DNA and the Paternity of Johan Olof Calleberg

The place was an apartment on Stationsgatan in Borlänge, Sweden.  The year was 1965.  It was summer.  I was seventeen. 

I was deep in conversation with my grandfather, Ernst August Egebring, about history, genealogy, and ancestors. Grandpa had an extraordinary memory for these things.

And so, in that apartment in 1965, I learned about my grandfather’s grandparents – Sara Andersdotter and Johan Olof Calleberg – a pair of quintessentially rural, though not deeply rural, 19^th century Swedes.  They were my great- great grandparents.

Naturally, my grandfather knew a lot about these ancestors.  They were his grandparents, after all, and he had interacted with them in his youth.  He had photographs of them, with their names written on the backs, which he generously shared with me.

But alas, there was one fact that Grandpa did not know.  He did not know the name of Johan Olof Calleberg’s father — my great-great-great grandfather.  Nor have I known it for the last 60 years.  But now, thanks to DNA, I do.

First, the historic facts – mostly the facts as I knew them 60 years ago; facts as accessible now as they were then.

1. Johan Olof was born on 25 July 1843. Here is his birth record.
2. There is a textual discrepancy about where Johan Olof was born. His birth is recorded in the Aspeboda church register, implying that he was born there.  However, The Aspeboda husförhörslängd for 1835-1845 (see here) states that Johan Olof was born at Ornäs torpet, which is in the adjoining parish of Torsång.
3. Johan Olof’s mother (i.e., my great-great-great grandmother), is named in the birth register as Stina Lisa Uppström, the wife of Hans Görsson Wahlberg of Wallmora, Aspeboda.  However, Hans Görsson is not named as Johan Olof’s father.
4. In fact, Johan Olof’s birth is designated as oäkta in the birth register– that is to say, he was born out of wedlock.  But this was not the usual case of a child being born to an unwed mother; rather, Johan Olof was born to a married woman and a man who was not her husband — and the parish priest knew this to be the case, which is why he designated the birth as he did.
5. How did the priest know that Hans Görsson was not the father?  Researching this matter further, I refer to Elisabet Hemström’s book, Svinhuvud-släkten i Aspeboda, which states that Hans Görsson left his family in 1834, leaving Stina Lisa alone to raise their two minor children.  So, Hans Görsson was not around at the time of Johan Olof’s conception or birth, (though he later appeared), and could not have been the father.
6. So it appears that Stina Lisa found a new partner.  One would think that she might have divorced her husband, given that he had abandoned her and their family.  But things were not so easy in early 19^th century Sweden.  Divorce was rare.  The church believed in the sanctity and permanence of marriage, and did what they could to prevent divorce.  Conceivably, with enough time, money, and legal resources, a divorce might have been attained.  But Stina Lisa did not have these advantages, so she settled for an alternative, illegal and frowned upon though it was.
7. What other clues can be derived from Johan Olof’s birth record?  Well, there were the sponsors, or godparents, namely Hans Hansson and his wife Anna Andersdotter, as well as their son Anders Hansson, living at Ornäs, or Solbergs torp – the same place that the husförhörslängd states that Johan Olof was born.  Also there was Johanna Catherina Hedblad from Falun.  Johanna Catharina was an unwed mother who had lived at Ornäs a few years previously, and was apparently a good friend of Stina Lisa’s.
8. So what about the theory that one of the Hanssons from Ornäs torp was Johan Olof’s father.  Well, it seems unlikely that Hans Hansson could be the one – he was married and listed along with his wife as being one of Johan Olof’s co-sponsors.  And Anders Hansson?  Well, he was only seventeen years old at the time, so another unlikely candidate. 
9. OK, let us look forward a few years.  Let us look at the surname that Stina Lisa appropriated for Johan Olof (which appears in the records as early as 1848, when Johan Olof was five years old, at most) – and that name was Lindgren.   Johan Olof kept that surname for many years, and not until he was well into adulthood did he take the name Calleberg – as did his mother. (Note that this was during a time period when the old patronymic naming system in Sweden was being abandoned, and people were beginning to assume permanent surnames, often very “ornamental” ones, like Lindgren.)
10. But now comes a surprise: at about the same time that Johan Olof began being called Lindgren, so did Johan’s sponsor of a few years earlier, Anders Hansson – now Anders Hansson Lindgren.  So could this imply that Anders, despite his youth, could have been Johan’s father? Maybe.

