One Swedish family left the village of Nybo in Haverö parish in 1892, bound for North America. Three years later, in Minnesota, their fifth child was born and the name became Ostrom. This is what we know — drawn from the church books that recorded them.
§ I · The journey
Two generations of one family left the same Swedish village within months of each other. The genealogist's notes say only that they went "to North America." Three years later, the family appears in Minnesota.
§ II · The family
The Ahnentafel chart below traces Olof Bernard Ostrom's paternal line back four generations. Numbers follow the convention: each person's father is at 2n, mother at 2n+1. Select any name to read what the records say.
In 1892 the Åström household — two parents and four small children — left Nybo, in Haverö parish, bound for North America. The same year, three of Per Olof's grown siblings followed, along with his recently widowed father.
The genealogist's note is brief: destination North America. The trail picks up again in Minnesota three years later. We don't know which port, which ship, or which crossing.
Of seven living children of Per Olofsson, only one — the unmarried daughter Lotta Kristina — stayed in Sweden. She later moved north to Föllinge in Jämtlands län, had three children outside of wedlock, and lived until 1944. She is the one who stayed.
The Haverö household examination roll for 1892–1899 is the document that records the family leaving. The priest's hand marks the destination — Nord Amerika — beside Per Olof's name, and the names of all four Swedish-born children are struck through the parish rolls together.
This is the page where the family stops being Swedish on paper.
Until the late nineteenth century, most rural Swedes used patronymics — your surname was simply your father's first name with -son or -dotter attached, and it changed every generation. The shift to fixed family names happened slowly, household by household, across the late 1800s. The Ostrom name carries that shift in three steps.
Sigrid Märta Bäckman, Olof Bernard's maternal great-grandmother, was probably born on 29 August 1830 in the village of Magdbyn in Borgsjö parish. The genealogist had to write "probably" because of a single sentence in the research notes.
A fire that ravaged Borgsjö rectory on 28 February 1844 destroyed the church archives. None of the interrogation and ministerial books were preserved. — Find Your Swedish Ancestry · research note
Sigrid Märta was thirteen when the fire happened. Every record of her birth, baptism, and first decade of life burned with the rectory. What we know about her comes from after: the household roll that was started fresh in Borgsjö in 1844, then her later life in Haverö parish after she married Hans Hansson Sandin in 1860. She lived until 26 August 1906, in Vassnäs.
This is the one question mark in the family tree, and the reason for it.
The first surviving Borgsjö household examination record after the fire. Sigrid Märta appears on it — by then a young woman in her twenties — but her early childhood remains absent from the archive.
Hans Hansson Sandin — a tailor, later crofter, in Vassnäs — and his wife Sigrid Märta Bäckman had six children. Two of them died within six weeks of each other in the early months of 1876. The cause, in both cases, was scarlet fever.
Margreta Selina — Olof Bernard's future mother — was twelve years old that winter.
Sixteen years later, she crossed the Atlantic with four small children of her own.
Two entries, six weeks apart, in the same hand. The parish priest recorded Lars Olof first, in February, then went back and added Brita Catharina to the January page. Both lines end with the same word: scharlakansfeber.
§ III · The villages
All five villages cluster in a small area of northern Sweden where the borders of Västernorrland and Jämtland meet, near the Ljungan river system. Each one is still on the map today.
The home village. Per Olofsson and Gölin Halvarsdotter raised seven children here between 1855 and 1892. Per Olof Åström was born here in 1856; four of his own children were born here too. The whole family left from Nybo in 1892.
Where Per Olofsson and Hans Hansson Sandin were both born — in 1828 and 1835 respectively. Hans's family lived here from 1865 to his death in 1904. The two scarlet-fever deaths of January and February 1876 happened in this village.
Where Margreta Selina Hansdotter Sandin was born on Christmas Day, 1863. The Sandin family lived here from 1862 to 1865 before moving on to Vassnäs. Hans Erik Sandin, Margreta's eldest brother, returned to Kölsillre and died here in 1950.
Birthplace of Gölin Halvarsdotter, in July 1825. She married Per Olofsson in 1855 and moved with him to Nybo, where she raised seven children before her death in 1886 — six years before her widowed husband would leave for America.
The probable birthplace of Sigrid Märta Bäckman in August 1830, and the site of the rectory fire of 28 February 1844 that destroyed the parish records. The only village in the story that sits outside Haverö.
§ IV · Timeline
§ V · The records
Almost everything we know comes from the parish books of Haverö and Borgsjö — the household examination rolls (husförhörslängd), the birth book (födelsebok), and the death book (dödbok). The originals are kept at Riksarkivet, the Swedish National Archives. A selection follows.
+ Sixteen further pages in the complete archive · available on request