Jakob Herman Mattsson Smeds and Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs

Herman Smeds and Greta Mickelsdotter -- formal names Jakob Herman Mattsson Smeds and Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs -- were the couple that produced the family this website is devoted to. One would think their own combined biography would have more content than any profile to be found here. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to do them justice in that fashion. They left no letters or journals that would reveal them to posterity, nor were they celebrities or public figures that contemporaries would have written about in any depth. The absence of source material is especially true of Greta, who died so young that her last-born children literally could not remember her by the time they reached adulthood. There are no surviving photographs of her. Her origin story faded away so profoundly that after the last of her children had died, her grandchildren were disturbed to realize they didn’t even know the names of her parents, other than the obvious fact that in having the name Mickelsdotter, her father’s first name must have been Mickel (Swedish for Michael). It is only thanks to modern databases of records from the two church districts in which she lived -- Larsmo parish during her childhood, and Nykarleby parish when she was part of Herman’s sphere -- that her heritage can be described. Details about her forebears and about Herman’s forebears are included here on the page The Ancestry of Herman and Greta (not yet completed at this time). Meanwhile below is an attempt to provide at least a basic sense of who Herman and Greta were and what sort of lives they led.

Herman Smeds, son of Matts Johansson Smeds (1815-1876) and Lisa Jakobsdotter Pörkenäs (1818-1897), was born 24 October 1856 on a farm at the end of a country lane at a locale known as Soklot (more often seen on modern maps as Socklot). Soklot was tiny community -- not even a hamlet, really, just a light concentration of residences a few miles from the shore of the Gulf of Bothnia in the parish of Nykarleby, a church district which in turn was named for the village south of Soklot. Nykarleby is the Swedish name for that village, which is called Uusikaarlepyy in Finnish. When asked by customs and immigration officials to describe where he was from, Herman said Nykarleby, because Soklot was too obscure a place name for anyone but locals to know. (Not that the average American had any idea what he meant by Nykarleby, either.) This area is part of the northwestern corner of the province (or state) of Vaasa. The general region is known as Ostrobothnia (Österbotten in Swedish, Pohjanmaa in Finnish), which is the one part of mainland Finland where the population even now is predominantly Swedish-speaking.

It would be accurate to say that Herman’s upbringing was imbued with a sense of rootedness not many of us alive today in the 21st Century can imagine. For one thing, he and his family and neighbors were part of an ethnic group that had laid claim to Ostrobothnia seven centuries earlier. Further, he was brought up on an estate that had been in the family for generations, ever since his great great great grandfather Johan Mattsson had settled there in 1722, just after the conclusion of the Great Northern War. Herman’s last name literally was the name of his home. It was the case in the traditional culture of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Ostrobothnia that residents of a farm or village appended the name of that farm or village to their everyday names when identifying themselves for bureaucratic or church purposes. The word smeds means smith, and it seems clear that at some point centuries earlier, a blacksmith had set up his forge on the site. The reference had stuck, turning Smeds into a “farm name.” Herman’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather and great great grandfather had all been Smedses because they had lived on that specific property. If they had ever moved, use of the surname would have dissipated and been gone within a generation. (This is something that did not happen with Herman himself because of shifting customs, and the fact that he and his kids stuck with the name at the time of emigration.) Anyone who knew Herman on a direct basis as a boy would have known the name “Jakob Herman Mattsson Smeds” meant he was “Jakob Herman, the son of Matts, of the Smeds farm.”

