Amanda (b 1872) and Charlotta (b 1864) Anderson

[Glen Johnson]

Amanda and Charlotta Anderson emigrated to the US in 1886 and 1888, respectively, and disappeared.  No one knows what became of them.  I spent a lot of time looking for them and have exhasted all of my ideas.  I posted their family genealogy on Rootsweb and Ancestry.com with the hope that someone else might be looking for them.
 
The missing women are Charlotta Anderson (b 10-23-1864) and her kid sister Amanda P. Anderson (b 12-16-1872) from Tvååker parish, Halland.
 
Charlotta left Sweden on 4-30-1886 at age 22.  She arrived in New York on 5-18-1886 on the RMS Spain.  
 
Charlotta was travelling with a friend, also named Amanda Anderson, age 16.  Amanda's husband was in America at the time.  His name was Carl Johan Börgesson, born 1846.  He emigrated to the US on 4-20-1885, to Hinckley. Hinckley is in Pine County, Minnesota and was a big lumbering town.  I suppose that Amanda and Charlotta went to stay with Amanda's husband.  However there is no proof he was ever in Hinckley.
 
In Sepetember 1894 the town of Hinckley and the surrounding area was completely destroyed by a wildfire, killing 418 people.  About 100 of them were never positively identified.  No Charlottas, Lottas, Charlottes, etc. of the same approximate age were listed among the dead, nor were they listing with the survivors. The list of survivors is not complete; it only lists those who received public assistance afterwards.
 
Carl Börgesson and his wife Amanda returned to Tvååker in June 1894.  This was nine months after the Hinckley fire. Their return to Sweden may not have had anything to do with the fire.
 
Getting back to Charlotta -- there is a record of a Charlotta Anderson of Ramsey County, Minnesota marrying a Peter Nelson of nearby Carlton County on 12-16-1899.  The marriage took place in St. Paul (Ramsey County). Both counties are adjacent to Pine County and it was in fact the Pine County recorder who had the marriage certificate.  A search through the Carlton and Ramsey county marriage records did not turn up anything.  The Pine County certificate only shows the names of the parties, and the date.  I have no way of knowing if this is the Charlotta I've been looking for.  I tried to find the application for this marriage license, but I couldn't find it.
 
Searches through the Minnesota 1900 census indexes for Peter and Charlotta Nelson didn't find them.
 
Amanda Potentia (Charlotta's kid sister) left Sweden two years after her sister Charlotta, on 5-25-1888.  She arrived in New York on June 11 1888 on the Cunard steamship Servia. On the passenger manifest she is listed as Amanda P. Anderson, age 16, destination Penn.  Presumably this means Pennsylvania, and not Penn Station...
 
Searches through the 1900 census index for Pennsylvania failed to turn up anything helpful in my search for Amanda Potentia.
 
I looked for Amanda in the marriage records in McKean County, PA for the years between 1888 and 1905, and turned up nothing.  I chose McKean County as a starting point because the town of Kane was a very popular destination for Swedes from Halland.
 
Another search through Emigranten found Amanda and Charlotta Andersdotter emigrating from Tvååker to America on the same ticket, seven years later, on 5-9-1893.  The passenger manifest lists their destination as New York, and they are listed as Swedish nationals, not as US citizens. The ages of these women fit perfectly --both are exactly seven years older.  Its reasonably to think that they are the same women.  We didn't find parish records for this 1893 emigration from Tvååker, so we don't know for sure if they are the women we are looking for.
 
In Sweden there is a photograph of Amanda taken during a visit to Tvååker in 1932, with her children Frank, Harry and Laura.  No one has any further information.  I am hoping that when the new Emigranten arrives, a search could be done that will find these four people leaving Sweden together in 1932.  Then I can look for the passenger manifest and find out exactly where they were going.
 
If anyone has any information to offer, please let me know.  Otherwise I'm giving this up as a lost cause.  Perhaps someday someone will come across the genealogies I've posted.
 
Glen Johnson
New York City

[Karin Holm Björkholm (Karin)]

[color=aa00aa] enl. www.ellisisland      
May 1893 färdas två systrar (?) Amanda och Charlotte Andersdotter med båten CHESTER ; Built by Caird & Company, Greenock, Scotland, 1873. 4,770 gross tons; 444 (bp) feet long; 44 feet wide. Compound engine, single screw.  Service speed 15 knots.  
 
Built for American Line, in 1893 and renamed Chester. Southampton-New York service. Built as CITY OF CHESTER for Inman & International Steamship Company. Sold to US Government and became US Army transport in 1898.
``  Karin - bilingual in Landskrona[/color]

[Irene Poignant]

Hi Glen,  
Just want to remind you and others that single  
women immigrants could not become  
citizens. They  
had to wait until they got the right to vote.
Looks like you've gotten a little further in your  
search.
Keep it up!
 
