Assorted Updates

News on several fronts this week: Fraser family DNA testing; Rudeen relatives in Sweden; and an upcoming Martinson project.

Fraser Family DNA Testing

A long-standing brick wall has been to find more information about my 4x-great-grandfather John Fraser. This case is well suited to Y-DNA testing and I have been fortunate to have mom’s cousin Bruce as a willing DNA tester. The results came in late last year, and I took a Y-DNA course in January so I could learn how to understand the test results. What I learned is that we have many distant Fraser cousins who are likely connected to us by a common ancestor who lived sometime around the year 1500. But there was one cousin who initially appeared to be more closely related – previous Y-DNA testing showed that we likely shared an ancestor who lived around the 1750-1800 timeframe. I was thinking that our common ancestor could be John Fraser’s father, grandfather or great-grandfather! Well, the cousin recently upgraded his Y-DNA test (the results came in just days ago!) to the “Big 700”, which is the same test we used for Bruce. This test is a lot more advanced and accurate. Unfortunately, the test results show that this cousin isn’t as closely related as the earlier test had suggested. Like the other distant Fraser cousins, our common ancestor likely lived sometime around the year 1500. And records don’t generally go back that far, so this line of investigation has probably come to an end for now.

There are still three bits of good news and hope, however:

• The Y-DNA testing suggests that our Fraser ancestors REALLY ARE related to Clan Fraser of Lovat (the Highland Frasers). Some of our DNA cousins can trace their ancestry to clan leaders. So we aren’t just wannabe-Frasers, we’re the real deal! I believe the Fraser surname has been in our family since at least 1500 and maybe earlier. So that’s pretty cool.
• Bruce’s DNA test results have been made part of the “FRASER and Septs” group project at FamilyTreeDNA.¹ Thanks to Bruce, our Fraser DNA is now included in a 24-member subgroup called “Fraser etc. – Hap’group R1b1a2 – Family A (possibly L257+)”. That’s mostly gobbledygook to me, but these are our people! And there’s still the possibility that future Y-DNA testers who are more closely related to us will join the project and get assigned to our subgroup. That’s the great thing about using DNA in genealogy – there’s always the possibility of more matches in the future! 
• Finally, we’ll be getting Bruce’s Ancestry DNA results soon. Our John Fraser is five generations away from Bruce, my mom, and Aunt Jane. John Fraser’s unknown father would be six generations away – pretty much the outer limit for reaping benefits from the autosomal DNA testing such as what Ancestry offers. But who knows, maybe between the three of them, we’ll be able to find some interesting new matches either now or in the future that help shed light on our more distant ancestors.

Rudeen Relatives in Sweden

Out of the blue, I got an email last week from a Swedish researcher who is digitizing photo albums that belonged to the family of Carl August Pettersson. Carl August was the younger brother of my great-grandfather Gust Rudeen. The researcher sent me a photo of Carl August and his family from about 1900.

The adults in the photo are Carl August Pettersson and his second wife Klara Lovisa Ericksson. (I see a strong resemblance between Carl August and my dad!!!)

In the back is Klara’s son Einar from a previous marriage.

In the middle with Klara and Carl August are his two children from his first marriage: Ester Amanda and Karl Gunnar.

In the front is the daughter that Carl August and Klara had together, Eira Viktoria.  

The photo album likely belonged to Eira. 

The researcher sent two other photos to me. They were also from Eira’s album and were from Anderson Studio in Wahoo, Nebraska.

Here’s a photograph of a baby captioned “Anderson”. This is certainly one of the children of Emma Anderson – Emma was a sister to both Gust and Carl August. She traveled with Gust and Augusta to America in 1882 and lived in Wahoo. The baby could be Carl, Clarence (“C.W. Anderson”), Oscar, or Alice – all of them are first cousins to my grandpa Lawrence Rudeen. My guess is that it’s Alice but hard to know for sure with children’s clothing during this era.

The other photo is a young man who I do not recognize at all – maybe Emma’s husband Carl Anderson? Or is this one of her sons?

Click on any of these photos to see them at a higher resolution. Can anyone help identify these photos?

And there may be more photos to come! What fun!

The John Martinson Project

I attended our local Swedish Genealogical Society of Colorado meeting on Saturday and got an update on all the new record sets, indexes, and features included in ArkivDigital, the premier software and data source for Swedish genealogists. I started snooping around and immediately found some good stuff for John Martinson, my great-great-grandfather.

When I first started my interest in genealogy in the 1980’s, John Martinson was one of the first ancestors I studied. My research techniques and data sourcing were very amateurish at that time – I really didn’t know what I was doing. I made a lot of data entry errors and I have a lot of gaps that are easily fillable. And I have never studied his extended family – all his siblings came the United States too. Our cousin Lee has a lot of this research nailed down but I’ve not completely incorporated his work into my family tree. So time to get on with it! I’m going to start from scratch with John and follow records from his birth both forwards and backwards to find ancestors, descendants and collateral lines. There are many new record sets in Sweden that are fun and informative. I’ll also explore his land ownership and revisit his involvement with local churches. Stay tuned!

¹ Per the group’s page, “This project incorporates the Surname Fraser (Frazer) as well as the Septs belonging to Clan Fraser. With Fraser, Frashure, Frasier, Frazier variations, here is where you can find out whether you are carrying the same genetic signature as those with alternative spellings.”