Lindström

Nothing in Lindström tells you anything about the first person who carried it. Lind is the linden or lime tree, ström is a current of water, and welded together they name no farm, no father, no trade and no parish. It is the second coinage Sweden built out of the same linden: Lindberg set the tree against a mountain, Lindström against moving water.

The result is a name that belongs nowhere and is everywhere. At the end of 2012 Sweden held 25,171 people spelled Lindström, eight spelled Lindstrom and one Lindstrøm: 25,180 altogether, and the twenty-first commonest surname in the country. The two dots are the first thing the name loses when it emigrates, which is why English-speaking countries carry it flat, as Lindstrom.

Lindström is the next turn of a wheel Sweden had been turning for three centuries. Ambitious men kept swapping the name they were born with for one that sounded better, in Latin first and then in Greek, and each fashion in turn was a way of not being your father's son on paper. What is new in Lindström is the material. The borrowed languages have fallen away and the words are plain Swedish: lind and ström, two nouns off the landscape bolted into one, doing the work a Latin ending used to do.

Eric Gustaf Lindström (1792–1865) was born in Gothenburg and died there, and in 1826 he put the name over a door: the snuff and tobacco house of Lindström & Brattberg. That is the quiet advantage of a made compound. It works on a signboard and a bill of exchange in a way a patronymic cannot in a country of Anderssons. The trust he accumulated as a private merchant kept being converted into public work, and he founded Gothenburg's elementary schools, its workers' housing and its arbetsinrättning, the work institution.

He sat on the city council from the day the council existed, and Gothenburg sent him to the Riksdag of the Estates for Borgarståndet, the burgher estate, in 1844–1845 and again in 1847–1848, putting him on committee both times. He sat with the liberals and argued for bringing railways to Sweden. His son Julius Lindström (1825–1904) took up the same two trades, wholesale merchant and politician.

Maria Christina Lindström (1806–1895) was born in the country parish of Lindesberg in Örebro county and came to Stockholm as a girl, where she was taken on as a serving girl at Bianchini's on Storkyrkobrinken in Gamla stan. Carrying trays there gave her the idea for a cafe with a female clientele. She opened it in 1834 at the crossing of Drottninggatan and Jakobsgatan, the first cafe for women in Stockholm, in a period when women did not eat in public for pleasure. Upper-class ladies came for the calm and the discretion of it, and Svenska Dagbladet recalled at the centenary that they had been delighted from the start.

The name on the board was not the ornamental one. Tysta Mari, Quiet Marie, was a nickname fixed on her for the discreet way she managed the room, and she answered it by hanging it outside as the name of the house. Men found the place soon enough and the custom grew. She retired in 1857 and handed the cafe to her cousin Elise Granberg, who passed it in 1879 to the sisters Amalia and Mina Dammberg. Tysta Mari survived until 1954, when its premises in Kronprinsens stall came down in the rebuilding of Norrmalm. Past eighty, contemporaries said, she still looked fifty, and the walkway Tysta Marigången carries her nickname yet.

Carolina Lindström (1812–1892) was born Lundström, the daughter of a businesswoman, and saved her own money until she could afford an apprenticeship with the finest hat maker in Stockholm, a Frenchwoman. By 1842 she had her own shop at Västerlånggatan 40. The city called her the Evening Star, because she was so often seen working through the night.

What made her was the web of contacts rather than the needle. When the king died in 1844, footmen at the royal palace got word to her before the death was publicly known, and she bought up the black mourning ribbon held by every other milliner in the capital. A second shop followed on Hornsgatan. In 1847 she married a man who gambled away her money, and she recouped it. In 1892 she left the business to an assistant and bought a place in the Stockholm retirement home for merchants' widows, where she died a couple of months later. Her boutique was still trading in 1995, by then the oldest fashion shop in Stockholm. The name reached a Swedish table by another route: Ulrika Eleonora Lindström (1835–1892) is held to be the creator of Västerbotten cheese.

Carl Jacob Lindström, born in Linköping on 8 April 1800, was the son of a customs warden, Nils Lindström, and Kristina Ulrica Nyqvist. The parish rector Nils Mobeck taught him to draw, and the Bishop of Linköping, Carl von Rosenstein, made an artist of him by paying him 2 riksdaler banko a week to study at the Academy of Art in Stockholm. The academy gave him a token of merit in 1817 and recorded him present from 1818 to 1822, and he showed at two exhibitions of the Götiska förbundet, in 1818 and 1820.

In 1822 he left the academy without finishing and left Sweden with it. He travelled with a fellow artist, Alexander Malmqvist, by way of Hamburg and Paris, mostly on foot and over the Alps, reaching Rome in 1823. There the pair sought out the sculptor Niklas Byström at his Villa Malta, and Byström wrote to Bernhard von Beskow that the two youths had arrived entirely without money. At the villa Lindström met the etcher Hjalmar Mörner, who made a printmaker of him.

He stayed, and became the Swedish artist of his time best known in Italy. Around 1830 he moved to Naples and remained there until his death, probably in 1841, and it was there that his most popular work was made: two albums of etchings, Panorama delle scene popolari di Napoli in 1832 and the costume plates of Costumi vestiture napolitani in 1836. The Roman years had run to Italian watercolour vedute and to caricature, the German poet Wilhelm Waiblinger recurring in them. Sweden noticed him late, when Italian-owned works of his were exhibited in Rome in 1932. The Nationalmuseum holds his dance of death in twenty-four sheets.

Gustaf Lindström (1829–1901) was born in Visby, entered Uppsala University in 1848 and took his doctorate in 1854. A course of lectures in Stockholm by Sven Lovén turned him towards the zoology of the Baltic, and he published on its invertebrate fauna and then on its fishes. His living came from teaching: a schoolmaster in 1856, a master at the grammar school in Visby from 1858. What he did with his leisure was the Silurian rock of the island he had been born on.

He worked through its fossils, the corals, brachiopods, gastropods and pteropods, cephalopods and crustaceans, and he determined the true nature of the operculate coral. He described remains of the fish Cyathaspis from the Wenlock beds of Gotland, and with Tamerlan Thorell a scorpion, Palaeaphonus, from the Ludlow beds at Wisby. In 1876 he was appointed professor and keeper of the palaeozoological department of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, and in 1895 the Geological Society of London awarded him its Murchison Medal. He died in Stockholm in 1901, a schoolteacher from Gotland who ended as keeper of the nation's deep time.