Ancestry Magazine

It takes luck and perseverence to find some ancestors’ records.

George McCracken, former editor of The American Genealogist, observed, “It is much easier to tell others how to conduct genealogical research, than it is to do it yourself.” As one who writes and lectures on genealogy, I was reminded of the truth of his comment very forcefully when I attempted to learn the name of the vessel on which Lars Petter Storm’s immigrant family arrived in the United States from Sweden. Lars and Wilhelmina Storm are the maternal grandparents of my wife, Marjorie [Larsson] Holden.

In many instances, determining the name of a vessel on which Scandinavian immigrants crossed the Atlantic between 1860 and 1920 is a routine exercise in genealogical detective work. Usually a few reels of readily available microfilm from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, plus a moderate degree of perseverance are the only elements needed to assure a successful conclusion to this venture into family history research. On a previous search I had encountered no problems discovering information about my wife’s paternal grandparents, Lars Petter and Amanda [Olofsdotter] Larsson. They had arrived in New York Harbor on 20 May 1883, aboard the SS Germanic of the British White Star Line. I was confident that the procedure I had employed so effectively in that search would also enable me to identify with ease the ship on which her maternal grandparents came to this country. Events proved that in this belief I was sadly mistaken.

I initiated the second search by ordering a reel of microfilm containing the 1900 census for the town of Westmanland in Aroostook County, Maine, where the Storm family was living at the turn of the century. That reel confirmed my belief that Lars Petter and Wilhelmina Karolina Storm had arrived in the United States in 1888. Based on this firmly established fact, I borrowed the Family History Library’s microfilm containing the 1888 police records of Göteborg, the port from which the majority of Swedish emigrants embarked on the initial leg of their journey to North America. I ordered the police records, not because Marjorie and I suspected that her grandfather was a criminal, but because the law of the land decreed that before a ship with emigrants aboard sailed from any Swedish port, its Captain must submit a list of emigrant passengers to the city’s police authorities [Poliskammaren]. The 1888 Göteborg Emigrantlists furnished us with these facts about the Storm family:

Lars Petter Storm, a 30-year-old stonemason from Meddkers in Vastmanland province, sailed from Göteborg on 6 July 1888. He was accompanied by his 27-year-old wife, Wilhelmina Karolina, and their sons Lars Anton, 3, and Carl Henning, an infant. Their stated destination was Caribou, Maine. (Caribou was the nearest railhead to Westmanland where Wilhelmina’s uncle, Victor Lindberg, had settled a few years earlier upon his arrival from Meddkers.)

The Göteborg Emigrant lists further revealed that on Friday, 6 July 1888, the Storm family along with 66 Swedes and 13 Finns boarded the SS Orlando for the stomach-churning two-day voyage across the North Sea to Hull on England’s east coast. At Hull, emigrants from northern Europe boarded the westbound “cars” for the four-hour rail trip across Britain to Liverpool. Huge rooming houses at the bustling port accommodated the immigrants until they boarded one of the many vessels that traveled back and forth between Liverpool and the United States each month.

Encouraged by the discovery of the Storm family data in the Göteborg police registers, I was naïve enough to believe that the search was nearly over. I was positive that the only task remaining was to examine the Family History Library’s microfilmed passenger lists from the National Archives which enumerated the Europeans who landed in New York and Boston during the last two weeks of July, 1888. Upon receiving the appropriate films, I made time-consuming searches through each of them. The registers contained the name, age, sex, and occupation of every passenger aboard the ship. The handwritten rosters also stated each emigrant’s national origin, shipboard accommodations, and destination. Among the thousands of European immigrants sailing from Liverpool, hundreds of Swedes were listed on ships docked at those two east coast ports during the last two weeks of July, 1888, but the surname, Storm, did not appear in any of the Swedish entries on those manifests.

Completely stymied and deeply disappointed, I concluded reluctantly that I was pursuing a lost cause. Fortunately, however, subsequent events proved that I was wrong again. As a result of a conversation with my brother-in-law, Louis, serendipity came to the rescue. Relating to him my failure to discover the ship’s name on which his maternal grandparents came to America, he remembered that as a child, his grandmother had told him of an event she would never forget. The event occurred aboard the ship on which she came to the United States. As she recalled the incident, a sailor was killed when he crashed to the deck from a mast during stormy weather.

I was understandably pessimistic about locating information concerning an accident in which a common seaman had met his death aboard ship thousands of miles from his home port more than a hundred years earlier. Nevertheless, I e-mailed the Cunard Museum at the University of Liverpool asking if that institution’s archives might contain an account of the tragedy that had occurred during the last fortnight of July, 1888. To my amazement and utter delight, I received the following reply from a dedicated curator who must have spent hours digging through the museum’s old files on my behalf:

“Leigh Lyon, storekeeper, SS Aurania of the Cunard Line, died on July 23, 1888, from injuries sustained by falling down Hatch No. 5 as the ship entered New York Harbor in rough weather.”

Although the accident had not occurred exactly as Grandmother Storm had remembered it, I reordered the microfilm from the Family History Library containing the New York Ship Passenger Lists for the latter part of July, 1888. Upon receiving the reel I went over the names on the Aurania’s manifest line by line. I was rewarded for my diligence by finding these entries: Passenger 253—Lars Storm, age 30; Passenger 254—Mrs. Storm, age 27. They were traveling in steerage compartment 3 and their sole piece of baggage was one large steamer trunk. On the following page I discovered these entries: Passenger 294—L A Storm, age 3; Passenger 295—C or O Storm, infant. They were also assigned to steerage compartment 3, one of the four crowded holds below decks.

My failure to find the members of the Storm family during my earlier examination of the SS Aurania’s passenger list was due both to clerical errors on the part of the vessel’s staff, and my own failure to conduct my research with sufficient care. On the ship’s manifest all four members of the Storm family were mistakenly listed as being from Norway rather than Sweden. As for myself, I had violated the laws governing genealogical research by failing to give careful consideration to every bit of evidence available to me. In an attempt to save time during my earlier examinations of the Aurania’s passenger roster, I had ignored the names of any passengers who were not from Sweden.

The thrill of discovering the name of the vessel on which the Storm family arrived in New York, and the date of their arrival, ameliorated the sting of embarrassment I suffered from failing to meticulously examine the existing data during my previous inspection of the ship passenger lists. However, my excitement was not so intense that it prevented me from remembering to photocopy the relevant pages of microfilm in order to validate my findings.

For the final step in the process of discovery and documentation, I turned once again to the University of Liverpool’s Cunard Museum that had been so crucial to my eventual success in this search. In return for a very modest fee, the museum sent me an 8 x 10 glossy of the SS Aurania which, along with an 8 x 10 likeness of the SS Germanic, occupies a prominent position in our ancestral photograph gallery.

Edward F. Holden, a genealogist at the New Hampshire State Library, is a chairman of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, and the editor for both the Merriman Valley Genealogical Society and the New Hampshire Mayflower Society.