The first half of this history has been organized from the furthest point to the present, showing Andy Bannister’s family from the 1500s in France, through the settlement of Quebec in the 1600s; through the French-Canadian voyageurs who helped develop the Great Lakes region; through the American Revolutionary War, when one of our ancestors was conscripted to serve with the British but escaped; through the settling of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and into the 20th Century and World War II. This half of the genealogical project, although it still took many years, was scripted by the Catholic Church and its propensity for record keeping. Much of the biographical data, especially on Canada’s original inhabitants, had been published. Places of birth and death were taken from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, published in 1945 in New York by Macmillan Co. Other major sources of information were the Dictionnaire genealogique des familles du Quebec and “Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents,” compiled by editor Reuben Gold Thwaites in 1896 from 250-year-old parish priest documents.
The second half of this history leads from the present to the past, beginning with Ellen Stenlund’s parents, Olof Petro Stenlund and Helga Mae Albertsen, as Pete created a life in the new country; continuing through generations of life in the “old country” – Denmark and Sweden. This half of the project has not been as easy to organize and therefore holds fewer generations than the first. Sweden has had a system of registry for 400 years, but until 1991 records were kept in each parish. To find information on an individual or a family, a genealogical researcher must know the name of the county or province as well as the parish, and sometimes more than one parish has the same name. The researcher faces another problem: the distinct naming patterns of Scandinavia. Sweden began using family names at the end of the 19th Century. Before that, children often were given a surname ending with –son or –dotter and beginning with the father’s first name. Had she been born in Sweden 150 years ago, Olof’s daughter, Ellen, would have been Ellen Olofsdotter; her brother, Theodore, would have been Theodore Olofson. Spellings weren’t standardized; Holmquist, therefore, could be Holmkvist or Holmqvist and Kajsa could be Caisa or Cajsa. Great strides are being made in the 21st Century in making Swedish and other countries’ records available, especially on the Internet, which will assist future genealogists. However, it was time to publish this genealogical research.
It will always remain a work in progress.
– Barbara Bannister
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