My grandfather immigrated to the United States from Sweden, a country that has long kept cradle-to-grave records of its citizens. But all I knew about his origins in Sweden was that he had said he was from the Smaland region. How would I find the town of his origin? Join me on my mission to discover where in Sweden my grandfather, Axel Frederick Svenson, was born.

I began my search by asking my father if he knew where Grandpa had come from. He told me that Grandpa had spoken of the island of Oland as his home. I examined a map of Sweden and found that Oland Island is off the southeast coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea and is in the Swedish county of Kalmar. Now, which town do you suppose he's from? I thought to myself, as I considered the towns that occupy the coast of the island.

Next, I wrote down everything that I knew about Grandpa. Until I started the list, I didn't think I knew much about him, but I knew his name, the dates of his birth and death, where he died, and that he was buried in the Swedish cemetery, Mt. Olive, in Chicago. I learned from his death notice in the Chicago Tribune (27 June 1952) that he had belonged to Irving Park lodge No. 416, Order of Vasa, and Irving Park lodge No. 20, Independent Order of Svithiod. He had also been a union carpenter, land developer, and house builder in Chicago and on the north shore. He had a wife, Carolina Anderson, and five children: two girls and three boys. One of the boys, Hilding, died in infancy of bronchial pneumonia. The other children were, in order of birth, Ruth, Inez, Axel, and Herbert. I really did know a few facts about Grandpa Svenson!

Since Grandpa had come to Chicago from Sweden, I called the National Archives, Great Lakes Region in Chicago for information about his citizenship. The staff gave me the information I needed to procure his citizenship papers. For a nominal fee, I received a copy from the archives, and I searched the document thoroughly for the name of his birthplace-but only the country was mentioned.

I next wrote to the Cook County (Illinois) Recorder's Office and requested a marriage license for Axel and Carolina, including a tentative span of years to search. Surprisingly, nothing was found; I remembered family stories about my grandparents meeting and marrying in Chicago. At the same time, I had requested birth and death certificates for my father's family members; the only items found were death certificates for his mother and younger sibling.

From my grandmother's death certificate I discovered her birthdate, the cause of her death, and the names of her parents. I had always thought her family name was Anderson, but the name of her father was listed as Anders Olson. I was puzzled until I remembered that, in Sweden, "patronymic" references for surnames were the norm, so my grandmother was really Ander's daughter or, as recorded in Sweden, Andersdotter. The other death certificate indicated that my father's younger brother Hilding died at age one year, two months, and twenty days. I had a baptism record for my father from the Irving Park Swedish Lutheran Church in Chicago; on it was the pastor's name. When I learned from him that the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, has collected records of all the Swedish churches in the Midwest, I contacted the center. The information I received from the center was extensive. I learned that Grandpa Svenson had been the treasurer and recording secretary for the Swedish lodges to which he belonged. The research center also sent a copy of a church record showing the names of my grandparents and their children the day they joined the church. They were listed in the registry with their dates and places of birth-everyone except Grandpa, of course. Again, his home was listed as Smaland; my frustration continued to build. Another twist surfaced: there was no date in the "married" column of the register for my grandparents. While pondering the implications of this missing information-were they married at all?-I was determined to press onward.

Because I kept encountering dead ends where Grandpa Svenson was concerned, I focused on gathering information about my other grandparents, all of whom had come from Sweden. Then, in 1983, my father's bachelor brother, Herbert, died. When we cleaned out his apartment, I found several items that rekindled my interest in searching for Grandpa's birthplace. I found letters written in Swedish, a Social Security card with my grandfather's name on it, and some "worthless" old insurance policies.¹ Worthless is admittedly a strong word coming from someone who claims interest in genealogical research. The policies were, in fact, monetarily worthless; however, the information I found in them made them priceless. I was initially attracted to the policies because the penmanship of the agent who had filled out the forms was so beautiful and flowing. Upon closer inspection, I found some facts: a policy dated 1907 stated that my grandfather had had typhoid fever when he was eighteen years old and that he did not use alcohol as a "daily habit." A 1930 policy stated that Grandpa had dislocated a shoulder in 1914.

