Sven Johan Svensson Storm/Frej

1850s–1860s

Born 28 June 1850 at the croft of Perstorp, Vallsjö parish, Jönköping County, Småland, Sweden, to Sven Magnus Petersson and Anna Maria Johannisdotter. From fifteen worked as a farmhand on farms around Vallsjö and Norra Sandsjö.

1870s

Recruited into the Life Company of the Småland Grenadier Battalion in December 1872 and given the soldier's croft of Lönsås in Bringetofta parish. Married Johanna Sophia Björk on 1 March 1873. Children Ella, Anna, Charles, and Augusta were born.

1880s

Children Frank and Jennie were born. Left Lönsås with his family on 15 August 1884 for America, where they lived in the Midwest and Tacoma before settling near Shelton, Washington, as the Swanson family.

1890s

Rented a place with an orchard below Shelton in April 1890. Widowed that September; died of pneumonia in Shelton on 7 April 1891.

The Grenadier of Lönsås

Sven Johan Svensson was born on June 28, 1850, at Perstorp, a croft on the Eksjöhofgård estate in Vallsjö parish, Jönköping County, in the Swedish province of Småland, and baptized the next day. His parents were Sven Magnus Petersson and Anna Maria Johannisdotter, and he had two older sisters, Lovisa and Anna Christina, and a brother, Carl August, who died in 1867. At fifteen Sven Johan left home to work as a farmhand, moving from farm to farm around Vallsjö, Norra Ljunga, Norra Sandsjö, and Björkö parishes, and for a few years he went by the name Sven Johan Andersson.

On December 12, 1872, with no previous military experience, he was recruited into the Life Company of the Småland Grenadier Battalion to replace a soldier named Johan Tapper. Like other Swedish soldiers of his day he was given a short soldier's surname, first Storm and, from about 1879, Frej, and he was assigned Lönsås, the grenadier's croft of the Drageryd Södergård farm in Bringetofta parish, as his home. He was a tall man for his time, six foot one and a half. On March 1, 1873, in Nävelsjö parish, he married Johanna Sophia Björk. Their children were Ella (born in January 1873, two months before the wedding), Anna (1875), Charles (1877), Augusta (1879, Meghan's 2x-great-grandmother), Frank (1881), and Jennie (1884). In 1879 he was in the camp hospital during the muster.

To America

Food was scarce, and his daughter Augusta remembered waiting anxiously for her father to come home from shopping trips and eating raw potatoes as a treat. On August 15, 1884, the family left Lönsås for North America. They lived for a time in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the Midwest, where a son, Edward, was born about 1886, and in Tacoma, where Annie was born in 1888. By 1890 they were at Shelton, in Mason County, Washington, where Sven Johan went by John August Swanson. A baby, Merlin, was born and died there in 1890.

In April 1890 John rented William Walter's place down the bay from Shelton, planning to care for and improve its orchard, while Johanna wove rag carpets on the loom she had brought west. That summer she became seriously ill, and in early August he moved the family into Shelton to be near help. She died that September. John was working as a laborer the next spring when he caught pneumonia, and he died in Shelton on April 7, 1891, at forty. He was buried at Shelton Cemetery. The same day, his eleven-year-old daughter Augusta went to live with Joseph and Irene Day of Shelton, who adopted her that summer.