Earlier last week my article about my research describing the method how to do research about Swedes in the Great war at the Western Front and use digital archives, was released at the UK blog Great War Reflections. It was very nice to get the opportunity to be a guest writer and read my own word at another project page.
Below you will find my article, as the link where it was originally posted, seems to be removed.
This article describes methods and angles of attack regarding digital research on the Swedes who participated in the First World War where I have chosen to confine myself to describing methods of research on the Swedes who participated in battles on the Western Front and who fell in the battles and are buried and remembered in Belgium and France.
Introduction
A little bit about myself as a person and why I do what I do.
My name is Joacim Hallberg, but no one says Joacim anymore, I am mostly called Jocke. I am working as an Army officer, my rank is Major, in the Swedish Armed Forces. I have a background in Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), but my current task is to coordinate battle training and exercises for the units in my Regiment, Swedish Engineer regiment ´Göta Ingenjörregemente´. I have served in several missions abroad in Bosnia, Afghanistan and in Mali, both in the Infantry and EOD branches. I am 53 years old later this year, I have two kids, one daughter who is 19 and a son who is 13. You can easily see on them that the time goes too fast. As soon as the snow is gone, and when the roads are dry again, I will take my motorbike out, which is my other great passion.
During the latest years I have developed a huge passion for The Great War and have visited the battlefields in Belgium and in France many times. When I went to the Swedish Staff Officer Course at the Swedish National Defense College, I wrote a small essay about the South African units in the battle of Delville Wood connected to courage and moral factors in offensive and defensive operations.
I consider that to be the starting point for my great passion for the Great War.
One evening, some years ago in Ypres in West Flanders, Belgium, I discovered some Swedish names at Menin Gate Memorial, and then I decided to highlight their efforts to the Swedish citizens as this is a kind of a blind spot in our Swedish history. I did not realize back then that I would find many more soldiers with Swedish background.
The core in my project is to connect the individuals to the terrain but also broaden the perspective of the individuals by connect the places in Sweden, where they came from and if possible, also some information about their history. If everything goes well, you will maybe find a guidebook that makes it possible to follow in the footsteps of the Swedes who fought in the Great War at the Western Front. You can follow my development at my project page westernfront.se.
Angle of attack
In these times when it may not be possible to visit archives on site, partly due to the pandemic that currently prevails, but also because some archives are some distance from where you live, a lot of research is done through digital archives. The information you find in these digital archives is largely sufficient to find the basic information that you are looking for.
In my own project, I have chosen to follow up on the Swedes who fell in the battles on the Western Front and have therefore assumed to try to find these among the archives that have information about the individuals who were injured or died in the fighting’s.
Most Swedes who fought in the First World War did so for the new countries to which they emigrated. I consider this to be the case for those who emigrated to the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Cautiously, I consider right now that most Swedes who fought in World War I on the Western Front did so for the American forces followed by the Canadian and Australian forces.
From the information I have found so far, I believe that the Swedes who chose to fight for the German and French sides did so more as volunteers, although there were certainly those who also voluntarily joined the Canadian and American forces. In my research, I have found a few Swedes, born in Sweden, who fought for Great Britain, but my assessment is that they were British citizens at the time they joined the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF). So far, I have not found anyone who fought for any other countries on the Western Front, which are buried on the Western Front, although there were Swedish individuals who, for example, fought for south African forces in the BEF, which in one of these cases is buried in the Great Britain.
Sources
One method to find information about the Swedes who fought in the Great War is to start with the archives from The Commonwealth Grave Commission, and search for “Sweden”. You will get quite a lot of hits, but you must sort the individuals out from those who belonged to the navy, most of them commemorated at Tower Hill Memorial in London, but also those Swedes who are buried at home in their new countries. You also must sort out those who for example has ´sweden´ as a word in their address, like ´Sweden Grove´ or ´Sweden Street´ in Liverpool, UK.
I then continued to search among those casualty cards that you can find in some archives. I started to search in Library and Archives Canada, among their circumstances of death collection. They are sorted in alphabetical order, but only to the letter S, as the other parts have been destroyed of some reason. I then must search through their other search engine in the same archive, but then get all those who fought, even those who survived.
I then start to find the common Swedish names like Anderson, Svenson, Johansson and so on, but of course I must look through all the cards to really find the others who does not have those common names but are from Sweden as well. It is a huge work, but remarkably interesting at the same time.
One key word to look for in these cards is also religion, where most Scandinavian individuals were stated as Lutherans, but not everyone.
Next source to search in is the National Archives of Australia (NAA). This approach is a bit harder, but I have found a method where I use the search text ´POB Sweden´ which gives me quite a number of hits, but the results are different from time to time for some reason which makes it harder to sort it out and really find everyone you are looking for.
