I have no information about them...
The story a ten-year-old orphan couldn't tell
When I found my grandmother Esther’s handwritten story after my mother died, I almost put it back in the trunk.
“Buried inside three pages of notes on her childhood, Esther Rask wrote ‘My folks were born in Sweden and I have no information about them.’”
That’s how I opened my article proposal to American Ancestors magazine in February 2014. Three pages of notes. One devastating sentence. And a research journey that began in earnest at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in 2011.
Esther lost her mother when she was one. Her father when she was ten. She spent most of her childhood with her three brothers at the Swedish Christian Orphanage in Cromwell, Connecticut.
How could a ten-year-old have no information about her parents?
That question is what drove the research. But it wasn’t until I went through the editorial process with Lynn Betlock, the managing editor at American Ancestors, that I truly understood what Esther’s statement meant. Before I get to that—before I show you what the back-and-forth with an editor actually looks like—here is the article itself. I have permission to reprint it in full. Read it first - the story behind it follows.
📰 The Article — Reprinted in Full
Reprinted by permission of American Ancestors. Bill Farley, “’I was left an orphan’: Reconstructing the Family History of Esther (Rask) Barnett.” American Ancestors vol. 15, no. 2 (spring 2014). For more information about American Ancestors magazine visit AmericanAncestors.org.
“I was left an orphan”: Reconstructing the Family History of Esther (Rask) Barnett
In 1976, when she was 80 years old, Esther (Rask) Barnett, my grandmother, wrote a brief account of her childhood. Her daughter Marlyn, my mother, had prodded her to compose three brief autobiographical paragraphs. Included in Esther’s short story was the sentence, “My folks were born in Sweden and I have no information about them.” Instead, Esther wrote about her upbringing at the Swedish Christian Orphanage in Cromwell, Connecticut.¹ When Esther died in 1985, she knew little about her parents other than their names and their birthplaces in Sweden. After my mother passed away recently, I found Esther’s story, several photographs from her time at the orphanage, and a family portrait of her father and brothers. Instead of putting her memories back in the family trunk, I decided it was time to learn more about Esther’s past.
Esther’s parents were Samuel Rask and Hilda Carlsdotter. (Hilda’s last name was “Americanized” to Carlson in some records.) During a visit to Boston, my daughter and I visited NEHGS for the first time and in Massachusetts vital records found Sam and Hilda’s marriage in Norwood in 1888. The entry included the marriage date, their parents’ names, and their occupations.² The information surprised me because I had assumed the couple had married in Sweden, and I thought they had arrived at Ellis Island in 1895. Before this discovery, I was trying to determine how the two might have met in Sweden when their hometowns were more than 200 miles apart.
Meticulous parish records document Sam and Hilda’s lives in Sweden. The Swedes recorded births, marriages, and movements of individuals inside Sweden and to and from other countries. Ancestry.com currently holds digital images of these collections, and many records are well indexed. When I was conducting my research, I accessed the records through a database managed by the Computer Genealogy Society of Sweden. The language barrier and indexing system were challenging, but, luckily, Esther left a few clues that helped me narrow down where to look for Hilda and Sam. A postcard of Strömstad contained a note stating her father was from that city, and a cousin’s letter mentioned that their maternal grandparents lived in Misterhult. With these two starting points, a Swedish dictionary, and a lot of patience, I leafed through hundreds of digital records to find several generations of Hilda’s and Sam’s families.
My search for the Rask family was made easier because I had to look for only one surname in the records. Sam’s family dropped the conventional Swedish surname practice (adding “son” or “dotter” to your father’s first name) and adopted “Rask” as their permanent surname in the 1850s. (This change happened about the time the family farm name was shortened from Rasktugen Kalfhagen to Kalfhagen in parish records.)
For Hilda’s family, I found help from the Sabelskjöld Family Society—a local genealogical society near Misterhult that keeps a database of families related to Major Carl Jönsson Sabelskjöld, a famous knight from that region. Using all these sources I could trace the first chapter of Hilda and Sam’s life together.
