29 – Birthdays

My 4th-great-grandmother Anna Nilsdotter was born on a settlement named Finnhult, in Grythyttan Parish, Örebro County, Sweden, on August 27, 1781. We share a birthday, my birth coming 172 years after hers. 

Photo taken the day I was baptized...Mom (right) passed along some Finnish genes!

When you get back to the 1700s you need to worry about whether they were using the Gregorian calendar yet or were still on the Julian calendar which was 13 days off. A paper in the FamilySearch.org wiki tells us that Sweden's switch from Julian to Gregorian was more complicated than you might expect, but that by 1753 Sweden had made the transition, so we should be safe to assume that by 1781 records used modern dating. Sometimes only a baptism date is given, but here we are in luck: both birth and baptism are listed, so there is no confusion on that point.

Anna Nilsdotter birth: 27 August 1781, baptized on Sept 2

We see her name is Anna, her birth and baptism dates, her parents names: Nils Ersson, and Catharina Jonsdotter from Finhult. Anna is also special because she is on my maternal line: we share the same mitochondrial DNA. My mDNA testing on FamilyTreeDNA shows identical matches to 17 Swedes and 3 Finns, and off-by-1 matches to 12 Finns and 3 Swedes. Since Finns mostly came to Sweden and not vice versa, it seems plausible that my maternal line goes back to Finland in the 1600s and before. 

Anna was one of my sixty-four 4th-great-grandparents, and so on paper Anna would be 1/64 of my ancestry, and her parents 1/128th each. DNA results at 23AndMe credit my sister and me with 0.9% Finnish ancestry, a chunk of DNA on our 4th chromosome. Since my mDNA seems to originate in Finland, my guess is that Anna's mother was mostly Finnish and her father mostly Swedish. Three more generations have been traced back, but they are still in this area of Sweden, which had a mix of Swedish and Finnish-speaking people. My earliest known ancestor on my maternal line is Anna's great-grandmother Chierstin Hindersdotter of whom we know almost nothing.

My second cousin Linda Hoeschler researched our shared Swedish ancestry, and mentions Anna in her notes about Anna's daughter Christina Larsdotter, my 3rd great grandmother:

Christina's years in Sweden centered on Örebro and Värmland county farms carved out of the woods, the tree removal and farm planting techniques having been taught by the Finnish immigrants to Sweden in the 16th and 17th centuries...

Christina, the second of six children, was born on Hälltorp farm in Grythyttan Parish, Örebro County, Sweden on May 7, 1814 to tenant-farmers Lars Nillson and Anna Nilsdotter. Anna was born in Finnhult, so she was most likely of substantial Finnish descent... The family's long-standing parish church in Grythyttan is beautiful, and its comely village is a major tourist draw today, due to a splendid historic hotel and world-renown restaurant.

I visited Finnhult in August 2008; it's a wooded area with many lakes, with scattered homes that look like vacation places today. I don't think any homes remain that were around in Anna's time. The church in Grythyttan where Anna was baptized still stands: it was built in 1642. An English guide to the church notes:

During the first decades services were held both in Swedish and in Finnish – half of the population of the parish being Finnish and one half Swedish. A Finnish bible printed in Stockholm in 1642 and still in possession of the church bears witness to this bilingual condition... Restorations of the building have been carried out in 1775, 1778, 1903-04, and in 1953... the organ case dates from 1780, being the front of the old organ...  

So there were two church restorations in the decade previous to Anna's birth, and the last one was done the year I was born.

Grythyttan Parish Church (taken 2004, L. Hoescher)

A final note: Anna died 7 Sep 1851, less than two weeks after turning 70, a long life for someone living in Sweden at that time. I turn 70 this year, and hope to do better than Anna given all the advances in knowledge and medicine we enjoy in our current times, but I will be especially cautious this September 7. 

Sources

Juengling, Fritz, Ph.D., AG. n.d. “Calendars and Feast Days in Scandinavia.” Accessed 26 Jul 2023.