Rudeen cousins still in Sweden?

With the help of some experts at the Swedish Genealogical Society of Colorado, I have some clues about our relatives still living in Sweden. This will be the first of several posts on this subject – I have lots to share!

Let’s begin with Gust Rudeen’s family (Gust was my great-grandfather, the father of Lawrence Rudeen). Gust was the oldest of five children. In Sweden, he was known as Anders Gustaf Petersson. He had three sisters and one brother, who was the youngest.

Two of the sisters came to America:

• Emma Christina traveled with Gust and Augusta to America. She settled in Wahoo, married Carl Anderson, and had four sons. One of those sons was one of Wahoo’s “Five Famous Sons”, C.W. Anderson.
• Anna Charlotta came a few years later with her husband Gust Bjorklund. They had five children (I think) and after living in Saunders County for  a while, they settled later in Sharon Springs, Kansas.

The other two siblings stayed in Sweden.

• Hilda Maria was the next oldest after Gust.
• Carl August was the youngest and stayed on the Eket farm for the rest of his life. We have a couple of letters that he wrote to Gust.

In this installment, we’ll take a look at what became of Hilda. (By the way, I am going to tell all these stories in a narrative style and dispense with footnotes and all the genealogical formalities. I will post the documentary evidence on my family tree in the coming weeks.)

Hilda was born in 1857 shortly before Gust’s 2nd birthday. She was confirmed at the age of 16, and then left home at the age of 18 to go work as a housemaid at a large manor house in Rosendal in the parish of Vånga near Norrköpping. It’s about halfway between Marbäck and Stockholm, so it was quite a ways for a young girl to travel in those days. She only stayed a year before moving to Kimstad (a neighboring parish) and then after six months she moved yet again. In fact, I haven’t yet traced all her different jobs and places of residence as a young woman. This kind of moving-around was very typical for poor people in Sweden at this time and reflects why our ancestors wanted to leave. They thought it would be impossible to ever get ahead in life!

Eventually, she married a Coachman, Sven Oscar Ericksson, and had three children:

• Arvid Oscar, born 1880
• Elin Maria, born 1885
• Henning Emanual, born 1889

These three children would have been first cousins to Lawrence.

Arvid Oscar married but it appears that they had no children. He was a dairyman at first but eventually he owned his own farm in Västra Vingåker parish, north of Norrköping.

Elin Maria died 1895 at the age of 10. The cause of death was diabetes.

Henning enlisted in the army and reached the rank of Corporal. His life, too, was cut short. He died in 1923 at the age of 34, also of diabetes.

Remember that Lawrence’s brother Harry died of diabetes in 1915 at the age of 25. Diabetes seems to be a common disease in the Rudeen family and here is even more proof of that.

Hilda lost her husband Oscar in 1903; he died of cancer at the age of 57.

Hilda lived with her son Arvid and Arvid’s wife for many years and died in 1947 at the age of 90.

There are many more details that I would be able to find about this family and intend to do that someday. But for this branch of the family, there are no descendants still living in Sweden. Now that we’ve got this sad bit of history behind us, we will have much happier outcomes in future installments.