Sam and Hilda’s married life
Sam and Hilda arrived separately in America sometime after 1886, and met in Norwood, Massachusetts. At the time, Hilda was a dressmaker and Sam was a tanner in the leather industry. Norwood was attractive to new immigrants because of its solid industrial base—a furniture factory, an ink mill, a foundry, and two large tanneries.³ The town had been a hub for tanning and leather fabrication since 1776.⁴
Sam and Hilda married in Norwood on 30 July 1888,⁵ and lived there for two years. On 19 January 1890, the couple left America for Sweden. Return migration was common among Swedish immigrants. Twenty percent of Swedes who came to the United States in the late nineteenth century returned to Sweden.⁶
Sam and Hilda initially lived with Sam’s mother, Cecilia Olsdotter. The family farm was located just outside Strömstad.⁷ Sam was born at Kalfhagen 9 April 1859,⁸ and previous generations (his father, Anders Rask, and grandfather, Hilgo Eliajson), had lived on the land since at least 1800.⁹ By the time Sam and Hilda arrived in 1890, Cecilia’s husband and all of her children except Sam had died. Sam’s work in Strömstad was likely connected to the local fishing or timber industries. Strömstad, on Sweden’s west coast a few miles from the Norwegian border, was a main shipping center for lumber and herring during the late nineteenth century.¹⁰ After a year at Kalfhagen, Sam and Hilda found a home of their own and, in time, welcomed three boys: Johan (b. 1891), Joseph (b. 1893), and Enoch (b. 1895).
The health of the fishing and timber industries in Strömstad ebbed and flowed during these years and in 1895, when Enoch was still an infant, Sam and Hilda decided to return to America. Sam went first, followed by Hilda and the boys, who travelled via Liverpool, departing on 12 October 1895 aboard Cunard’s S. S. Campania. Hilda and her sons arrived at Ellis Island seven days later, on October 19.¹¹ Sam and Hilda once again settled in Norwood, and Sam worked at an ink mill.¹²
On 16 March 1897, Esther Frideborg Rask, the couple’s only daughter, was born.¹³ Sam and Hilda had barely a year to enjoy their new addition before tragedy struck. Hilda was afflicted with tuberculosis, then the second leading cause of death after pneumonia,¹⁴ and died in Norwood on 27 May 1898.¹⁵
Sam was now a single father of four children under 8 years of age. He could not both work and keep his children at home with him. He made the only choice he could—he placed his children’s care in the hands of others. In her story Esther reported that she was placed in a private home because orphanages would not take children under three. Enoch was likely also placed with a private family, and the two oldest boys, Johan and Joseph, were admitted to the Boston Children’s Friend Society home in Dedham, Massachusetts.¹⁶
The Swedish Christian Orphanage of Cromwell, Connecticut
Although Sam could not keep his children with him, he wanted them to be together. When Esther was old enough to enter an orphanage, Sam gathered the four children and brought them more than a hundred miles to Cromwell, Connecticut. Here Sam had found a place where his children could be under one roof with people who shared their language and customs—the Swedish Christian Orphanage.
Cromwell was a special place for Swedish immigrants. Local businessman Andrew N. Pierson actively recruited Swedish immigrants to work at his floral empire there. Pierson made the transition to America as easy as possible for his fellow countrymen. He provided jobs, housing, a Swedish church, and an orphanage. The Swedish Christian Orphanage was founded in 1900 after several years of planning and development. Reverend M. Nilsen of the Cromwell Swedish Congregational Church persuaded Pierson to donate an abandoned residence, three acres of land, and several buildings. Pierson even paid to have the rooms decorated. Rev. Nilsen worked with his church to secure the funding for operations and to hire staff. The orphanage doors opened on 30 May 1900.¹⁷
Sam was one of the first parents to admit his children to the new orphanage. Before he took the children to Cromwell, he stopped at a photography studio in neighboring Middletown. A fellow Swede, Gideon Appelquest, operated the studio.¹⁸ Sam commissioned a family photograph that captures his pride in his family. After the portrait session, Sam took the children to their new home. The admission records for Johan, Joseph, Enoch, and Esther indicate they were the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth children admitted to the orphanage, on 3 November 1900.¹⁹ Afterwards Sam returned to the Boston area.
