Another sentence translated, please

[Mary Nelson Keithahn]

Could someone please translate this:
 
Blev ägare till torpet 1872 Familjen flyttade till Vittsjö 1897, fadern hade rymt tidigare.  
 
Does this mean:  He became manager of a farm in 1872.  The family moved to Vittajö in 1897, where the father had moved (escaped, runaway?) earlier.
 
I am confused by fadern hade rymt tidigare.  
 
Thanks for your help.

[Heikki Särkkä]

Your translation is correct as the original stands.
 
However, there is a chance that rymt is a corrupt form of inrymts, in which case the translation would be something like where the father had been granted right of tenancy earlier.

[Per-Olof Åstrand]

In principle you are correct.
 
ägare means owner, so it means that he bought it.  
torp is not really a farm; in my dictionary it is translated to a croft
fadern hade rymt tidigare does not really makes sense. rymt means escaped or ran away. What is the source of that statement?

[Mary Nelson Keithahn]

Thanks for your help, Heikki and Per-Olaf.  The source for my information was a family line sent to me by a distant cousin in Sweden that I discovered through this site.  She is limited in her English and I know no Swedish, so I have been trying to translate the notes she included with the help of an online dictionary and kind people like you on Anbytarforum. My cousin has documented some of her sources in official records, but not this one.
 
Per-Olaf, I still find it hard to distinguish between our farm (which is owned by deed, though the owner may still be making payments on it, and raises crops and maybe animals--as opposed to a ranch which is usually much larger and raises cattle, sheep, or bison and maybe some hay crops to support them) and torp or croft, terms that seem to be used for the same thing.  Is the croft always a tenant farm--i.e., a person farms the land but pays rent or labor for it?  In our history such a crofter would be called a tenant farmer or a sharecropper (paying a share of what he raises as rent for the use of the land)?
 
If you can clarify this, I would appreciate it.  Again, thanks for your help.  Mary

[Judy Olson Baouab]

There is an article about torpare (crofters).
 
http://www.genealogi.se/roots/nwotorp.htm
 
Judy