Week 23 of #52Ancestors asks about a place that matters. I have written about houses before: the Brooklyn home my Dowling great-grandparents bought in 1905, and my own childhood home in Lynbrook. This week, the place that matters is one I have never visited. I know it only through paper.
A harbor I have never seen made my entire family possible. Twelve days of paperwork in November 1926 carried my eighteen-year-old grandfather from a Blekinge farm to a Gothenburg pier, and the documents survive to tell the story.
Week 23 of #52Ancestors asks about a place that matters. I have written about houses before: the Brooklyn home my Dowling great-grandparents bought in 1905, and my own childhood home in Lynbrook. This week, the place that matters is one I have never visited. I know it only through paper.
Gothenburg harbor, on Sweden’s west coast, is where my grandfather David Svensson Sten boarded the S.S. Gripsholm on November 24, 1926. He was eighteen. He never lived in Sweden again.
The harbor was the destination. But the documents show that leaving Sweden in 1926 did not begin at the pier. It began twelve days earlier, in a parish office.
November 12: The Pastor’s Pen
The first document is a flyttningsbetyg till utlandet, a moving out certificate for emigration abroad. The pastor of Jämshög parish in Blekinge issued it on November 12, 1926, for “David Svensson (Sten), jordbruksarbetare,” a farm laborer living at Nr 8 Jämshög. The certificate records his birth on 21 March 1908 in Hjärsås parish, Kristianstad County, and notes that he had been confirmed in the Swedish church with “god (A)” knowledge of Christianity. Good, grade A.
I love that detail. Before Sweden would let him go, the church graded him one last time.
The printed warning at the top of the form adds something else: anyone who received this certificate but failed to leave the country within a month had to return it to the pastor or face a fine of up to 100 kronor. Emigration was not a casual decision. The paperwork had a deadline.
November 20: Six Hundred Kronor in Malmö
Eight days later, David stood in a Svenska Amerika Linien office in Malmö and paid 600 kronor for ticket M.A. No. 53397. Second class. Stateroom C-157, berth K. The route printed across the top reads “Göteborg direkt New-York.” The fare included free forwarding of his baggage to New York, so long as it did not exceed twenty cubic feet.
Twenty cubic feet. Everything he would carry into his new life fit inside a space the size of a kitchen cabinet.
November 23: The Police Chamber
A stamp on the moving out certificate shows it was presented at the Malmö police chamber on November 23, 1926, the day before sailing. Sweden inspected its emigrants on the way out.
The police chamber kept its own record of that inspection. A bound register page lists the contracts presented in Malmö on November 23, 1926, for emigrants sailing from Gothenburg aboard the Gripsholm the next day, all handled through the Svenska Amerika Linien’s agent Axel H. Lagergren. David appears partway down the page: contract 53397, “jordbruksarbetare” (farm laborer), age 18, home community Jämshög, county Blekinge, ticket to New York, fee 600 kronor. He was one line among dozens, each a person leaving the country that week, each reduced to an occupation, an age, a destination, and a fare.
November 24: The Harbor
Then, finally, the place itself.
The Gothenburg passenger list for the Gripsholm’s November 24 sailing records him on contract number 53397: “Svensson (Sten), David,” farm laborer, born 21/3 1908 in Hjärsås, Kristianstad, home parish Jämshög, Blekinge, destination New York, N.Y.
I have stood in no place on earth where my family’s story pivoted more completely than that pier. Every document David accumulated over those twelve days, the certificate, the ticket, the visa, the police register and stamp, existed for one purpose: to get him onto that ship.
When the Gripsholm pulled away from the harbor, the Swedish chapter of his paper trail effectively came to a close. He left behind his parents, Sven Svensson and Pernilla Olsdotter, and the quiet rural world I wrote about earlier this year. [See: “He Stayed: One Man’s Quiet Life in Sweden.”]
December 3: The Other Side
Nine days later, the Gripsholm reached New York. The arrival manifest fills in details no Swedish record bothered with. David Svensson, eighteen, single, farm laborer, able to read and write. Five feet ten inches tall. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Health: good. He paid for his own passage. His nearest relative in Sweden was his father, Sven Svensson (Sten). And he was headed to his sister, Alma Bahnmuller, at 30-18 Broadway, Long Island City, New York.
Alma. The sister who had crossed alone at sixteen, the great-aunt I wrote about in Week 1 of this year’s challenge. [See: “Sixteen Years Old and Brave Beyond Measure: Why I Admire My Great-Aunt Alma.”] By 1926, she was the family’s foothold in America, the address her little brother wrote on a manifest line.
A Place I Carry Anyway
I have never seen Gothenburg harbor. No photograph of David’s departure exists, as far as I know. There is no family story of who walked him to the pier, or whether anyone did. I will not invent one.
But the harbor matters anyway. It is the hinge between the Swedish records and the American ones, between Sven Svensson’s quiet life in the parishes of Skåne and Blekinge and everything that came after. David built a life in New York. He married. His son, my father, was born from that crossing, and so was I.
My father died this spring. Working through these documents, his father’s documents, I keep returning to the same thought: a place can matter even if you never stand in it. Sometimes it matters most then. The harbor holds the moment when an eighteen-year-old, his belongings packed into twenty cubic feet and his faith graded one last time, stepped off Swedish soil and made all of us possible.
Someday I want to stand where he stood. Until then, I have the paper.
Your Turn!
Is there a place in your family history that matters deeply, even though you have never been there? A port, a village, a building you know only through records? Share it in the comments. I would love to hear about the places you carry.
- Jämshög Parish (Blekinge, Sweden), flyttningsbetyg till utlandet [moving out certificate for emigration abroad] no. 129, David Svensson (Sten), issued 12 November 1926, stamped at Malmö police chamber 23 November 1926; Max-Douglas Family Papers, privately held by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, Blue Ash, Ohio.S ↩︎
- Svenska Amerika Linien, ticket M.A. no. 53397, David Svensson (Sten), issued Malmö, 20 November 1926, for Gripsholm sailing 24 November 1926, Gothenburg to New York; Max-Douglas Family Papers, privately held by Kirsten M. Max-Douglas, Blue Ash, Ohio. ↩︎
- “Sweden, Emigration Registers, 1869-1948,” imaged, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/discoveryui-content/view/1395709:61637 : accessed 27 May 2024); citing ArkivDigital, Göteborgs Poliskammare, 1869–1948, Landsarkivet i Göteborg. Entry for David Svensson, contract no. 53397, Gripsholm departing Gothenburg 24 November 1926. ↩︎
- “Gothenburg Police Chamber before 1900, Information received about emigrants, SE/GLA/12703/E IX/118 (1926),” digital image, Riksarkivet (https://sok.riksarkivet.se/bildvisning/A0035167_00389 : accessed 19 May 2024), image A0035167_00389, image 389, page 1503; entry for Svensson (Sten), David, contract no. 53397, Gripsholm, Gothenburg to New York, departed 24 November 1926. ↩︎
- Passenger manifest, Gripsholm, arriving New York, New York, 3 December 1926, pages 128–129, line 24, David Svensson; imaged “New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820–1957,” Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7488/records/2003166595 : accessed 24 May 2024). ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
External research references
- Riksarkivet (Swedish National Archives) – https://riksarkivet.se/en
- The Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation – https://www.statueofliberty.org/
- ArkivDigital – https://www.arkivdigital.net/
Leave a Reply