Or, shall I say, “Swedes”?

In Acts 17: 25, the apostle Paul, while in Athens, spoke to the Athenian people about their altar to the “Unknown God”. (Photo of Athens ruins by Spencer Davis on Unsplash.)

Surely everyone has heard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (Photo by Philippa Rose-Tite on Unsplash.)

If you’re a child of the 70’s, you may remember the Unkown Comic, otherwise known as Canadian comedian Murray Langston, seen here in a photo from this website.

And if you ever knew my husband Mark, or have read “Not Really Silver, Part 2”, you’ll recognize him here as the Unkown Chemo Patient.

But unless you’ve read “Faces from the Old Country”, you may not be familiar with the Unkown Swede.

My great grandmother, Petronella, brought this carte de visite album with her from Sweden in 1891. It was here that I first discovered there were so many unknown Swedes in my family.

Granted, not everyone in Petronella’s photo album was completely unknown. My grandmother had written “Johanna the Dressmaker” on the back of this carte de visite. What’s unknown is whether Johanna was a relative, a friend, and if she made the dress she is wearing in the photo.

An unknown Swedish lady whose photo I found on eBay. It appears to be from the same studio where many of our family photos were taken.

Also from eBay, this was taken at the same A. J. Hagnell studio. The town of Wernamo was the same as Vernamo and Varnamo. For an explanation of that, see this article from Wikipedia.

Considering that Varnamo wasn’t all that big in the late 1800s, and that it’s just over 13 miles from Torskinge, where Petronella was from, the possibility exists that some of these unknown Swedes from eBay are, in fact, related to me.

Here’s another unknown Swedish lady from eBay. What’s interesting, but not surprising, is the label on the back.

Petronella Magnusdotter had nine siblings, five of whom were brothers.

So, while my grandmother’s label does narrow it down, it still doesn’t tell me a lot. We know this photo can’t be Emanuel, as he died in infancy. It can’t be Enoch, or Johannes Victor, because they were younger than Petronella. But is it Johan Emanuel or August?

And are any of these the aforementioned brothers?

I know from the back of this woman’s photo that she was Petronella’s sister, Maria. At first, I wondered, could the man be her husband, since their pictures are right next to each other? But according to Ancestry.com, Maria married Frans Uno Gustafsson in 1894, three years after Petronella moved to the US, which makes that theory doubtful. Not impossible, but doubtful all the same. So, we’re going to guess that he was their cousin Nels. When guessing the name of an unknown Swede, Nels is always a good choice.

Not knowing who these people are, I will take the liberty of guessing. The man looks a little too old to have been Petronella’s nephew Albin Anderson. If these photos were all taken before she came to America, Albin hadn’t even been born yet. Albin was 23 years old when he died after falling from a bedroom window in Hartford, Connecticut, and that was in 1915. But it’s fun to imagine that maybe this is what he looked like. (Maybe it’s his dad or older brother?) The lady could easily have been his mom. If I had a son who moved to the US at the age of twenty-three and I was raised by Swedes (wait, what??), I’d have a worried expression on my face, too.

For the longest time I have wondered about this photo. What was the significance of the flowers and garlands? The hat looked military to me, but I failed to find anything like it by researching “Swedish military 1800s”. Finally, I did a Google image search, and I found another photo of a man wearing the same type of hat.

Okay, same hat, with flowers. What branch of the service could this be? I scrolled down to see what other photos my search had revealed.

Imagine my surprise when, on a site called Media Storehouse, I found these pictures of Swedish princes with “student hat” in the description. So, my next thought was, did they all go to the same school? Does this mean one of my unknown Swedish relatives attended the same college as royalty?

Not so fast, Debra Kay! Let’s just Google this whole “student hat” thing. I found some information about this student cap from the University of Uppsala here. (For what it’s worth, you may notice that my ancestor’s photo was taken in Uppsala.) On other sites, I found that today, this type of hat is worn by both high school and college graduates in Sweden, as well as in other Nordic countries. On Wikipedia, I found this article, but to see the Swedish caps you have to scroll all the way to the bottom. So, there’s that. I still don’t know who he was, but I know there was at least one college graduate in Petronella’s album.

This one has the name “Nella” on the back, prompting me to wonder if it is a photo of Petronella herself. This woman’s eye looks a little bit crooked to me, and if you scroll back up to the photo we know is of her, you can see the same thing with the same eye.

Here are three more unknown Swedes from Petronella’s album who had their portraits taken at the A.J. Hagnell studio. It’s a long shot, but if anyone out there recognizes them, please leave me a comment. Until then . . .

I won’t lie and say I’m above searching other people’s media galleries on Ancestry, in hopes of finding one of my CDV photos with a name attached to it. While these people did not turn out to be anyone from my family, it could happen. One can always hope.