Irene

[Glen Johnson]

Hello Karin,
 
Thank you for taking the time to look them up on the Ellis Island website.  I have already seen the microfilm with the City of Chester's passenger manifest -- I looked it up the hard way several months before the website opened.  Unfortunately the passenger manifest gave me no useful information.  It only listed their destination as New York.

[Glen Johnson]

Hello Irene,
 
Yes I have gotten a bit further.  But it seems that the more I found out, the more questions came up.  I may get a lucky break, if and when the new Emigranten CD set comes out (has it?).  That 1932 trip may be documented on the CD.
 
Glen

[Glen Johnson]

Irene,
 
Today I went looking through all of my old posts to Anbytarforum, in case someone has responded after a long time and I missed it.
 
In the fall of 2001, I received my new Emigranten CD and it provided the break I was looking for.  Yay!  It was perfect.  The new Emigranten CD shows only one Amanda, approximate  age 60, leaving Sweden in 1932.  So I looked for Amanda Larson in the passenger lists for the first week of September 1932 and found her immediately.  Not only was her SAL passenger manifest typewritten but it also included her maiden name, the name and address of her closest relative in Sweden and the address of her home in Newark NJ.  This identified her beyond a doubt.  
 
Knowing her husband's name, I was able to find her immediately in the indexed US censuses for 1900 and 1920.  She was living in Manhattan in 1900 so I checked the Manhattan brides index and found her. This helped me find her marriage certificate, which led me to the Augustus Adolphus church in Manhattan (about a 5 minute walk away from where I work).  The census also gave the names and ages of the children and so I found birth certificates for Olga (1900) and Fridrich (1902) but not for Laura A. (1897).  
 
Since I was on a roll I wanted to get copies of the church records showing the marriage and the baptisms of their children.  I walked over to the church on a lunch break and had a talk with the pastor. Unfortunately the old Swedish records are no longer there.  I figured they were at the Swenson Center.  They located them and sent me copies.
 
I made contact with Amanda's great grandchildren and found out what happened to the other sister, Charlotta.  I then located Charlotta's great-grandchildren in North Carolina and tried to contact one of them, but got no response after a couple of tries. Perhaps she is not interested. or maybe she thinks I'm a weirdo.
 
My friend in Tvååker was ecstatic because she could finally e-mail her cousins in America.  I wish that I could have inspired the other string of cousins to participate, but it looks like a dead-end, at least for me.
 
Since the North Carolina släkt won't talk to me, the cousin in Tvååker should probably send a letter herself; a letter from a new cousin in Sweden will probably get their attention.  I'll ask her to do this (again).
 
There were times when this search seemed futile and a really dumb waste of time, there were times I wanted to quit. But eventually the patron saint of genealogists took pity on me, and everything fell nicely into place.
 
Glen Johnson

[Irene Poignant]

Glen,
How nice to hear a happy ending!
I know that you've been searching for these  
people up and down the country. Amazing that  
you  
should find the records practically next door.
I hope you have some other missing relatives  
or  
else you'll not know what to do with your time,  
now that this yearslong search is over.
 
Regards,
Irene

[Glen Johnson]

Irene,
 
Now if I could only make such progress in my own family history project.
 
My grandmother worked on a farm in Tvååker between 1893 and 1897. The owner of the farm had three sons.  At the time my grandfather was conceived in March 1896, only one of the sons was still living at the farm.  My great-grandmother once told her sister that the son of the owner of the farm got her pregnant.
 
The farm is still owned by the same family. With the kind help of Amanda and Charlotta's great grandniece, we exchanged family photos with the current owner and his relatives.  But since I was unable to find any proof that we were related to them, this was really nothing more than an interesting story to tell my friends and family.  
 
Then I heard about Y-signature DNA testing for genealogy.  It is a way of finding out if two men share a common male ancestor. As it turns out, we couldn't be much further apart.  The direct male ancestors of the owner of this farm have been farming in Sweden since the Ice Ages, but my own direct male ancestors came to Sweden, probably from Germany, some time after the Middle Ages.  
 
So my great-grandmother made up the story. It probably sounded better to say that grandfather was a rich man's son, better than saying that he was the son of a poor farmhand.
 
So I amuse myself now by borrowing microfiche from SVAR looking for some guy in Tvååker or Morup who was born in another country.  
 
I found a farmhand working at the farm right next door, born in Denmark.  But his father was born in Morup, and I will probably find that his father and grandfather were also born in Morup and so on.  
 
I am probably wasting my time. The church records aren't old enough.  But within the next 5 to 10 years there will be a lot more DNA data collected from southern Sweden, and Europe in general.  Soon this mystery -- and others like it -- may actually be solvable.