Esther’s story included some memories from her orphanage years. She wrote,
My childhood was pleasant enough as we had lots of companionship and we had a healthy and Christian bringing up. There were four women that worked at the home, all very nice, two from Sweden and two of Swedish descent. We used to have prayer meetings in the evenings—sing the hymns etc. The boys use to take the cows to pasture and come home with their blouses filled with apples.
Esther’s recollections are echoed in the 1909 Board of Charities report to the Governor on the conditions at the orphanage: “The children attend the public school nearby, but have prayers and singing in the Home night and morning. There is a good sized barn and an apple orchard on the place, and the children enjoy many of the benefits of farm life.”²⁰ Esther also left behind a faded newspaper article with a picture of the orphanage. In neat script she wrote, “My Childhood Home,” over the photograph.
To try to find more about the Rask children’s lives at the orphanage, I contacted Ädelbrook, the successor agency to the Swedish Christian Orphanage that holds admission and dismissal records. Carol Vincuilla, the agency’s archivist, kindly retrieved the records for the Rask children. When she let me know the records were in the mail, she cautioned me that they were not very extensive and consisted of a single 5 x 8 card for each child. Nonetheless, I waited for her letter with great anticipation. When the letter finally arrived, I could not believe the amount of information packed into the small note cards. The records included a place for the child’s name, date of birth, names of father and mother and their places of birth, the date and place of the parents’ marriage, whether the parents were living or dead and their locations, the financial support provided by the parents, baptismal dates, date received at the orphanage, the dismissal date, where the child was placed, and notes.
Sam’s last years
A few years after Sam placed his children at the orphanage, his health began to fail. He suffered from progressive muscular atrophy—an affliction similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease.²¹ His prognosis was not good. Sam started to put his affairs in order by filing papers to become a naturalized citizen. This process would ensure that his three sons born in Sweden would have citizenship after he was gone. (Since Esther was born in the United States, she was already a U.S. citizen.) Sam’s application was approved on 11 October 1904.²²
Soon after, Sam brought Johan and Enoch back from the orphanage to live with him.²³ At 13 Johan was just six months from being released due to the orphanage’s age limit (14 for boys and 16 for girls). Enoch was 8. Only 7-year-old Esther and 11-year-old Joseph (who may have been sickly) remained at the orphanage.
A year and half later, Sam’s health had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer care for Enoch. Enoch was readmitted to the orphanage on 16 July 1906.²⁴ Johan was now 15 and too old for the orphanage. On 11 April 1907, Sam entered a Boston hospital and died eight days later, on 19 April 1907.²⁵
The Rask children were now truly orphans. Johan was 15, Joseph 14, Enoch 11, and Esther 10. Although they had lost their parents much too early, Sam left them with American citizenship, a community that would provide jobs and housing, and a family portrait they could cherish forever. Sam also had used Johan’s last two years with him to teach Johan how to survive outside the orphanage.
Johan returned to Cromwell with his younger siblings and worked at a greenhouse. Over the next few years, Joseph and Enoch joined him in the local workforce. Joseph’s dismissal papers from the orphanage noted that he was left in the care of “Cromwell Ct.” Census records indicate Joseph found work at a hotel in nearby Hartford. Tragically, in 1912 Joseph succumbed to tuberculosis, the same disease took his mother’s life. Enoch was released to the care of Timothy Hodge in neighboring Glastonbury; 1910 census records indicate he was employed by Hodge as a laborer.²⁶ While at the orphanage Esther completed eighth grade at the Nathaniel White School and was confirmed in the local church. When the day arrived for her to leave the orphanage, Esther made the transition with support from Johan and Enoch, who had remained in the area until she turned sixteen. Sam taught his children well—families stick together.
