Deep dive into Rudeen paternal line

Although the blog has been pretty quiet this year, I have done quite a bit of genealogy in recent weeks (an update on all my genealogy endeavors is at the bottom of this post). One project that has received quite a lot of attention is my Rudeen paternal line. Dad took a Y-DNA test earlier this year, so I felt it was important to find out as much as I could about his paternal line.

I thought I was at a brick wall, but with the help of the experts at the Swedish American Genealogist workshop in Salt Lake City last month, I was able to push the line back two more generations!

This chart shows my great-grandfather, Gust Rudeen (born Anders Gustaf Petersson), at the bottom of his direct paternal line. That line now goes all the way back to Hendrick Persson who was born in 1682 in Eksjö parish in Jönköping County. 

Besides the direct paternal line, I made progress on several of the maternal branches as well. While in Salt Lake City, I collected 83 records related to various branches of this family. It takes a lot of time to analyze and document all these findings! So far I have only processed 13 records so my work is cut out for me over the next several weeks. By the way, the SAG workshop is so wonderful, I can’t say enough good things about it. It’s so fun to not only devote a whole week to genealogy, but to also connect culturally with fellow Swedish Americans.

I also now have a better sense of the geography of the Rudeen family’s origins. This whole branch of the family, including Gust Rudeen’s wife Augusta, all come from an area bounded by Trånas on the north and Nässjö and Eksjö on the south. This region lies directly east of the larger city of Jönköping. Here is a map highlighting a few of the parishes where our ancestors lived.

It’s really fun and interesting to track the family’s movements between and among these parishes throughout the 1700s and 1800s. At times, various branches of the family were doing relatively well. They owned farms or had heritable leases, and although none of them were at all wealthy, estate inventories show that some of them had healthy assets and in one case, cash! The records still show that Carl August Rudeen (Gust Rudeen’s uncle) was the first to come to America. In future research, I will do some descendancy research to see if there are any other early emigrants.

When we visited Sweden in 2013, we visited Lommaryd and Marbäck parishes and spent an afternoon in Eksjö. I would love to make a return trip to explore some of these other ancestral parishes and farmsteads.

Research Update

Like I mentioned, the blog has been very quiet this year despite quite a bit of research happening in the background.

• The John Martinson Project has languished a bit, but I’m actively working on the next post in the series. It will explore his early childhood and young adult years up until his marriage, and will also explore the early lives of his siblings.
• I’ve been working on a little mini-project about Mathilda Martinson, one of John’s daughters. I’ll be writing up her biography…pretty interesting stuff!
• Also while in Salt Lake City, I started working on the Louis (Lars) Hanson line (one of dad’s maternal lines). He came from an area of northern Sweden on the coast near Söderhamn. His family was in this region for generations – in fact maybe as far back as the records go. And the records in this region go back REALLY far. So it will be fun to extend this line in much the same way that I am extending the Rudeen paternal line.
• I still check for DNA matches from time to time on Mom’s Frasier and Dill family lines. 
• I’m compiling a spreadsheet listing all the records I’d like to retrieve from the National Archives in Washington D.C. I wasn’t able to pull together a research trip this year but am hoping I can still get my hands on those records someday – either myself or through paid researchers.