Secure as Herman’s boyhood was in the senses described above, not everything was rosy. For one thing, Ostrobothnia was going through a downturn. In the 1700s, the region had enjoyed a golden age in terms of prosperity. The area was replete with tar pools. Tar was a vital commodity necessary to keep sailing ships from leaking, and for that matter was essential during the process of the construction of such vessels. Finland as a whole was a prime source of tar, and Ostrobothnia contributed the lion’s share, with such ports as Nykarleby and Jakobstad -- both no more than a partial-day’s sleigh-ride from Soklot -- getting in on the action. Not surprisingly, the entrepreneurs of the region had been quick to develop shipbuilding as an inter-related economic engine. They had the tar, they had the wood, they had a skilled labor force. Of course they built ships. The 1800s by contrast brought a discouraging reversal of the good times. A key factor was the increasing dominance of steamships. While large-scale sailing vessels continued to be used for many decades into the steam-engine era, new ones ceased to be built. Finland could not simply retrofit its operations and start building steamships of its own. The nation had been a perfect place to build ships of wood, but the same could not be said of it as a place to create vessels of steel. Then in the 1850s, a huge portion of the Ostrobothnian merchant fleet was lost in the Crimean War because by sailing under the Russian flag, England and France viewed them as assets of the enemy and destroyed them. In the 1860s came some unusually cold weather and a long-lasting, widespread famine, one made worse in Ostrobothnia by the arrival of refugees from the even-harder-hit interior who had heard of the coastal region’s prosperity and hoped things would be less desperate there. The refugees brought along not only their added mouths to feed, but typhoid fever, too. By the time Herman came of age, he had far less reason for long-term optimism than his grandparents and great-grandparents had been able to call upon. While the economy was beginning to revive in Finland as a nation, this was not true of Ostrobothnia. Instead it was occurring in the central and eastern and southern portions of the country, which were more suited to industrialization.

While the family coped with the above issues afflicting the society as a whole, they also were confronted by a more personal scourge, namely a brutal level of childhood mortality. Herman was one of ten children, yet only four made it to adulthood. The others were Maria, Erik, and Brita Sofia, his seniors by fourteen, nine and a half, and two and a half years respectively. His other six siblings perished at no more than four years of age. A peculiar side effect of all that death is that Herman ended up on the brink of acquiring the ownership of the farm. That should have been an almost impossible scenario. Not only was he the eighth of the ten children, he was the fourth-born son within a clan that traditionally passed down entire ownership of the estate to the eldest son. Had the Grim Reaper not been so manic with his scythe, Herman would have been well down in the line of succession. Instead he found himself in a position to become the beneficiary of the same sort of happenstance that had caused his own father to become the owner. Matts Johansson Smeds had been the tenth of ten children, and fifth among the male offspring of his generation, and nevertheless had ended up as the heir due to the deaths in infancy of all four of his elder brothers. The only thing standing in the way of Herman doing the same was one lone figure -- his brother Erik (Johan Erik Mattsson Smeds). If Erik had not thrived, Herman might well have never left Finland, and his children might never have become Americans.

One other development might have resulted in Herman acquiring the farm. Erik seems to have contemplated forgoing his birthright. Immigration and ship passenger-manifest documents show that in the autumn of 1873 at age twenty-six, Erik took a trip to Bay City, MI. He was quite possibly doing so in order to determine if the United States might be a better place in which to raise the family he was creating with his bride, Brita Isaksdotter Pesonen. But he came back the following year. A mere two years after that, Matts Johansson Smeds passed away, and Erik assumed his mantle. The next heir in line was already in the womb. Brita would soon give birth to son Johan Eriksson Smeds. (He was actually the fifthborn child, but the first four pregnancies had yielded girls.) From that point on, Herman knew if he ever had kids of his own, he would have to nudge them toward lives spent somewhere other than Soklot. Fortunately in the meantime, he personally was not confronted with displacement. Erik was not inclined to give him the boot, anymore than he would have told his widowed mother to find new accommodations. Quite the opposite, the property was large and Erik needed another young, grown man to help manage it all. Furthermore, the estate had always tended to contain multiple dwellings. In 1880, in anticipation of becoming a family man, Herman added a brand-new house -- a somewhat small one, but enough for his needs. (The residence is still in use in the 2020s as House Number 414 of Socklot neighborhood.) Over time, his kids would be born and raised within its walls.

While Herman was proceeding through his own childhood, his future bride was growing up approximately sixteen miles to the northeast in the small village of Fagernäs. Here the coast of Finland contains a large bay that is almost completely cut off from the Gulf of Bothnia by the cluster of islands along the coast, particularly by Larsmo, the largest island of the archipelago. Manmade barriers have transformed this body of water into a freshwater lake -- in English, it is known as Lake Larsmo. Fagernäs sits on the eastern fringe of Larsmo island, which is to say, along the western shore of the lake. The settlement had existed well before Greta became part of its population. Her mother, Anna Maria Hansdotter Fagernäs, was a native of the village, as you might guess from the matching last names. Anna Maria (3 June 1821 - 21 May 1874) had married Mickel Simonsson (5 October 1818 - 20 October 1886) in the early 1840s, at which point they had made a home near her parents. Mickel was from a village on the eastern side of Lake Larsmo known as Haga, located in Kronoby parish. His original last name was therefore Haga, which could also take the form Hagman. Upon becoming a resident of Fagernäs, he was sometimes known as Mickel Simonsson Fagernäs.