Esther first worked in Cromwell, and then moved to the Boston area to be close to an aunt (her mother’s sister) and cousin. Enoch served in the Navy during World War I, and after the war, Esther and Enoch followed their aunt and her family to Detroit. Enoch settled in Detroit and worked as a machinist for a shipbuilding company. Johan moved to Rochester, New York, to continue his career as a florist; he later moved to Staunton, Virginia, to open his own store. Esther became a telephone operator and met her future husband at a public dance hall. She married Guy Barnett and raised a family in Detroit. Esther’s photo albums include many pictures of her siblings and cousins reuniting and spending vacations with each other throughout the country. I believe Sam would have very pleased that his family remained close for many years after he expended so much effort to keep them together. ◆
📬 Now—The Story Behind the Story
You just read the finished product. Here’s what it took to get there.
The Proposal
On February 27, 2014, I submitted a proposal to American Ancestors. The pitch was straightforward: one sentence buried in three pages of childhood notes, and a research trail that ran through NEHGS, Ellis Island, Swedish parish records, orphanage admission cards, and Massachusetts death certificates.
Lynn Betlock, the managing editor, wrote back the same day. “Your story sounds fascinating, and I think it will be interesting to readers on a number of levels: the steps of your research process, the opportunity to learn about a New England orphanage, and a very poignant family story. We would be pleased if you would write an article up for publication in our magazine.”
She suggested 2,400 words. Four pages. I responded within hours: I’d have it to her by March 31.
I was confident. I had been researching Esther’s story for years. I had the facts. I had the photos. I had the narrative arc.
I was wrong—not about the facts, but about what the story actually needed.
The Submission
By March 23 I emailed Lynn: “Almost there! I’m wrapping up the article submission. I just have to get all of my footnotes/references in order and scan a few images for consideration. I’m right at the 2,400 word count (plus or minus 10-20).”
I submitted on March 27. The word count was 2,360 words without my bio line and footnotes. I used Zotero to manage my sources and placed the references on each page to make them easier to track. I attached a separate file with potential images, noting which two would require permission to publish.
Lynn responded the same day: “Thanks very much for the article and images. I’m very interested in reading the story.”
Then came the wait.
The Edits
April 4: “Hi Bill, I’m checking in to apologize and let you know that I am running late on your article. I have started editing it and I will definitely back in touch with you on Monday.”
I wasn’t worried. I had submitted early specifically to allow time for editing and rewrites. I wrote back: “No worries. I submitted early to allow us both some time for the editing and re-write. I look forward to your edits.”
April 8: Lynn sent me the edited article with questions highlighted in yellow. Most were standard—image requests, source clarifications. She wanted specific photographs at 300 dpi or higher: Sam’s final family portrait, an example of an admission record, the children of the orphanage in 1906, Esther at grammar school, Esther’s confirmation, individual portraits of Samuel and Hilda, the family photo circa 1895, a postcard of Strömstad. She also asked if I had a contact at the Cromwell Historical Society for the orphanage photograph.
I did. I had two contacts: Richard F. Donohue at the Cromwell Historical Society, and Carol Vincuilla at Ädelbrook—the successor agency to the Swedish Christian Orphanage. These weren’t just names to cite. They were people who had opened their archives to me.
But one question from Lynn stopped me cold.
The Question
“In the opening paragraph you note that Esther wrote that she had no information about her parents. Since she was ten when her father died, I’m wondering if that statement is more nuanced than it might seem. Perhaps she meant that she had no information about her parents’ lives in Sweden and about earlier generations, or perhaps she really just didn’t know/remember anything about them at all. Of course you may have no idea what she meant there yourself. This last time when I read through the article, I began to really think about what a ten-year-old might remember. I have ten-year-old boy/girl twins, so I am sure they are at least part of what got me musing.”
