göteborg. (I was forced to make the move from the countryside to the city on Tuesday night - a move that was, perhaps, made for the best as I was thus able to see the city itself - as the Johnson family cat, Cartman, had my allergies in such a state that I had trouble breathing deeply at night and thus could not sleep soundly. Cats! On Saturday night I was the guest DJ at Club Function in Malmö (about a 3-hr drive South from Göteborg). It was a fun night and cool to have Mark come along and see me do my thingthing; I really enjoyed the other DJs, especially all the other excellent and RAER modern soul the other guest DJ, Johan, spun, though found the crowd kinda hard to read and maybe even uninspired. Was it me, my records, or is it just that Swedes don't necessarily go crazy and let it all hang loose in the sweet soul breeze of the smoke-free night? All I know for sure is that I accidentally used the ladies' toilet a few times before i realized my mistake, and that I also used all my free drink cards on Gin and Tonics and glasses of Estrella Dam.

Tuesday was the main event, though. Mark and I headed out for the Swedish midlands in his Prius in search of our common, Swedish roots. I was thoroughly groggy from the night before, however, since I was basically unable to sleep, so I myself was rather uninspired as we started off the day tagging along with a group of geology enthusiasts (Mark is a geology prof. at the University of Göteborg) on the lookout for natural springs. Still, we saw some interesting sites, and even came across an ancient Viking burial site in Dimbo, Sweden, before we started off in search of the rather ancient burial sites of our own kin.

Our roots tour started off at the cemetery of a church located in Frösve, where Mark showed me the grave of our oldest know relative on record, Påfvel Törsen, born 1682, died 17??.



In the same cemetery lies the grave of a man who married one of Påfvel's daughters, Sven Andersson, born 1729, died 1772, who was a one time a member of Parliament (or a Riksdagsmannen).

Only a few miles away is Herrekvarn (roughly translated as "Lordmill" or "Mastermill"), the farmland, stream, and mill that Påfvel owned way back when.



Apparently, the doorposts on this current house are the same ones Påfvel had built centuries earlier.

The next stop was a brick factory. No relation to the family here, but Mark, being the curious geologist that he is, thought maybe there would be a clay pit around somewhere. There wasn't. But I still got in a few cool photos.

After that, we went on to see the first gravestone with the actual name of Lindeman on it in the cemetery at Värsås church. (Again, Lindeman is my mom's maiden name.)



Jonas was born with the surname of Andersson, but at some point he and his brother, Anders, took on the name of Lindeman. Jonas was a pastor at the Värsås church in the mid-1800s, and apparently developed a reputation as being quite a character. (More on this later...) Jonas lived with his wife, Johanna Regina Mebius, on the parish farm called Klockaretorp. Up until this past Tuesday, there had been no information recorded regarding this farm, save its name, but Mark had a hunch that we could find out something more if he started to ask around. Unlike in the States, in Sweden many farms have names and keep these names over the years. Thus, Mark asked about Klockaretorp at a local gas station, where the attendant told him that the name rang a bell and that it was the second farm over yonder. We arrived at this spot quite excited to have possibly found something new to add to the records and started taking pictures of the house after no one answered the door. We eventually noticed, however, a little old Swedish lady coming out of a nearby woodshed; upon speaking to her she informed us that the house in front of us was hers and had never belonged to a Lindeman. She did recall the name though, along with the farm name of Klockaretorp, and pointed to a different farm about 1/2 kilometer away in the gray distance.

The first house we came to on the land turned out to be a rented home, but the couple there told us that the farmland was indeed called Klockaretorp and that the current landowners lived in the next house over. As no one seemed to be home there, we started taking photos.



As we tooled around the plot a bit, a blond farmer dirtied by the land and animals came out of a storage shed. Mark asked him the relevant questions, and the man confirmed that we were in the right spot! He even knew an anecdote about ol' Jonas Lindeman, the kooky preacher, which he related to us in broken English about the time Jonas, also a blacksmith, was doing his blacksmithing and was so caught up in his work on a Sunday morn that he lost track of time and didn't realize that church had already started and that he wasn't there to deliver the sermon. Eventually, his wife notified him of his error, and Jonas, all covered in soot, ran to the church a few kilometers away, where he delivered the Sunday sermon, dripping sweat and soot. HAHA!!

Our new-found farmer friend told us that the original house on the parish farm, built at some point in the 1850s and where Jonas and his family used to live, was still standing, though now being used as more of a shed. This is it!



The first Lindeman who made it to Kansas, Johan Rickard Lindeman, most likely lived in this house as a child and struck out from here when he left for America. Johan died in Salina, Kansas - where my mom is from - on December 6, 1907: seventy-three years and ten months before I was born.