Gustafsson

Gustafsson answers one question, whose son, and answers it for one man only: Gustaf, the genitive -s, then son. A man's own children could not carry it, because their father was not called Gustaf. The men who carry it earliest in the Swedish record show that plainly, because in their names it is not the last word. Karl Gustafsson Banér, Karl Gustavsson Stenbock, Sven Gustafsson Stoltz: a given name, then the patronymic, then the house or family name. In every one of them Gustafsson occupies the middle slot. These are patronymic Gustafssons, not bearers of a surname.

The proof that the middle word moved sits inside a single household. Karl Gustavsson, baron and governor of Kalmar castle, was the son of Gustav Olofsson of the Stenbocks. Father and son shared the house name and could not possibly share the patronymic: Olof's son was Olofsson, Gustaf's son was Gustafsson. Karl's own children are entered in the record as Claes, Abraham, Gustaf and Christina Sofia Stenbock, the middle slot simply gone.

So the medieval and early modern Gustafssons in the register are not a family and never were a kindred. Arvid Gustavsson av Vik, dead in 1379 or 1380, was lawman of Finland. Nils Gustafsson of the Rossvik line, dead about 1440, was a councillor of the realm and a lawman. Bengt Gustavsson, of Tre Rosor till Horshaga, died bishop in Strängnäs in 1460. What links them is the accident that each had a father called Gustaf. The record makes none of them kin to another, and none of them the ancestor of the 97,537 people who held the name and its spellings in Sweden at the end of 2012.

Gustaf Olofsson Stenbock was made baron of Torpa in the first creation of Swedish counts and barons, Erik XIV's of 1561. His younger son Erik Gustafsson was likewise entered as baron of Torpa, and John III afterwards granted Öresten and Kronobäck to that same Erik Gustafsson of Torpa, and Kungs-Lena to Olof Gustafsson Stenbock, the elder son and heir. Three men set down as Gustafsson because one man was called Gustaf.

The third of them, Karl Gustavsson, was born probably in 1537 to Gustav Olofsson and Brita Eriksdotter of the Leijonhufvud, and started as a court page to John III. In 1580 he became lawman of the Tiohärad jurisdiction and captain of a company of Småland horse, serving with it in the Russian war that year, and on 24 August 1582 was appointed councillor for war matters to Pontus De la Gardie on the campaign in Estonia. On 20 June 1583 he was granted Berga åtting and the Annerstad living, and on 1 July sat as a commissioner in negotiations with Russia.

Office came quickly after that. He was made a court councillor in 1584, and on 3 September that year colonel over all the Swedish foot; in 1586 he received the hundred court's rights in Vadsbo. He followed King Sigismund to Poland in September 1587 on the king's election there, then signed the estates' declaration of the hereditary settlement at Stockholm on 7 March 1590. He was colonel of the foot again from 5 June 1591, knighted by 20 January 1593, and sat as commissioner at the truce talks with Russia at Ivangorod in 1592 and 1593.

The spring of 1593 loaded him with the eastern frontier. He signed the decisions of the Uppsala meeting on 20 March, having been commissioned on 18 March as commander of the fortress of Kexholm, and on 19 March he received Bolmsö with Dannäs and Tannåker in fief, with command of the troops drawn together near Viborg castle for frontier defence. He had already signed the Finnish nobility's undertaking at Åbo to King Sigismund, and he married at Åbo that April, to Brita Claesdotter of the Västgöte.

In 1596 he travelled to Sigismund in Poland and was sent on by the king to Denmark. Before 1 June he had been appointed governor of Kalmar castle and Öland; he was back in Sweden by September, and on 8 November the castle and town of Kalmar were given up to him. On 4 June 1597 he surrendered Kalmar castle to Duke Karl and gave himself up as a prisoner, and in 1598, on the duke's order, he was taken to Gripsholm and shut up there.

At the Linköping bloodbath of 1600 he came within a hair of the block. In 1603 Duke Karl gave him his brother Olof's barony of Kungslena. He held Kungslena in Kungslena parish, Toftaholm in Dörarp and Vik in Birkkala, and died on 10 January 1609 at Kurön in Adelsö parish, buried in Västerås cathedral.

Karl Gustafsson Banér was born on 17 October 1598 in the prison at Segersjö, where his parents Gustav Axelsson Banér and Kristina Svantesdotter Sture were being held. He was the youngest of their children, and his father was executed in 1600 at the Linköping bloodbath, the same killing that Karl Gustavsson Stenbock survived. Nothing in the record makes the two men kin. They were caught by one political convulsion, and both are entered under a patronymic because each had a father called Gustav.

