Pictured is my great-great grandfather John Edward Winblad, a native of Sweden, son of Anton Julius Winblad, grandson of Lars Magnus Winblad. John was the maternal grandfather of my maternal grandmother Helen Eloise (Freudenberg) Borland-Brindley. While no direct paternal descendants of John have yet tested their y-DNA (most of his living descendants are either female or descend from his daughters' lines), today I stumbled upon a record that might provide some clues as to the origin of my Winblad family.
Some time ago, my cousin Richard Norton commissioned research on Anton Julius Winblad, our earliest known Winblad ancestor at the time, and a hired genealogist in Sweden revealed records indicating Anton was the son of a Lars Magnus Winblad, born June 3, 1794 or 1797 in Vingåker, Södermanland, Sweden. No birth or baptismal record has been found for Lars. A year or two ago, I found a user-submitted family tree on the LDS website FamilySearch that included an Erick Vingblad born December 12, 1798 in Vingåker married to a woman by the name of Britta Ehrsdatter. See here. Suspecting Lars and Erick were brothers, I searched for Erick's marriage record, and eventually (as more records have been added to the FamilySearch collection) found reference to the marriage record of Erick and Britta. See here. Erick is listed as "Eric Winbladh," and Britta as "Brita Ersdr." The marriage took place July 1, 1821 in Vastra (West) Vingåker.
Today, I spent several hours looking thorugh the online baptismal records of Vingåker for Lars' baptism, but to no avail. However, I found a new piece of circumstantial evidence that might lead to a major breakthrough in tracing back my Winblad family. The baptismal records use patronyms, not surnames, so there are no Winblads listed. However, I found that the only Eric(k) whose birth was recorded in Vingåker on December 12, 1798 was a child christened as "Eric Nilsdr." The record clearly states that Eric was a male, although his patronymic name indicates "daughter of Nils." Eric's father is not listed in the record, which is highly unusual, but his mother is listed as "Anna Nilsdr." Perhaps the father of Eric, and presumably Lars, either died or left the family prior to Eric's birth. The baptismal record for Eric can be accessed here, although a scanned image of the record is not yet available online.
Eric is a pretty common Swedish name, and so the likelihood of more than one Eric having been born in Vingåker on a given day should not be discounted where a surname cannot be confirmed. However, even today, the population of Vingåker is approximately 4300, after a considerable expansion in the mid-1800s due to Vingåker's location along a railroad line. Even assuming the population of Vingåker was 4300, 200 years before present, only 2150 would have been females, and far less than 1,000 of those females would have given birth in 1798. Statistically, there would have been less than three births per day, so the odds of more than one child named Eric having been born in Vingåker on December 12, 1798 is unlikely. However, there is no definitive proof that Lars and Eric were brothers, and to prove such a contention, y-DNA samples are needed from each line for examination. Also, this new piece of evidence only tells that Lars' mother might have been Anna Nilsdotter, and does not provide any other family information that could be used to trace the family back further. In and around Vingåker, for example, in the 20 to 40 years prior to the births of Lars and Eric, there are many marriages recorded for women named Anna who were daughters of fathers named Nils.
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