Family Reunion: Holmquist

A Quick Overview of my work under this surname

My wife’s maternal grandfather, Arvid Wesley "Bud" Holmquist (1920 - 1996), was the son and grandson of Swedish and Norwegian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the 1880s (in the case of his maternal grandparents) and in 1910 (in the case of his father).

Eight of my wife’s sixteen great-grandparents are relatively recent immigrants from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, or from Holland and Prussia. When I say “recent,” I mean that they arrived during the mid-to-late-1800s as opposed to arriving during or before the American Revolutionary War. In contrast, my own great-grandparents were all born in the U.S. and the most recent immigrants on my side of the tree were Joseph Frey and Elizabeth Horn, who arrived from southern German states in the 1840s.

Researching immigrant families is a lot of fun, but it does take extra time. The digitized records for the Scandinavian countries are particularly good, as they tend to be thorough - more details to compare means it is easier to learn new facts. However, the language barrier remains difficult. Not only did I find myself dealing with multiple countries with different languages, but they were going through periods of administrative changes that affected both family names and place names. You can see a lot of examples in Bud Holmquist’s ancestry.

The Scandinavian Surname Game

I have been able to trace the Holmquist family back to Bud’s grandfather, Anders Holmquist (1846-1916). If you recall our previous post about the Thompson/Thomsen family, we observed that my wife’s Danish ancestors seemed to begin using a family name for their surname instead of a patronymic after an 1856 law passed in Denmark. The Holmquist family name appears to have already been in use as their surname as far back as Anders, born in 1846, despite Sweden having no law regarding family names until after 1901.

We also see that Bud’s maternal line, the Leander family, was using their surname as early as his grandfather’s generation, Gustaf Hugo Leander (b. 1863). Gustaf’s father was known as Mårten (Persson) Lenander (1833 - 1896), suggesting that he was born under the patronymic name “Persson” and later switched to using Lenander as his surname.

Bud’s grandmother was Ingeborg Olesdatter (1858-1934), born in Byneset, Norway. She was given a patronymic at birth, but when her family came to the United States during the 1880s, they used Svedal or Swedahl as their surname. Her family's farm name was Svedal, one of the farms near the village of Aunet.

To Minnesota from Sweden

Gust Leander probably married Ingeborg Swedahl in New York, in about 1884, according to their 1910 U.S. Census record. Their first two children, Augusta and Hildur, were born in Connecticut and Brooklyn, New York, respectively, and the family had moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, by 1888. By 1895, the family was in Chicago, and then in McHenry County, Illinois, but they had returned to Saint Paul by 1903.

William A. (he only seemed to use “Arvid” on certain records) Holmquist was 29 years old when he arrived in New York from Liverpool aboard the Arabic on 3 May 1910. His uncle, John Spence, was listed as the "Person in the US" to meet him in Stillwater, Washington County, Minnesota. William married Hildur on 26 Jun 1912 in St Paul, Ramsey, Minnesota. William was naturalized as a citizen on 12 Sep 1921 in Stillwater.

Slow and Steady

I expect to find a few cousins on this side of my wife’s family in the near future - it has been difficult to find all of the siblings who immigrated to the US at different times. But as I keep working and adding profiles to WikiTree, I hold out hope that things will start to come together.

As always, if these families look familiar, drop a comment or an email.

And if you haven’t already done so, go ahead and subscribe so you can get a free newsletter in your inbox.