Karlsson

On 31 December 2019 Sweden counted 169,326 people who spelled the name Karlsson and 29,875 who spelled it Carlsson. Behind those two ran a tail: Carlson 2,385, Carlzon 389, Karlson 282, Karlzon 23, Carlsohn 10, Carlzohn 8, Karlzohn 7, Karlsohn 4, and sixteen written Kahlson, which is close to how the name is said in many Swedish dialects. The total reaches 202,331, making it the third commonest surname in Sweden and the commonest of all on Åland.

The tail exists because the name began as a description rather than a possession. Karlsson meant Karl's son and nothing more, and karl itself was the old word for a free man long before it was the name of Swedish kings. A description does not need a settled spelling; it needs only to be understood by the priest writing it into the parish book. C and K stood for the same sound, the C carrying the prestige of Latin and the K the plainer Swedish hand, and one household could be written either way.

Then, around the turn of the twentieth century, the patronymic stopped renewing itself each generation and hardened into an inherited family name; the spelling hardened with it. Whatever a family happened to be written as at that moment is what its descendants carry now. It is why the modern register runs so heavily to K while the men on this page, all of them out of the older records, are almost without exception Carlssons. The freeze caught different families in different hands.

Brynolf Karlsson was born about 1351 and his family connections are unknown; he bore an otherwise unrecorded arms of three horns, which is a polite way of saying nobody has managed to place him. He became a canon of Skara in 1375 and went on to the university of Paris, where he was made baccalaureus in artibus in 1379 and magister in 1380. In 1382 the English nation at Paris elected him its procurator. He turned the office down, probably because he had just been appointed dean of Skara.

As dean he grew into a considerable support to his bishop, and he was called into the council, where he sat at least in 1396 and 1397. In 1404 an arrangement was struck: bishop Torsten laid down his office in return for maintenance for life, and Brynolf stepped into his place. He went to Rome in person in 1405 for the pope's confirmation, and used the visit to obtain permission to assign the diocese's poor-tithe to the upkeep of its canons. He had already been called bishop in 1402, so he may have been consecrated before any confirmation reached him.

What he complained of at Rome is the sharpest picture of his Sweden that the name carries: the civil war between Albrekt and Margareta had laid his diocese waste, and parishes had been forced to merge because singly they could no longer maintain a priest. He gave the farm Brynolfsboda, later Brunsbo, to the church, and a number of his letters of indulgence survive. He stood well with Margareta, though in the fight over the see of Strängnäs in 1409-10 he sided against her candidate Andreas Johannis and joined the bishops of Linköping and Västerås in excommunicating him; after her death he wrote of her government in wholly positive terms.

Under Erik of Pomerania he sat in the assizes of Skara diocese and at the provincial councils of Arboga in 1412, 1417 and 1423. In 1417 the abbot Hans of Alvastra was summoned to answer for a letter to Brynolf likening the king to the emperor Nero. In the same year, the Council of Constance having ordered an enquiry into the life of Brynolf Algotsson at King Erik's request, Brynolf Karlsson appeared as a witness; Algotsson's canonisation was a cause he had pressed for. He resigned the bishopric in 1424.

Carl Carlsson, who Latinised himself as Carolus, was born at Kalmar on 24 November 1642. He entered Uppsala in 1659, took his magister in philosophy in 1664, then went round the German universities and took a licentiate at Jena in 1667, defending a theological dissertation there. In 1668 he went abroad again as tutor to a young Swedish nobleman, through Germany, Austria, Italy, France, England and Holland, and came home in 1671. He wanted a university teaching post; he could not get one, so he became a priest instead.

What followed was fast. Ordinary court preacher in 1672; kyrkoherde of the Maria Magdalena parish in Stockholm in 1674; pastor primarius of the Storkyrkan congregation in 1678; bishop of Västerås in 1680, which he remained until his death in 1708. He sat on the commission the estates appointed in 1675 to audit the regency's administration, attended six riksdags between 1678 and 1697, represented the clerical estate in the estates' bank, and helped draft the church law of 1686. At the Uppsala jubilee of 1693 he was made doctor of theology. He stood long in high favour with Karl XI, and was at one point falsely said to be a son of Karl X Gustav, a rumour only a man called Carlsson could attract.

The name, in his line, ends with him. Carlsson received noble privileges in 1678, and in 1684 his children were ennobled under the name Cederström. Ennoblement in Sweden replaced a family's name rather than adding to it. The six children of his first marriage, to Margareta Swebilia, and the three of his second, to Catharina Bröms, all called themselves Cederström, and his son Olof Cederström rose to the council of the realm.

Carl von Carlsson was born at Norrköping on 13 May 1686, the son of the burgomaster Carl Johansson and Christina Spalding. Those two names hold the whole system in miniature: the father was Johan's son and the son was Carl's son, and neither inherited anything except a rule for making a name. He entered Uppsala in 1701 and in 1703 set out on a long study tour through Germany, France, England and Holland, taking in the courts as well as the universities. In 1704 he was proposed as legation secretary in Paris, a post he never received.