I stared at that question for a long time.
Lynn was right. I had been so focused on reconstructing what Esther didn’t know that I had never carefully documented what she did know—when she learned it, from whom, and what her silence actually revealed.
The Response
On April 15, at 7:03 AM, I sent Lynn everything I had found. I had gone back through every letter my mother kept on her family history:
1978: Esther’s short “autobiography.” Two quotes about her parents: “My folks were born in Sweden and I have no information about them,” and “My father didn’t want us separated.”
1981: A letter from a cousin to Esther: Mother (Hilda) was born in Smaland.
1982: A note from my mother: “She (Esther) heard years later that her mother died in childbirth.”
Undated: A note on the back of a postcard of Strömstad from Esther: “My folks’ birthplace.” She also wrote “Smaland” on the card.
I wrote to Lynn: “From what I gather, all Esther knew about her parents were the birthplaces in Sweden—and this information she learned in 1981 from a cousin. She did not know they met in Norwood, married in the States, moved to Sweden, lived with Sam’s mother, their employment, cause of death, etc. The story she heard of her mother’s death does not match the death records.”
Then I added: “Johan would have been 7 when his mother died, so he may not have been able to tell Esther much about her when the two were older. He was about 16 when his dad died, but he apparently never passed on anything about his Father’s passing.”
And twenty minutes later, a second email: “I forgot one note on Esther’s knowledge of parents. She did receive a copy of Johan’s birth certificate from Strömstad. This was found by one of her cousins that was doing family research. So Esther knew where her parents raised her brothers.”
The Citations
Lynn also asked for footnotes on Sam’s birth and his grandfather’s residency on the family farm going back to 1800. I had to go back to Swedish genealogy research I’d done 10-12 years earlier and properly source it. I used FamilySearch’s guide for citing Swedish records and tracked down the specific Genline records:
Samuel Rask birth record, April 9, 1859, Göteburg och Bohus, Tjärnö: C:3: Marriage and Birth Records: Page 467, Genline GID # 956.18.58700.
Sam’s grandfather’s location on the family farm was implied in a household examination record from 1835.
Every question she asked revealed gaps I hadn’t seen. Every clarification request taught me to anticipate what a reader would need to follow the trail.
The Final Proof
On May 8, 2014, the Production Editor sent me the formatted article as it would appear in the Spring 2014 issue. “Please note that this low-resolution PDF is not of the same quality as the final printed version. As noted in the letter of agreement, this review is for accuracy only—unfortunately, we cannot accept major editorial changes at this point. Please contact me with any corrections by 9 a.m., Monday, May 12, 2014.”
The article was done. Published. Pages 36 through 40 of American Ancestors, Vol. 15, No. 2.
What I Learned
The editorial process wasn’t about polishing prose. It was about building an evidentiary foundation strong enough to support the weight of the story. Lynn’s question about what a ten-year-old might remember forced me to examine the silence in the record—not just fill it in. The requests for footnotes and high-resolution images forced me to treat every document and photograph as a historical artifact, not just an illustration.
In my original proposal, I ended with this line: “Esther would have been very proud of her father.”
Having gone through the editorial process—having understood what Sam actually accomplished in those final years—I know that line was exactly right. Sam taught his sons well. Families stick together.
Next week: I’m diving into a different kind of archive—the personal papers of another immigrant family that includes a mysterious mining monument and an inheritance battle that reached the Supreme Court. Subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it.
This is what I do: I rescue stories from the dustbin of history. Some families get three paragraphs. Some get nothing. But with the right research, the right questions, and the right photographs, we can give them back their full stories.
Bill Farley, PhD The Dustbin Historian
P.S. — If you have a family photograph that feels like a mystery, if you have a relative who left only a few paragraphs of their story, or if you’ve hit a wall in your research and need help knowing which questions to ask—hit reply and tell me about it. Every research journey starts with asking the right question. Sometimes you just need someone to help you figure out what that question is.
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