1880 - Wait. My Grandfather Wasn’t Born in Australia?
Note: I have written a great deal about the search for my long-lost paternal grandparents, the sad Elisabetta DeFabritus and Francesco Mancini, and eventually published a book called Immigrant Secrets about the search.
In a series of new posts, I’m going to start to document another unusual family character, my maternal grandfather, John Oliver Manson. I will likely hop around a bit as I do the research, so I’ll put a date stamp in the titles so those keeping score at home can follow the timeline. Previously published:
1925 - John Oliver Manson and the Phantom Kidnapping
Now it would seem like where you were born – and the name you were born with – would be a pretty basic thing and a core data point in any family history. Not so much with my maternal grandfather, John Oliver Manson. As I have learned more about his early years, the quote from the late Rachel Held Evans that I used in Immigrant Secrets to describe my paternal grandparents seems equally applicable to the maternal side:
Origin stories are rarely straightforward history. Over the years, they morph into a colorful amalgam of truth and myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale, the shades of their significance brought out by the particular light of a particular moment.
One thing we always knew for certain was that John Oliver Manson was born in Melbourne, Australia. The source? Well, John Oliver Manson himself, in many, many official documents. In one example among many official documents, the 1930 Census notes that he was born in Australia of a Swedish father and a Scottish mother. The Scottish mother was something I didn’t expect.
By the time of World War 2 draft cards were issued, my grandfather had gotten even more specific – Melbourne, Australia. There are some intriguing elements of this draft card in addition to the birthplace.
My grandfather’s wandering spirit was evident in that he was apparently working at the Sierra Theater in Susanville, California in 1941. This theater was built in 1935 and is still in existence. For those not immediately knowledgeable about California geography, Susanville is less than 100 miles northwest of Reno, Nevada.
Even though he lists my grandmother Sarah as his next of kin, as far as I know, she was nowhere near Susanville, California in 1941, but rather back in the Bronx with two kids. There is some ambiguity about whether he was even still married to my grandmother at this point.
His death certificate in 1945 continues under the assumption that my grandfather was born in Melbourne, Australia, although it does list a different wife than my grandmother. I’m hoping that somewhere in there was a divorce, although I have not yet been able to find documentation.
But.
My brother and I hunted for a long time for a birth record in Australia for my grandfather, to no avail. We had a scattering of additional data points. His father was named Lars, his mother was named Johanna, and his mother and brother died while my grandfather was an infant. Not only was there no birth information for my grandfather in Australia, but there was no death information for my grandmother in Australia.
My grandfather’s birthdate - May 25, 1880 - seemed pretty reliable. We were also reasonably certain that there were at least two older sisters and a brother. And picking up the comment by Rachel Held Evans that origin stories are a mix of “myth, nostalgia and cautionary tale,” a persistent family story through the years was that my grandfather had stowed away on a ship as a young man.
One clue we had was that the earliest record we could find of an entry into the United States was in 1910. Tracking my grandfather’s international comings and goings through the early 1900s is a challenging task since he was often part of the crew on a ship or its captain. There is also the matter that some of his border crossings in the 1920s were likely “undocumented transfers of refreshments” from the Bahamas to Florida. That 1910 record gave us an important clue. It lists a John O. Manson crossing into the U.S. at Niagara Falls with a birthplace of Malmo, Sweden, and an original entry into the U.S. in 1897.
Searching now with a birthdate of May 25, 1880, and a birthplace of Malmo, Sweden, we uncovered a birth record for an “Otto Johan Mansson,” born May 25, 1880 to Lars and Johanna.
And from there, a listing from the 1880 census of Swedish households gave us a potential family listing and set of siblings - Per, Hanna, Anna, and Betty - for the newborn Otto Johan.
But how to be sure? How to be sure? And then a stroke of genius from my brother. He started nosing around his DNA matches on Ancestry and found a DNA match indicating a probable third cousin relation. He contacted this potential relative - Anders - in Sweden. And lo and behold, Anders’s great-grandmother Anna was a sibling of John Oliver’s father Lars – my great grandfather. Bingo.
Anders told us that John’s father, Lars, was a farmhand, worker, coachman, and kerosene dealer. According to Anders, the parents of Lars lived in poverty and in the poorhouse, and he escaped to Malmo. Lars married three times. The last puzzle piece matching the DNA and evidence fell into place with the death records for Johanna and John Oliver’s brother Pers, both from dysentery and both within a few days of each other. And further confirmation, there was a major dysentery epidemic in Malmo in 1880-81, so all that matches up.
Lesson for future family history research on my grandfather – John Oliver made up a bunch of stuff.
But still to come… How and why did “Otto Johan” become “John Oliver” and leave Sweden? And did he ever reach Australia? And was his early family trauma a key factor in becoming the captain of the Presidential Yacht of Warren G. Harding?