He came home to the archives instead. Extraordinary clerk in the Riksarkiv and auscultator in the Svea court of appeal in 1708; acting registrar in 1709 and registrar in 1710; keeper of the minutes for the defence commission in 1712, for the council in 1713, and secretary of the minutes in the war office in 1714. He was ennobled in 1719 and made expedition secretary of the war office that year, sat in the riksdags of 1723, 1726-27 and 1731, and served on the secret committee. He became kansliråd in 1727, secretary of state in 1729 and friherre in 1731.

He is best remembered for a journey. In 1722 he accompanied Fredrik I on the eriksgata, the ceremonial progress through the realm, and ran the chancery on the road, keeping a detailed diary of it that Carl Christoffer Gjörwell the elder later put into print. He married Johanna Catharina Gyldenbring in the Kungsholmen parish on 9 March 1725, and died in Stockholm on 17 November 1737. His was the short-lived noble house that carried the name: not Carlsson traded in for something grander, but Carlsson with a von set in front of it.

Erland Carlsson was born on 24 August 1822 and grew up in a pious household. A crisis of faith in his teens turned him towards the ministry. As a young candidate he fell under the influence of the Pietist priest Peter Lorenz Sellergren and of the Läsare, the reader movement, and in 1844 bishop Esaias Tegnér granted him his venia concionandi, the licence to preach as a layman.

That licence was issued into a country where the Conventicle Act still stood. Carlsson's revivalist preaching and his work in the temperance movement made church leaders suspicious of him, bishop Christopher Isac Heurlin among them. He was somebody the hierarchy had already taken note of.

In 1853 Tuve Hasselquist needed a minister for the Immanuel Lutheran Church he had just founded in Chicago, and asked Peter Fjellstedt, who ran a mission school, to send him one. Carlsson was the second choice; the first could not go. That year he left Sweden from Kalmar with a party of 176 emigrants, seventeen of them from his own parish.

At Immanuel Lutheran he joined the Lutheran Synod of Northern Illinois and set about helping the Swedes arriving behind him, starting a Christian school and a Sunday school. The provisional church constitution he drew up for his congregation carried far past it and became a model for other Swedish-American congregations. What he reached for was a middle ground: the low-church warmth of Sellergren's influence, held together with the traditional liturgical rite and vestments.

The Northern Illinois Synod then split, and in 1860 the Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Augustana Synod in North America was constituted at the Jefferson Prairie Settlement near Clinton, Wisconsin. Carlsson was one of the pastors who built it, with Jonas Swensson, Lars Paul Esbjörn, Tuve Hasselquist and Eric Norelius. He served as the synod's president from 1881 to 1888, was business manager of Augustana College and Seminary at Rock Island, Illinois, and edited Missionären while managing other church publications.

In 1884 he and his daughter Emmy founded the Augustana Hospital in Chicago; it opened in his own home. He had married Eva Charlotta Andersson in 1855, and their three children were Eben, Samuel E., and Emmy Christine Evald, who became a teacher, philanthropist and feminist. Poor health ended his active ministry in 1889 and he moved to Kansas, but he came back to Chicago, died at his daughter's house there on 19 October 1893, and was buried in Graceland Cemetery.

Lars Magnus Carlsson, born on 21 May 1825 in Kuddby parish in Östergötland, became an innkeeper, a landowner and a member of parliament. He sat for the peasant estate for the hundreds of Sotholm, Öknebo and Svartlösa at the estates' riksdag of 1865-1866, returned in 1879 to the second chamber for the Södertörn judicial district, and served in the first chamber from 1882 to 1888 for southern Kalmar county. He held Fittja gård from 1859 until his death in 1899, along with Glömsta, Norsborg, Hallunda and Flemingsberg, which made him one of the largest farmers in the Mälaren valley. The son who inherited Fittja and kept it until 1950 was called Hjalmar Larsson: the old rule turning over once more in a family that could comfortably have stopped it.

Carl Gustaf Carlsson, born on 18 June 1774 in the Maria Magdalena parish of Stockholm, was the son of a gravedigger also called Carl Carlsson. He studied under Johan Wikmanson, was engaged as harpist in the Kungliga Hovkapellet from 1811 to 1821, served as organist of Adolf Fredrik's church, and taught organ at the Royal Academy of Music's teaching institution from 1824 to 1848. On 17 June 1834 he was elected member number 271 of the Academy. His brother Johan Henrik Carlsson was organist at Täby. He died on the last day of 1854.

The name lies thickest where those lives were led. Against a Swedish average of one bearer in fifty-two, Kalmar county holds one in twenty-one, Kronoberg one in twenty-four and Östergötland one in twenty-eight, with Blekinge, Örebro, Jönköping, Södermanland, Värmland, Halland and Västra Götaland all above the national rate. Carolus Carlsson was born at Kalmar; Lars Magnus Carlsson in Östergötland; it was out of Kalmar that Erland Carlsson's emigrant party sailed. Beyond Sweden, which holds 92.3 per cent of all known bearers, the name is thin: 2.8 per cent in Finland and 1.2 in Norway.