Named for her paternal grandmother Margaretha Johansdotter of Bjon, Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs was born 21 December 1852 (meaning she was four years older than Herman). She was the sixth of ten children. In contrast to Herman’s family, most of those children lived to see adulthood. The parish surveys -- known as husförhör, these volumes contain the names and vital statistics of each household in a parish -- demonstrate that as a rule, Mickel and Anna Maria’s offspring stayed put well into their twenties, or even longer in the case of their eldest, Marja Lisa. This was certainly true of Greta. But in the mid-1870s, the household went through a transformation. Greta’s mother died in the spring of 1874. Her father subsequently married Anna Beata Mattsdotter. The latter was nearly his age -- meaning she was marginally older than Anna Maria had been -- so Greta did not have to make room for a series of infant half-siblings. She was however obliged to rub noses with a stepmother, and this may not have been to her liking. Also, her sister Johanna gave birth to a son out of wedlock in 1878, so in that way there was after all the disruption of a new baby in the house, the first in a decade and a half. Some time during the midst of these changes, Greta decided it was time to launch into her independent phase of life. She took a job down in Soklot as a domestic servant on the Vik estate, which was a portion of the original Smeds farm that had been calved off way back when because the founding patriarch had arranged to leave land not just to his eldest son, but to another son and to a daughter. Greta was now quartered only a short walk from Herman’s residence, and they undoubtedly attended Sunday services at the same church in Nykarleby. Their acquaintance led to a romance. And toward the end of 1880, to a pregnancy. Ten weeks into it, the couple wed one another at Soklot. The date of the ceremony was 30 January 1881.

Herman and Greta had six children in ten years, Jakob Herman, Augusta Sofia, Maria Elisabeth, Vilhelm, Axel, and Anna Amanda. In the winter of 1890/91 Greta developed a cold she couldn’t shake and in that pre-antibiotic era her condition progressed into pneumonia, from which she died 9 January 1891. The children were all still young. The eldest, Jakob, was only ten, and little Amanda was only a toddler. The fact that nearly all of them went on to become well-adjusted, loving, responsible adults is the best possible proof of Herman’s fine character. A lesser man, a dysfunctional man, a cruel man, would not have left that sort of human legacy. As mentioned in the top paragraph, there aren’t a lot of windows through which we can get a glimpse into Herman’s essence, but that’s a big one right there.

Naturally to develop properly, the children required a maternal figure as well. For the next six and a half years after the tragedy, that role was filled by Herman’s mother. Lisa was there round the clock, sharing the home with Herman and the six youngsters. She was the last survivor among the grandparents, Mickel Simonsson Haga having passed away in 1886 a matter of days after Vilhelm’s birth. Lisa’s contribution must have been huge. That said, she is not the only one to whom credit should be tendered. For one thing, she died before the job was done. She passed away 19 July 1897 -- which as it happens was the seventy-ninth anniversary of her birth. Herman’s three youngest kids had yet to enter their teens. Given that Herman was not inclined to remarry and did not want to bring in a paid servant to serve as a governess, the kids were blessed to have an aunt near at hand in the form of their uncle Erik’s wife, Brita. Erik and Brita’s own children were already adults with the exception of their very youngest, their daughter Amanda, born the same year as Herman’s daughter Amanda. The houses were close to one another, so the logistics were manageable. Brita embraced the responsibility.

As Herman soldiered on as a single father, his house gradually became less crowded. In fact, the process had already started prior to the death of his mother. According to a husförhör, Jakob had moved out 26 June 1897, a few weeks before that grim event. Jakob had not quite reached his sixteenth birthday. He was too young to be completely out on his own, of course. He remained in supervised circumstances, boarding with and working in Jakobstad for a goldsmith named Bjorkman. Mr. Bjorkman was probably a relative of some sort. This employer/landlord may have been Jakob Johansson Bjorkman, a man Herman’s age whose daughter Vilhelmina would go on to marry Herman’s nephew Johan Eriksson Smeds in 1906, but he is only one of a number of candidates. In any case, Jakob completed his apprenticeship within two years. He returned home in the spring of 1899, where he would remain for the next fourteen months.

