Just One Record

Last week I was at Rootstech helping people with their Swedish ancestry. I may have called this kind of thing genealogical speed dating before. If I haven’t, I will now. It goes fast and it can be a lot of fun. Sometime there just isn’t enough time to find records or to think things through. Other times, you find things. Sometimes things even go spectacularly well.

The Story, Part 1

I was asked to track down a soldier. I found a record that placed him in the Malmö garrison in the 1860s. I checked there and didn’t so much find a record as a story. I found him. He was listed with his wife. Above her name it was written that she was a widow and the identity of her deceased husband was entered. I could tell looking at it, that he wasn’t just anyone, but the man whose death opened the position in the garrison that had been filled by the soldier I was tracking. He hadn’t simply gotten a job, he had gotten a wife too. If you think about it, that is a story all on its own. After her name, her deceased husband was mentioned again in order to state that he was the father of the children whose names followed.

The Story, Part 2

After those children came the name of the first child of our soldier and the widow. All his information was entered, date of birth and date of baptism, just as one would expect. No story there. The next child was born four years later. The birth date was stated, but there was no name and no date of baptism. There was a note about the mother not allowing the child to be baptized. It reminded me of a note I had once read in a different Swedish record. The Lutheran minister had written “Child not baptized” where the date should have been but then added a note at the end that the child had been baptized by a Methodist minister. Thinking about that religious explanation of a baptismal oddity made me realize that the note I was looking at was not what I thought. It did not use the Swedish word “Maman,” a rather informal term for mother. It said “Mormon.” It wasn’t that the mother refused baptism, it was that Mormons refused baptism. When I explained this, the woman I was helping got excited and said that it made sense “We don’t baptize until age 8.” I looked back at the record. The previous, baptized child had been born four years earlier. In those four years there had been a conversion. I pointed out what the timing had to mean. Her eyes grew big. “Thank you! Thank you! I have to go check church records!” And she was off, with one record and quite a story.

You never want to leave a stone unturned. It might be hiding a record. And just one record can tell a whole story.

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