The names of our Swedish ancestors, the forebears of Olof Lars Ekberg and Ida Magdalena Almstrom, are difficult and confusing to trace. This is because the family names, Ekberg and Almstrom, are not really very old. In fact, the names were actually created by our ancestors in the late 1800's. Before that time the names did not exist, at least not in our family. It is also very interesting to find that both our family names, Ekberg and Almstrom, were derived from names created by two brothers!
Until about the 1870's or so, Swedes used the "patronymic" system of naming their children (see the article, "Swedish Names," from the Swedish Genealogical Group, Minnesota Genealogical Society). In this confusing system children were named after their father's first name. For example, when our ancestor Ohla (or Ola) Larsson had a son named Lars, the son's name was Lars Olsson, or Lars, the son of Ola. When Ola had a daughter named Hanna, her name became Hanna Olsdotter. This was very confusing because in the absence of family names, in any village, every child named Lars, whose father was named Ola, was named Lars Olsson. Any given village might have several Lars Olssons, all totally unrelated.
And it gets worse. Since there were no family names, women retained their original names after marriage, not assuming the husband's surname. Thus, in our ancestor's family, the father was Ohla Larsson, his wife was Boel Gertsdotter and the children were Lars Olsson and Hanna Olsdotter; four different last names in one family!
But wait! It gets worse! All males were required to serve in the military. Because there were so many Lars Olssons, or Anders Martenssons, or whatever, the military gave soldiers names that were supposed to be less confusing. However, that actually, in many cases, added to the confusion, as when our ancestor Ohla Larsson went into the military he chose, or was given, the last name "Nyman," which essentially means "new guy." After he left the military service he kept the Nyman name, so that in searching the records he is initially listed as Ohla Larsson but later became Ola Nyman. However, his children and wife did not assume that name; their names remained the same, at least for a while.
In this short history I will try to explain how Olof's family name went from Olsson to Nyman to Ekberg, and how Ida's family name changed from Martensson to Sand to the Almstrom we know, and will include some documents showing the progression of these name changes.
Exactly when and how the name was changed from "Ekberg" to "Eckberg" is not entirely clear, but it seems to have occurred relatively soon after Olof's arrival in America. It was likely the result of misspelling of the name by Olof's mining employers. At any rate, Olof himself spelled the name with the "c" on his marriage application in 1905 and also in a "day book" in which he kept track of his mining work, which he started in 1907. However, in 1909 the name was spelled without the "c" on the family's naturalization certificate. That is the last record I can find of the name being spelled in the original Swedish fashion, with one exception. In 1925 Olof returned to Sweden to visit his family. On his Certificate of Identification, which he had to attach to his Naturalization Certificate to gain entry into Sweden, Olof once again spelled the name "Ekberg," but to do so he had to correct himself as his signature starts out as "Ec" with "Ek" written over it.
Anders Almstrom was actually born as Anders Martensson, but those are only two of the names he used during his life (more about the third one later). It is quite confusing to talk about his ancestors because of the patronymic naming system , plus the fact that men often named their first sons after their own father. In Anders (Almstrom) Martensson's case, he came from several generations of first sons. His great grandfather was named Marten Andersson, and his first son was named Anders Martensson. This person (Anders Almstrom's grandfather), had a first son he named Marten Andersson, who was Anders Almstrom's father, who in turn had Anders. Did you follow that? We have Marten Andersson who begat Anders Martensson who begat Marten Andersson who begat Anders Martensson (who was also Anders Almstrom), all of these people having been given the first name of their grandfather and a last name based on their father's first name!
So Ida's father was born as Anders Martensson, in the village of Almarod, near Skivarp (also spelled Skifvarp). He kept this name until the mid-1860's when he joined the army. He then was given, or took, the name Anders Sand. In an old record book of Olof Eckberg's I found fragments of an old Swedish document which I was able to piece together and have translated. It turned out to be the discharge certificate of "Anders Sand, also known as Anders Martensson." I didn't know who this person was until I learned that Anders Martensson later became Anders Almstrom, Ida's father.
Anders kept the name of Anders Sand during his several year military career and up until about 1877 while he was again living in the family home. However, during this time his sister, named Kjersti Martenssdotter, married a soldier named Jons Olsson. Jons was, coincidentally, the brother of Lars Olsson Nyman, mentioned above in the description of how the Ekberg name came into being. Whereas Lars Olsson took Nyman as his military name, Jons took as his military name the word Alm, meaning "elm tree." (Ida Eckberg had in her scrapbook a clipping about Jons Alm which I've had translated.) Jons and Kjersti came to live with Kjersti's parents and Anders, who was still at home and known as Anders Sand. In 1877 Anders (Martensson) Sand married Ingrid Persson (also sometimes called Ingrid Persdotter, but by then family names were becoming more common and she ultimately kept the family name of Persson), and after this marriage Anders and Ingrid moved out of the family home and assumed the name Almstrom, the suffix "strom" meaning "power," "river" or "current." So, the name of Ida's family was apparently created out of the military name of Ander's brother-in-law with a suffix to make it sound more powerful. It's an interesting, if confusing story of how often names changed in old Sweden.
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