Untangling Swedish names - Grandmom's siblings

I've stumbled into an interesting tangent while going through the Kwick pictures.
Because I had his e-mail address, I shared with John Olson my online album of scanned pictures from Mother's family.  John (whose first name is Walter, and has also been known as Junior) is my second cousin.  His grandfather and my grandmother were siblings.

Right away he suggested that one of my pictures is mis-identified, and is actually a portrait of his grandfather.
He is right.  It is not Olaf. 
So.
This is Nils Adolf Olson (Ohlsson, Olsson, whatever) and his wife.

Oh.. I know Nils Adolf.
He is the one in this remarkable postcard, sent to his sister Gerda in America in 1919.
I'd never paid much attention to it before, except to think it was pretty strange.

On the back, he basically says goodbye; that he has a high fever and no appetite and will be in this hospital for the rest of his life.  Thanks for everything.
He was 44.

There followed a lot of new pictures from John, and the rediscovery of old ones I have had for a long time.  Here is one that John sent.  I don't have the original, of course, but it looks to be formally mounted on cardboard.  The middle guy is Walter, Nils's son, who could not have been more than 18 at the time, because he came to the US when he was 19.  John's opinion is that none of these people is sober in this picture.
I had always heard that at least some of the family emigration happened because coal mining was really the only work available in their area of Sweden at the time.

So.. names.
Why are the people in this part of the family called Olson, when two other brothers are called Krantz, and when the gravestones of their parents says Krantz?

I had been told that Krantz was a military name, but I never heard of Olaf or Axel being in the military in Sweden.  What I have learned from John is that Ola was in the Kings Guard.  So current theory is that Krantz was Ola's military-assigned name, but he didn't use it after he left the guard, so his children were called Olson (or some variation of that name).
Then in 1901 Sweden passed the Names Adoption Act which required that everyone have a name that would be passed down.  The idea here was to end the use of patronymics, which were just too confusing with a more mobile population.

SO.. (almost there), I think that Olaf and Axel took Krantz when they emigrated, either because of the new law or because it was simpler. And Ola and Johanna were buried as Krantz because of the new law.  Their other children kept Olson. Apparently they had that option, as well as the choice of how to spell it. "Ohlsson" was a more common spelling than I had been led to believe.  Grandmom (Gerda) used "Olson" and considered her sister's use of "Ohlsson" to be unnecessarily fancy.

Enough.  People who get all excited about these things can be tiresome, I know.

Having discovered Gerda's brother Nils, maybe I will find pictures of her other siblings who stayed in Sweden.  Stay tuned.

Just because it is such a great picture of Carl

 

Alice, Swea, and Carl.

This picture must have been taken in the spring of 1907.

Alice was born in September of 1905 and Swea in November of 1906.

Big brother Carl was born in August of either 1903 or 1904 depending on what records you believe.

This picture of him always make me smile.

Here is the Uncle Carl I remember.

We didn't see him often.  He was the only one of Mother's siblings who didn't live in the Wilmington area.  He worked for DuPont in Clinton, Iowa, at a cellophane plant.

We knew when he was visiting, though. If we came home from school to the smell of a cigar in the house, it was, "Uncle Carl was here!"

If he visited in the summer, it was probably an excuse to have a picnic at Alice's.

Carl was a safety engineer for DuPont.  I remember his saying that one of the things he had to do was make sure that no jewelry was worn around the machinery.  He said that it was not unusual for a young man to resist taking off a new wedding ring, but that he had some pretty unpleasant pictures to show the machine operators the reason for the strict rules.

huh.. (4/30/2012)  I found a postcard of the DuPont Cellophane Plant in Clinton.

Found a cousin!

This postcard had been rattling around in the 'Ruth Berlin' pile for years, and it seemed to be just one more of her many pictures of various friends.
I finally looked at it more carefully.
1913.
This girl is not from the Olson/Krantz side at all.  She is Judith Kvick.  Mother's first cousin.
Born in 1895.
She sent the postcard to her father, John (Johannes), Grandpop Kwick's brother, who had come from Sweden without his family.

*Very* loosely translated, this says: Happy Birthday from daughter Judith.  I wonder if you know that I can ride a bicycle.  This is not my bicycle. My girlfriend took a picture of me standing beside it.

This is the first I have realized that we had any surviving communication from Kwick relatives in Sweden in Judith's generation at all.
We heard that Uncle John and Uncle Charlie (Johannes and Carl) had come over, but since they died around the time Mother was born, there has not been not much awareness of them.

January 16 - Grandmom Kwick's birthday

Gerda Augusta Olson was born in 1881. She is 18 in this picture.

She married Nils Kwick in 1902.


POST IN PROCESS...  More to be added!

January 11 - Grandmother Keen's birthday

Mary Emma Stuck Keen was born in 1893. This portrait was taken for a church directory in the 1970s.
I have recently found pictures that make me think I never knew her at all.

We grew up hearing fewer Keen stories than Kwick ones, and we spent more time with the Kwick grandparents.  I am only now coming to some understanding of the Keen side.
 .

Here is the woman I remember growing up.

The picture was taken at some Christmas in the 50's or 60's.

She was certainly pleasant enough, but less accessible, somehow, than some other relatives.  (I wonder if I am not somewhat like her in this regard.)

Here are a few of a number of rather solemn photographs of Mary taken throughout her life.

Age 8

Wedding

Age 19

And this quite scary family portrait from maybe 1927?

Marjorie, Mary, Newlin,Walter, Evelyn, Jack

But the pictures that  intrigue me more are the un-solemn ones that showed up.
I was surprisingly glad/relieved to see these.

Picnic with friends (including Walter)

Youngest son Jack was being funny?

January 6. Grandpop Kwick's Birthday

Nils was born in 1875.

This picture of Gerda, Carl, and Nils was taken in 1904. 

 Grandpop was retired by the time I was born, but he was at one time a salvage diver. 

More pictures about the diving:

The dredge boat

The dredge at dock.  Maybe Nils standing there,

The diver being tended would be Nils.

Yes. It is a Rock.

This is a very special stone.

It was part of the Stone House on Naaman's Road where Grace was born in 1918.

When her kids were growing up, the house was known as “Corson's”, presumably the name of the people who lived there at the time. It was a nice looking stone farmhouse then.

The house was torn down when Naaman's Road was widened, but before it was completely gone, Grace rescued this stone so that her birthplace was not entirely obliterated.

Nils and Gerda Kwick and family moved there from Chester sometime between 1910 and 1918.

Late in her life Grace wrote:

"The stories about the time in the old house on Naaman's Road are many and varied. My father, who I think was by that time working on the Delaware River, probably on a dredge … bought this old dilapidated house with a lot of land and then told my mother. When he took her to see it she said she wouldn't move into that house, but it was a done deal so they moved into it. Stories go that the window sills were piled with manure to keep the wind out. Anyway, Pop had a crew from the boat come out and clean it up before they actually moved in."

Here is picture from before much was done with the house.

By the very early 1920's, the Kwicks had moved across the road to a new house that Nils built.