New-found notable ancestor

Ooooh, so fun to find something new and exciting! I learned last week that I have an 8x-great-grandfather who did cool stuff!

I am descended from Pehr Johansson Duker on my dad’s mother’s side. Here’s the line of descent – he was the 4x-great-grandfather of Lisa Stina Hultman.

I should first mention how I found out about him.

There is a Swedish genealogy association called DIS (Datorhjälp I Släktforskning) that operates a database service called DISBYT. Members can upload their genealogy data to DISBYT and compare it to the data of other members. It’s wildly popular among Swedish genealogists. After uploading your data, you get back a report with all the matches to your data. I have more than 1,000 matches in the database, and most of them are considered “high-quality matches” (and many are duplicates). So I apparently have lots of relatives in Sweden researching the same ancestors that I’m researching! I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this data gold mine.

I’m always on the lookout for ancestors that DON’T have patronymic names – i.e., names not ending in -son or -dotter. Those who did not have a patronymic name would likely have been soldiers or merchants or perhaps even nobility – something other than the usual farmers in my family tree. A surname that caught my eye was Duker. 

I first went into the machine-transcribed court records in ArkivDigital to see if the Duker family was litigious – ’cause that’s always fun!! I did find lots of Dukers in the court records, but not typically because they were plaintiffs or defendants. It turns out that Pehr Jonsson Duker and his son Jonas were both land surveyors (“landtmätare”) and their maps and data were often used as evidence in court cases involving land ownership disputes.

Pehr Jonsson Duker is said to have been born in Poland. To avoid conscription into the French army, he fled to Stockholm.¹ He gained skills in drafting and calligraphy and was eventually appointed to be the land surveyor for Jönköping län. His handiwork can still be found in archives in Sweden. At Lantmäteriet (the Swedish historical map archive), there are 642 maps credited to him. Pehr was married twice. Jonas was a son from his first marriage and followed in his father’s footsteps. Jonas has 510 maps credited to him at Lantmäteriet. I am descended from a daughter from Pehr’s second marriage. 

Here is just one example of Pehr’s handiwork. It is a map showing the area where Marbäck parish and Askeryd parish share a border and was prepared in 1650.² I have added two red arrows to the map. The arrow at the bottom points to his signature (“Pehr Jonsson Duker”). The arrow at the upper left points the “Eke” farm in Marbäck. It turns out that 273 years after Pehr made this map, his 6x-great-granddaughter Clarinda Hanson would marry the son of a farmer from Eket. Fun fact! (Actually, there are several other farms shown on this map where various ancestors lived…this is the heart of where the Rudeen branch of the family lived for literally centuries.)

It’s fun to imagine Pehr sitting at a drafting table with his ink pen and colored pencils crafting such beautiful technical maps. 

I am looking forward to more research on the Duker family!

¹ https://historiehemmet.se/blogg/familjen-duker-lantmatare-i-fyra-generationer

2 Askeryd map from 1650, Lantmäteriet