These are the facts and speculations I developed long ago. But then the age of DNA testing arrived, and everything changed.

Of course, I was an early uploader of my DNA to the major DNA databases, including Ancestry.com, MyHeritage, and 23andMe.  As a result, I was presented with thousands of genetic matches, some of whom I was aware of, but most of whom were mysteries. 

One mystery match, in particular, caught my attention. This match, found on 23andMe, was described as my second cousin twice removed, with paternal grandparents from Dalarna, Sweden—the very place my mother was from. I reached out to this match, but there was no response. I was effectively ignored.

So I had to figure out who this mystery match was.  On 23andMe, this individual was listed with a (common) feminine first name, a last initial, and a state of residence—not much to go on. However, she seems to have had mixed feelings about her anonymity because she included four family surnames in her profile. Thankfully, a couple of these names were quite uncommon. By cross-referencing these surnames across different genetic databases, searching through newspaper archives, and examining public records, I was able to identify who my mystery match was and construct her family tree.

I traced this individual’s family tree back about six or seven generations. One branch indeed led to areas in the province of Dalarna where my mother was from. Most intriguingly, the tree revealed a direct ancestor with the surname Lindgren! This ancestor was named Olof Persson Lindgren, originally known as Jönses Olof Persson, from the nearby parish of Gagnef. Olof Persson had lived for a period (from 1839 to 1843) at Lilla Ornäs, a small torp (or in English, a croft) adjacent to Ornäs torp, where my great-great-grandfather Johan Olof Lindgren/Calleberg was born.

Could this Olof Persson Lindgren have been the elusive father of my great-great grandfather?  We will see.

OK, next comes a trick — a strategy I picked up while watching presentations by professional genetic genealogists like CeCe Moore on YouTube. The trick — a true genealogical sleight of hand — was to attach my DNA to the created “mirror tree” of my mystery match, using Ancestry.com.  (Of course, I made the tree private so as not to confuse anyone, and reverted back to my true attachment after the experiment was over.)  I then let Ancestry’s ThruMatching algorithm go to work, generating lists of ancestors from my matches trees that also occurred in the mirror tree of my mystery match.  The idea here was that I was finding common ancestors among people who shared significant DNA with me, but with whom I could not otherwise associate a definite ancestry.

The results were dramatic.  I found over thirty people – until then, true mystery matches – who descended from Olof Persson Lindgren or his ancestors.  The way that these people were interrelated was also significant: not via suspicious polar lineages with no collateral lines, but instead through a forest of semi-distant cousins, all pointing, from idiosyncratic directions, to the same ancestors – an absolute rhapsody of triangulation!

Importantly, I found matches tracing back on both the maternal and paternal sides of Olof Persson’s lineage. Like two mighty rivers converging, these lines flowed together toward one specific family—the only family in history that could contain the father of my great-great-grandfather. This was the family of the ancestral pair Jönses Per Persson (1790-1876) and Berg Anna Andersdotter (1786-1849) from Gärde, Gagnef, Dalarna, Sweden.

Still, there was a problem.  A family is not the same as an individual.  In this case, there were four brothers in the target family — Olof Persson Lindgren, and three others.  Genetically, any one of these might have been Johan Olof’s father. So how did I decide on Olof Persson?  First, because Olof later married and had other offspring – tentatively half-siblings to my great-great grandfather Johan Olof – with whose descendants I share a DNA match.  Also, because of Olof’s geographic proximity to my great-great-great grandmother Stina Lisa. Olof Persson was the only one of the brothers who located to the Ornäs area, while the other brothers stayed in or near Gagnef.

But what about the other Lindgren at Ornäs torpet, Anders Hansson, young though he was, who was a sponsor at Johan Olof’s birth?  Just to be complete, shouldn’t I run a ThruLines test on him, too?  In fact, I was able to find among my matches someone who descended not from Anders, but his sister Margaret, and I ran such a test.  The result: a few very distant and disparate matches such as one might expect in a rural, moderately consanguineous society.  But since there was no concentration or focus such as I found in my first test, I could see no meaningful relationship between this Lindgren and my great-great grandfather.

So there it stands.  I have left out several details, but this is the essential story.  The net result: I have incorporated Olof Persson Lindgren into my tree, inserting him in a place where there had only been a question mark for the last sixty years.

Alas, I only wish my grandfather were still among us (well, he’d be almost 130 years old now) so I could sit with him, sharing the answer that eluded us that summer day in Borlänge so long ago.