(genitive heredis) “heir” (see heredity). Meaning “condition or state transmitted from ancestors” is from 1620s.
—Oxford English Dictionary
On a brisk day in October in the year 1658, a fleet of forty-five Swedish warships sailed south from Stockholm toward the narrow Oresund Sound on Denmark’s northern coast. Aboard one of the ships was a middle-aged peasant farmer named Mans Andersson—a man I know virtually nothing about other than the fact that he left his home in Smaland to fight the Danish on behalf of the Swedish crown, and that he would become the first of my ancestors to have the Gyllenhammar name joined to his own.
Sweden’s national registry and genealogical records are among the most comprehensive of any nation, and like many old families, the long line of my Gyllenhammar ancestors is well documented. Occasionally I am asked if I feel a sense of identification or commonality with these earlier generations. My first inclination is to dismiss this kind of personal identification with one’s ancestors as a flight of fancy. Nonetheless, it is impressive to contemplate the collective scope of the Gyllenhammars’ work and accomplishments. One common thread in the family is extensive military service, and other Gyllenhammar vocations over many generations include tanner, legislator, farmer, hunting master, carpenter, police inspector, painter/sculptor, pastry chef, railway engineer, pharmacist, dentist, and composer. This speaks to a broad array of sensibilities from the artistic and intellectual to the athletic and mechanical. It’s now generally accepted that there is a genetic factor at play in determining whether one will excel at music or math, or whether one will be drawn to mechanical disciplines or agriculture. According to some studies, there is even a link between genes and the tolerance (or lack thereof) of dishonesty. So, I suppose I could say that I identify with my ancestors indirectly, through the catholic scope of their qualities, and for the integrity implicit in their inclination toward service of their country.
As a child, I was aware—through various anecdotes and family lore recounted by my parents—of having come from a definitive place, and of roots that were clearly identified in well-documented family trees. My mother was Jewish, the child of Russian-born Mathias Kaplan and Sara Friedman Kaplan, who emigrated to Sweden from Frankfurt. Most of my maternal grandmother’s relatives remained in Germany, where it is believed they were virtually eradicated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I was very aware of and influenced by all three of those cultural distinctions in my household—the Swedish, Anglo-Scottish, and Jewish. My mother’s sister Irma had traveled to Berlin in 1933 and during her visit there she understood what the future in Hitler’s Germany held for Jews. I have no memories of my Aunt Irma talking to my parents about the signs of impending catastrophe that were plain for anyone to see in Berlin, but I do know that both of my parents were deeply affected by and fearful of what Irma told them.
I don’t recall my mother often speaking of her lost family in later years after the war, but the importance of keeping their memories alive was understood. If we did not remember, who would? Many years later when I was an adult, I wrote to the German Federal Archives (or Bundesarchiv) seeking information about my mother’s family. In due time I received a reply in the form of a list. There were my mother’s family’s names, one after the other, each name followed by categorized listings for “Deportation,” “Date of Death,” and “Place of Death.” From that document, I learned that almost all of them lost their lives in one of three concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Dachau, and Auschwitz. What was accomplished by my obtaining this chilling and meticulously recorded postmortem? The finality and validity of those names, those details cataloged with such clinical precision. To have that small reckoning, to see each name, each year, each place. So that they are not forgotten.
On my father’s side, several branches of our family originated in Scotland, including the Setons and the Erskines. They were an esteemed set. The Highland Seton Clan boasted a royal connection by virtue of Alexander, Lord Seton, who married the sister of King Robert the Bruce. The Gyllenhammars are also kin to the Bruce-allied Clan Erskine, whose noble origins dated back to the thirteenth century, and whose fortunes failed in the eighteenth century with the fallout caused by John Erskine’s participation in the Jacobite uprising. One of the disgraced Erskines was sent to Gothenburg to learn a trade, and he settled there for a number of years. He seems to have found Gothenburg dull enough to merit his founding a private billiards club there, and the club has withstood the test of time. Two hundred fifty years later, it is still possible to shoot pool in the Royal Bachelor’s Club or to enjoy a drink in the Large Club Room where Erskine’s portrait hangs over the fireplace.
George Seton found his way from Scotland to Sweden as well, settling near Stockholm in the eighteenth century. Seton apparently wished to live like a king, as he bought the royal Ekolsund Castle from King Gustav III in 1785, and from that time forward the castle was occupied by Setons for the next 125 years. In hindsight it is interesting that so many of our Scottish ancestors lived so nearby in Sweden. But it is our direct line of descent from the old Swedish Gyllenhammar line—and its origins in war, patriotic service, and monarchical recognition—that remains the best documented and known to me.
Our ancestral family patriarch Mans Andersson was born in the early seventeenth century at a time when Sweden was reaching the apex of an unprecedented era of political and military power. This time period is often referred to as the stormaktstid, a Swedish word that translates as the “age of great power.” Young King Gustav II Adolph, enthroned in 1611 when he was just fifteen years old, was an outspoken Protestant with a passion for education and a military prowess that would be viewed historically as a form of genius. The Golden King (as he was called) had no personal or political motivation to take up the gauntlet of the Thirty Years’ War—a series of regional conflicts in which virtually every major power in Europe had a stake. But the conflicts pitted Catholics against Protestants, and the Golden King was deeply concerned about the fate of the Protestant population in present-day Germany, who faced possible eradication without the intervention of a powerful ally.
Sweden’s empire at the time was comprised of a large stretch of coastland forming a horseshoe around the Baltic Sea, and included present-day Finland, parts of Denmark and Norway, and northern Germany, making Sweden the preeminent power in Europe. King Gustav had nothing to gain by lending the power of a Swedish alliance to the German Protestants, and no motivation to do so other than the agitation of his own conscience. Sweden’s Lutheran church was under no threat. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 had established the principle cuius regio, eius religio—whose realm, his religion. Quite simply, a prevailing ruler would dictate the religion over the dominion in his control. Catholic ruler, Catholic state. Protestant ruler, Lutheran state. But it applied only to Lutheran Protestantism. The Calvinists of the Habsburg-ruled Kingdom of Bohemia were unprotected by this realm-religion principle.
Upholding his fabled moral code, the Golden King chose in 1632 to put his life at risk and personally led an army to Bohemia to fight on behalf of the Protestants. The well-beloved King Gustav and his forces prevailed, and he won the battle, but at the cost of his own life—making it the ultimate Pyrrhic victory. The Thirty Years’ War came to a close fifteen years later, and the remaining hostilities that would ebb and flow for the latter half of the century in northern Europe were largely a prolonged wrangle over territory.
The regional tug-of-war between Denmark and Sweden dates back to the fourteenth century, when the Kalmar Union bound Sweden to both Norway and the dominant nation of Denmark. In 1523, the self-declared King Gustav declared Sweden’s independence and severed its ties with the Holy Roman Empire, and by extension with Catholicism. The remaining Danish southern provinces of the Scandinavian peninsula were ceded to Sweden in 1658, as part of a territorial acquisition dictated by the Treaty of Roskilde. For peasants like Mans Andersson, who were the latest in a long line of ancestors living and farming in or near the Scania region, it is likely that their sense of loyalty to Denmark-Norway was not necessarily so quickly forgotten, and that some continued to consider themselves more Danish than Swedish. Just five months before Mans Andersson and his son Jonas answered the call to join the Swedish fleet in the Battle of Oresund, the inhabitants of Bornholm, a small island some