In the year 1900, the exodus truly began. First, in June, Jakob returned to Jakobstad. Not long after that -- perhaps immediately -- he emigrated. This had become a common choice for the young men of Ostrobothnia due to the regional economic collapse. Areas such as Michigan, Minnesota, and the Pacific Northwest were among the popular destinations chosen by those who wanted to settle down among other Finns. Other spots such as the mining camps of the Rockies attracted Finnish bachelors looking for temporary situations. Quite a few of these men later would come back to the mother country to raise their families. An example was Herman’s nephew Matts Vilhelm Smeds (1879-1919), Erik’s second son, who departed in 1898 and spent much of the next nine years in the United States before permanently reestablishing himself in Soklot. Unlike Matts, Jakob committed from the git-go to becoming an American. The spot he chose to begin that phase of his life was not any of the aforementioned locales, though. Instead, he went to Eureka, CA. Ever since the 1880s neighbors and friends had been congregating in Humboldt County, where the lumber industry provided the means to make a living, and immigrants were welcome to partake. Some of those who had already taken this path were neighbors and acquaintances of Nykarleby parish and Jakobstad, and a few were relatives of one sort or another. Among them was Greta’s first cousin Leander Fagernäs, one of the younger sons of her uncle Anders Hansson Fagernäs. Born in 1871, Leander had departed for the U.S. not long after reaching adulthood. He had eventually settled down to raise a family with a young woman who, like him, had come to Eureka from the Lake Larsmo region. With an anchoring presence like that, even a very young man like Jakob -- only nineteen or perhaps just barely twenty at the time of his journey -- was willing to commit to a bold change of venue. Meanwhile his slightly younger sisters said their own farewells to Soklot. In the year 1900, at age seventeen or just after her eighteenth birthday, Augusta departed for Vasa (most often referred to these days under the Finnish-language spelling, Vaasa). At the end of the following year, seventeen-year-old Maria moved to Jakobstad. Herman was now down to a much smaller household, just himself and his youngest three kids.

In a typical family of that era, the leavetaking would have slowed down at this juncture, with the remaining members of the younger generation lingering in place, waiting until their early twenties or even longer before heading off, postponing that moment when “home” ceases to be a manifest phenomenon and is replaced by nostalgia. But outside factors created pressure that served to sustain the pace of departures at the rate set by Jakob, Augusta, and Maria. In the early years of the Twentieth Century, Russia was becoming more belligerent and was increasing the size of its army. This was to the detriment of its vassal state of Finland, whose native sons were expected to participate even though the potential deployments had nothing to do with the national security of Finland itself. Young men of Ostrobothnia became notorious for “not being home” when the Tsar’s army recruiters came around to scoop up new victims. Evidence survives in the Socklot museum archives in the form of a list of eleven local men who were absent when the posse swept through in the year 1901. One of the eleven was the aforementioned Matts Vilhelm Smeds (one of eight noted specifically as gone to America).

After 1901, Herman had the comfort of knowing his eldest son was now out of the Tsar’s reach, but he knew just as certainly something would have to be done soon to protect his other two boys. The concern became increasingly dire as relations between Russia and Japan deteriorated. It became standard wisdom that any Finnish youngster newly conscripted into the army would be forced to journey to the far side of Siberia, where soldiers not only faced the prospect of mortal risk on the battlefield, but were profoundly likely to freeze to death during the brutal winters or succumb to contagion in the crowded barracks.

In September, 1903, Johan Erik Mattsson Smeds died. The Smeds farm was inherited by Herman’s nephew Johan Eriksson. As far as can be determined, Herman and his nephew got along without friction, but the situation could not help but possess an awkward aspect -- a mature man having to defer to a youngster who hadn’t even found himself a wife yet. Perhaps it was at that point Herman decided he would ultimately leave Finland. Perhaps it took him a while longer to embrace the idea. But one thing is certain: His children were ready to follow in Jakob’s wake. All each of them needed was to lock down the particulars of their individual migrations and gather up enough money for their tickets.

By the following spring, Vilhelm was seventeen-and-a-half years old, and he had grown tall and was looking too much like someone the recruiters would decide was actually old enough to “do his duty.” His last day at Soklot was 30 March 1904. He probably had the companionship of his sister Augusta crossing the Atlantic and continuing on to Eureka. More than one source pins down the timing of Augusta’s trip to 1904; however, the precise date is not known. It could be she journeyed on a solo basis at some other point in that calendar year.