The son came back into office rather than out of it. He was made lord chamberlain in 1625, governor in Marienburg from 1626 to 1627, and secretary of state in 1628. On 6 January that year he married, at Stockholm castle, Christina Sigrid Bielke, daughter of the chancellor of the realm Svante Bielke. In 1631 he was appointed vice-governor in Pomerania.

His real work in those last years was logistical rather than ceremonial: during Gustav II Adolf's campaign in Germany, Banér carried responsibility for provisioning the army. He died at Elbing on 11 April 1632. Of the four children of that marriage, Gustaf Banér, born 1629, lived to be a president and died in 1680. All four are recorded as Banérs. The patronymic that named their father stopped there.

Sven Gustafsson Stoltz, born about 1710, learned his trade under the artist Alexander Fox in Gothenburg. He became a journeyman in 1735 and a master in 1741, and on making master he settled in Vadstena, where he worked as a portrait painter, a maker of painted hangings and a church painter. He lived in the castle quarter of the town, at numbers 39 and 40.

The judgement on his work is Bengt Cnattingius's: that Stoltz developed in Vadstena into the foremost representative of the French-oriented late baroque painting whose central Swedish source lies in the decorations at Läckö castle. His paintings went into churches across Östergötland, and he was training others by the 1760s, with the journeymen Liltjedahl and Johan Bromander and three apprentices passing through the workshop in 1764 and 1765.

He married Elisabeth Barkhus in Vadstena on 1 November 1741, the year he arrived; she died there in 1758, aged forty-three, and their daughter Maria Christina had been born about 1751. He married Catharina Möller in 1759, and died of consumption in Vadstena on 14 April 1766.

Carl Gustafsson was born on 3 January 1828 in Västra Ryd parish in Östergötland, and made his living from the three jobs a country parish had to offer a capable man: organist, parish clerk and elementary schoolmaster. In the riksdag he was down as Gustafsson i Södra Vi, identified by his place because his name would not do the work on its own. He represented the peasant estate for the hundreds of Sevede and Tunalän at the estates riksdag of 1865 to 1866, and the record of what he did there is exact and modest: three motions and five statements.

He sat as a deputy on the reinforced constitutional committee and on the general grievances and economy committee, and as a full member of the peasant estate's own grievances committee. It was the last such assembly. The reform of the Riksdag of the Estates in 1866 effectively ended the nobility's political privileges, and the chamber Gustafsson had been elected to, where peasants sat as peasants and nobles as nobles, went with it. He died on 15 June 1907 in Grebo parish.

Emilie Sofia Gustafsson was born Seth at Karlshamn on 24 June 1832, the daughter of a fireman, and she came to the name by marriage: in 1860 she married the actor, director and stage manager Gustaf Gustafsson. Her own career ran from 1853 to 1882 and crossed the whole Swedish-speaking theatre world: Hessler's touring company, the Ladugårdsland theatre in Stockholm, the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki, the Södra theatre back home.

The part of it she was remembered for was the last. From 1874 to 1882 she was at the Stora Teatern in Gothenburg, where her husband served as stage director under Rignér, and she was regarded there as the leading lady of the Gothenburg stage of the 1870s: a commanding presence, a mistress of the art of diction, with a sovereign command of movement and expression.

Her line was what the period called salongsdamer, the drawing-room ladies, and an assessment of 1887 was careful to say she was not confined to it, listing the Countess Danicheff in Familjen Danicheff, the Duchess in Tråkigt sällskap, Ebba Stenbock in Daniel Hjort, Mor Fadette in Syrsan and the governess in Den nye bibliotekarien. She stopped acting for reasons of health after the 1881 to 1882 season and was afterwards a valued instructor in the art of speech to young stage pupils. She died in Gothenburg on 9 September 1897.

Richard Alfred Gustafsson was born in Stockholm on 11 August 1840 and got out of the grocery trade by way of the stage. He was an assistant in a grocer's shop from 1856 to 1861, an actor from 1862 to 1865, and from 1865 a journalist in the city. In 1869 he founded a comic paper called Kasper, made himself its editor and publisher, and kept it going until 1910, sharing the editorship with John Johnson between 1888 and 1895.

The work that travelled was the fairy tales. Between 1874 and 1882 he brought out four collections of them, at his own expense and illustrated by Carl Larsson, and several were translated into English, German, French and Russian; they were still being reissued in the 1920s. He wrote stories and drama besides, including Ett bondbröllop, a scene from country life set to music by August Söderman, and he turned Offenbach into Swedish for the Stockholm stage, Pariserlif in 1868 and Perichole in 1869.

He took the name into parliament as well, a worker-friendly liberal in the riksdag's second chamber for two spells, 1885 to 1887 and 1891 to 1892. He died in Stockholm on 6 October 1918.