A section of the 1907 policy entitled "To Be Answered by the Insuree" indicated that Grandpa had four living brothers on 7 May 1907 and three sisters and a brother who had died "young." He also had two half-brothers, ages twenty-four and thirty, and two half-sisters, twenty-eight and thirty-two years of age. The same policy also referred to age and cause of death for Grandpa's parents and grandparents. His father had died of a "burst blood vessel" at age fifty-five, it said, while his mother died in childbirth at forty-three. As I took in all of this information I realized that I knew the ages of all of these people but did not know their names, nor did I learn their birthplaces. I am not a great reader of mystery novels, but I certainly enjoyed contemplating the match-the-name-to-the-correct-ages-of-the-siblings mystery.

Next, I turned my attention to the Social Security card. I wrote to the Social Security Administration and received in response a photocopy of Grandpa's application form. That form included the names of his parents, Sven Anderson and Karen Olson. Wonderful! Now I knew the names of his parents but, still, no town of origin.

In 1988, I made my first visit to the Family History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the company of a genealogy tour group. If I had thought things might get easier when I visited this genealogy research heaven, however, I had to think again. Smaland covers a broad area, including three of Sweden's most populous counties: Kalmar, Jonkoping, and Kronoberg. It was also the area from which the largest number of Swedes emigrated to America, and especially to Chicago, in the 1890s. I had many records to examine.

I knew how to search among the library's microfilmed records because I had already ordered microfilm through the family history center of the church's Wilmette, Illinois stake (an ecclesiastical unit). At the library in Salt Lake City, however, I would be able to examine as many of the seemingly countless rolls of microfilmed records as I could during my limited time there.

My tour group arrived on a Sunday; we were scheduled to leave in a week. I spent the first two days of my visit looking at microfilms in search of Grandpa Svenson. Running into dead ends, I turned my attention to the ancestors whose hometowns I already knew; I wanted to return home with something to show for my trip. But all the while I was pondering and rethinking alternative strategies for finding Grandpa S.

On Friday evening, I decided to return to the Kalmar ship passenger extracts once again. I had searched them once; they were extensive, and I could have missed something almost to the end of the roll-then, fifteen minutes before closing time, there he was! Wanting to jump up and down on a table screaming at the top of my voice, "I found my grandpa," I was surely the happiest person in that library. The passenger list gave his name, birth date, and the elusive village name: Runsten, on the island of Oland; it also indicated that Grandpa left Sweden on 29 April 1889. Finally, I knew where he was from-or did I? By now, the library was closing. I could hardly wait to get back on Saturday morning; it would be my last opportunity for research before heading home on Sunday.

I wasn't the first one in line the next morning when the library opened, but I was close. Once inside I began searching the microfilm for Grandpa's last family dwelling in Runsten-but the records showed that the family was originally from the mainland, a village named Halltorp in Kalmar. I knew Grandpa's birth date, 7 October 1872, so I scanned through the microfilm roll of births for Halltorp. I found his record, which also included his mother, Carin Carlsdotter, and his father, Sven Johan Anderson. Grandpa had listed his mother's name as Karen Olson on his Social Security application. Well, her father was an Olsson, but his first name was Carl and she was Carl's daughter; and in the Swedish records her first name was spelled with a C. In Swedish birth records, the mother's age is usually stated, so, once you find a birth record, it is easy enough to count back to the mother's birth year and discover her parents as well. This procedure works for as far back as a parish kept records showing the mother's age.

Also on that record was the family's residence, No. 16 Sodra Warnaby in Halltorp.² I soon unearthed the fact that he was the seventh child born in the family and that Halltorp, Kalmar, had been the ancestral village for 200 years. I don't know why the family moved to Runsten on Oland Island, Oland. It's just that he came from somewhere else first.

Today, Europe's longest bridge connects Oland Island with the city of Kalmar. Oland is a favorite place during sommar semester, the month of July, when many Swedish families go camping there. When my grandfather was a boy the word vacation was unknown; one had to take a boat to the island, and times were not so prosperous as to presage the camping and water sports that would become pastimes in another 100 years.

And regarding the missing marriage information for my grandparents? I'm still looking.