I had started making some progress on JWF Foeh, dug out some old software that had some old family files on it, and found his brother also living in Cook county. There is quite a bit of data online for that branch, so I started entering a new tree for them, but then I got sidetracked, as one frequently does in genealogical research, hah!

Now I’m in Sweden, but of course that has nothing to do with the C-A-T lines. In looking at some new information for hubby’s gr-gr-grandparents, I found some confusing surnames. Naturally, when you see names like Martinson, Pearson, Johnson, etc, you think of Swedish names, but then a lot of records turned up the name Moody. It seemed like gr-gr-grandma Bertha sometimes used the surname Pearson and sometimes used the surname Moody. Some Iowa church records came online, including Swedish congregations, and they had birth date and place for Bertha. Yay, looking up free resources from familysearch, and getting lots of helpful information from Swedish genealogists on reddit, got me back to Hallands county where all these ancestors lived, and all the free records on riksarkivet. So far, back to 5gr-grandparents born around 1700. Boy, those Swedes kept track of everybody. It does take awhile, though, to figure out what the records say because of the usual old and faded and sloppy handwriting, but now it’s in Swedish and Latin, sigh. And it’s not indexed, so it’s a lot of paging through old church books, but at least I can put on headphones and listen to something 20th or 21st century. I still have not figured out where the surname Moody came from though.

Hoping to finish up the direct line Swedish ancestors soon, so I can get back to trying to figure out German ancestors. 😃