When searching the American archives such as the National Archives Catalogue, I also use the method of searching through casualty cards, which are also sorted in alphabetical order. I have not yet been able to find a method to search this archive by entering keywords, but here I proceed in the same way as in the Canadian archives, which is extremely time consuming, but at the same time remarkably interesting. Who said it would be easy?
Here the cards are revised gradually, when new information has been found, e.g., clearer address to Next of Kin (NOK) which helps me along the way. However, sometimes I must go through all the “Anderson” and so on, to even find those who do not have a clear NOK, to really find the ones I am looking for. Another help in this search is to look at stamps found on the cards. If it says “Over”, they are buried in the USA, and are not included in my project, even if they are Swedes. Here I have concentrated on those who were born in Sweden and had or have relatives left in Sweden.
When I search for swedes who fought for Great Britain, I use Ancestry which gives me some names to look through, but they are quite few. As I mentioned earlier, I think those individuals already lived in GB when they went out on the battlefields. I will try to find another angle of approach and search for those again, to see if the results reflect how it was, or if there is more information out there.
I have also tried to investigate the German Archives, as well as the French. I have also investigated German Volksbund archives but as we know a huge part of those archives were destroyed in second world war. It makes it harder to find swedes from that database. Those I have found, I have found through books and other literature, and then been able to search more about them from there.
When it comes to those who were fighting for France, most of the swedes were connected to the French Foreign Legion at that time. Right now, I have 16 Swedes who fought and fell at the western front for France in my database.
There are other ways to find information about swedes who fought in the Great War, like searching in old newspaper archives from especially USA and Canada. At that time, they had columns with names of those who fell in the Great War, and those findings can also lead me to individuals that I have not found before. It was through twitter I received this tip to search through old, digitized newspapers, so I am grateful for the network you build up through different types of social media these times.
Next step is to verify the information that I have about all those individuals that I have found, by finding information in other sources like unit diaries. Then you also can connect individuals to correct units and locations. Most developed archives to find diaries in are the Canadian, Australian and the British ones. There are diaries to find in the French archives as well, but as I only speak English and German besides Swedish, it is a bit harder for me to search in those archives.
It is especially important for me to verify that the swedes that I have in my project were born in Sweden. I do this through the eminent Swedish archive Riksarkivet. In this archive I also find a lot more information about where and how they lived, how they moved around and finally when they emigrated. This will later be the source when developing my guidebook, whenever that is finished.
The Great Challenge
The most challenging part of my research is to find the correct individuals in the archives, due to that they changed their names for some reason when they emigrated to their new countries. Anders became Andrew, Johan became John, Carl became Charlie and so on. Gustaf becomes often Gust. At least it seems to be consistent. Due to that it takes time to really find the correct individual in the Swedish archives especially when they call themselves Andrew Johnson, that can be Anders Jonsson, Jönsson, Johansson, Jansson and so on. Quite common names at that time, and still are, in Sweden. I have now learned how to search with these parameters in mind.
The Scandinavian countries often use the same surnames and common names in both Sweden, Norway and Denmark is Olson, that becomes Olsen in Norway and Denmark. Common forenames in these times in Sweden were Arthur and Alfred, but it does not mean that you have found a Swede if you find Arthur Anderson, it was also quite common names in UK at that time, and maybe further back related to Sweden?
Putting the pieces together
When I put things together in documents and in geographical tools such as Google Earth Project, I can see that some patterns occur, for example Swedes who fought for Canada seems to have been in the area of Lens in France, and they fell during specific periods which makes me able to draw conclusions that I did not see before, when the information just were there by itself. That makes it possible to look deeper into specific things and develop new conclusions.
It is also possible to group information together such as those Swedes who fought in the Meuse Argonne Offensive that makes it possible to do a specific research about that.
The project continues.
The next step after my fact-finding phase is to travel down to the battlefields to visit those places where the individuals fell and are buried, take photos of the places, to make the project complete as it was thought in the beginning.
At this moment, february 2021, I am working with about 195 swedes that are born in Sweden and right now 164 of those are found in church books in the Swedish archives.
I am sure this project will continue for a long time as this piece of history is a kind of forgotten part in Swedish history as we tend to focus more on the second world war and the specific history connected to 16th century and our battles against Denmark and Germany, which are important as well of course.
Even if we as a country did not participate in either first or second world war, we had citizens from our country who ended up in those hard battles, either for their new country or for the cause they believed in at that time, or a combination of both.
I have as a person decided to take the role, to emphasize what our Swedish ancestors did back at this time, in the fighting within the Great War, at the Western Front. We will remember them.
Photo sources:
Picture 1 – Authors private photo
Picture 2 – Library and Archives Canada https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/
Picture 3 – National Archives of Australia https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/
Picture 4 – National Archives https://catalog.archives.gov
Picture 5 – https://www.memoiredeshommes.sga.defense.gouv.fr
Picture 6,7 – National Archives https://catalog.archives.gov
Picture 8 – Riksarkivet https://sok.riksarkivet.se/