My Family Tree

This family tree is provided in 2001 in memory of my mother who died some years ago. She did all of the research on my mother's side, and another relative unknowingly did the corresponding work on my father's side. They never met to discuss their work, primarily because they were not kin, and thus their trees don't intersect. Being a relative of both, the two efforts make up my ancestor tree. The Swedish Personal Information Integrity Law (Personupplysningslagen) discourages me from naming this other relative, and I have also edited out some facts on living persons from the original material.

My contribution consists of merging the two sub-trees together, entering them into a database and giving them a home on the Internet. Thus, the tree is more or less provided as is, even though I collect errors and extensions for a future revision. In particular, I cannot answer questions regarding the source or correctness of a particular piece of information since I simply don't know.

The tree was generated with too many levels on a single page - I might redo it someday. And I'm afraid it's all in Swedish, even though some relatives live abroad, particularly in North America. Enough said, here it is.


Thought experiment (2001): We are some 8 million Swedes born in Sweden. The average birth rate is just under 2.0, which makes around 4 million unique trees. The reasonably recorded average person's history goes maybe 10 generations back, with an average population per generation of 2 million. Thus, the task is to track down some 20 million people. If 1% of us (80,000) find 1,000 ancestors each with 75% overlap, we've nearly found them all. I guess there are also bounty hunters who find ancestors for money, thus speeding it up further. Then it only remains to invent a global naming space so that we can have as complete a picture as we can possibly get. It should not be too hard using XML, and it might even exist already.