How I started with genealogy

As I previously told it was poor with relatives on my father's side since he was born in a home for single mothers an was afterwards left by the authoroties to different farmers for upbringing. My father has written some very interesting stories on this. My grandmother, whom I knew who she was, but had very little contact with died in 1996 in old age. She refused until her death to reveal who my grandfather was. Some years later, I received of her brother - my fathers uncle - a copy of a hand-written family tree made around 1905. It was a tree of my grandmother's mother's side and had stated births and deaths of people but had very few surnames. The tree stretched back to a "Bergsman", which is a mine owner, in Ljusnarsberg in late 18th century. Anyway - I rooled the tree an had soon forgotten about it.

The same year as my grandmother died, in time for my father's 75th birthday, he received a telephone call from a woman claiming to be his half sister and that he also had half brother. Since their father's death they had known about my fatgers existance, but not considered it appropriate to reveal anything until his mother died. So suddenly I had a relative on my father´s side, which was pretty exciting. My new aunt, who were of teh same age as me, gave my father a bunch of old pictures of her father and some documents about the family ancestors. My father put this away in a boxs somewhere.

Nearly ten years passed and the end of 2005, I found the old roll with the family tree and the Bergsman´s family. I started studying it and found that the top was: 'Erik Matsson from Hörken, Bergsman (Mine Owner), resident on Stråtgården in Ljusnarbergs Parish, comming from a Finnish ancestor from the 1600s, a certain Peder Persson Ossmi according to Ljusnarsbergs chronicle from 1607. Married to Kristina Katarina Hansdotter from Kyrkbacken Klastorp in Ljusnarsbergs Parish, Örebro län. Eriks in all 12 children were recorded and their descendants until the early 1900s. This was interesting and since I have had research (not genealogy, however) as my profession for 25 years, I attacked the problem in the only way I knew. I searched on the Internet.

I was mainly interested in going back in time because it was the most exciting to do. Who was he Ossmi? Searches on Ossmi returned no results, but on Osmi. It gave lots of international organizations and companies with OSMI as acronym. Eventually, I wrote Osmi + Ljusnarsberg and Google hit a jackpot. It turned out that several other researchers had been interested in a Osmi in Hörken in Ljusnarsbergs and now I found their messages on Anbytarforum. I will tell you about Anbytarforum later.

The picture above shows my grandmother´s parent´s home, where my father could have been brought up if things had been different

/This text was first published in January 2007/