Maria came back to Soklot in early May, 1904, somewhat filling the void left by Vilhelm’s departure, but this arrangement was ultimately even more temporary than Jakob’s interlude at home in 1899-1900 had been, i.e. it was a prelude to emigration. Toward the end of the year, or in January, 1905, Maria set out to join her siblings. She did not make it. It was for a good reason, though. On the ocean liner she met a Norwegian widower and was won over by him. He knew Swedish because his first wife had been a Finn from Ostrobothnia, and Mary was so relieved to find someone aboard with whom she could converse that she took a shine to him the instant they met. The pair were immediately married and she settled with him in Berlin, NH, where he had been based for a decade and a half.

In the latter part of 1905, Russia lost its war with Japan. As a result, the need to get Axel Smeds out of harm’s way was not as urgent as had been the case with Vilhelm. It made sense to wait another full year, even though this would put Axel past his eighteenth birthday. (Axel had been born 13 July 1888.) There were multiple reasons not to rush into things. First, the remaining family members had chosen to go in tandem. The departure needed to be tidy, because no one in the immediate family would be left in Finland to take care of loose ends. Also, there was the issue of America’s evolving attitude concerning immigration. The Theodore Roosevelt administration was pursuing a number of measures that would make it harder for immigrants to come in. Jakob was due to become a naturalized American citizen by the latter portion of 1906. He could at that point act as a sponsor for his family members. It seemed important to have that ace up the sleeve.

Finally the time came. Herman, Axel, and Amanda departed Soklot 26 November 1906, taking ship at Nykarleby and after interim stops, boarded the liner Ivernia in Liverpool. They arrived in Boston harbor on the twentieth of December. After a long train journey across the continent, they reached San Francisco, where Jakob and his bride Anna Rautiainen lived with their baby daughter Sylvia, Jakob having obtained employment in 1904 as a silversmith with the large, well-known jewelry firm, Shreve & Company. As for Eureka, Vilhelm and Augusta were still based there, and that was the ultimate destination. After a belated holiday celebration, the travellers completed the last leg of their journey some time in January, 1907. (They quite possibly postponed the departure from San Francisco in order to be on hand to welcome to Herman’s second grandchild into the world. Lillian Anna Smeds was born on the seventeenth of the month.)

Vilhelm was at that point a tree-cutter for the Eel River Lumber Company near Fortuna, south of Eureka. Whether Herman followed his example and likewise obtained employment in the timber industry is not known. There is reason to doubt the possibility. Herman had turned fifty years old just prior to leaving Finland. He was therefore more than twice the age of the typical member of a forest work crew. And he was not a large specimen of a man. Small stature -- along with brown eyes and dark brown hair -- was characteristic of the family. Herman’s port-of-entry paperwork describes him as 5'5½" tall. Whatever he may have done to earn money in Humboldt County, it was not swinging an ax at gigantic redwood trees.

Soon the local economic scene became complicated. The lumberworkers union, the International Brotherhood of Woodsmen and Sawmill Workers, staged a strike that ended poorly. Family oral history does not say whether any of the Smeds family members suffered retaliation, but at the end of 1907 a number of them made alterations to their circumstances that suggest they may not have had a choice whether to make those adjustments.

For Herman, at least, things worked out well, launching him into what was to be his final phase of life -- a somewhat brief span of only half a dozen years, but rich with purpose and hope. At Christmas, 1907, Herman and Vilhelm, if not all of the Eureka-based family members, ventured down to San Francisco to spend the holidays with Jakob and Anna. While there, Jakob tendered a proposal. Jakob had purchased farm acreage in Fresno County just north of the small town of Reedley, as part of a scheme to found a substantial “agricultural colony” of immigrant Finns. Jakob was unable to personally tend to the property because he needed to preserve his good-paying gig with Shreve & Company as his means of paying down the mortgage. In the meantime, he needed someone to develop the land, including undertaking the conversion of the existing fields of alfalfa into vineyards so that when the time came for Jakob and Anna to take possession, some years in the future, they could count on a decent livelihood as raisin growers. In addition, someone needed to put up a house, a water tankhouse, an implement shed, and so on. Vilhelm was just the sort of robust young man who could be counted on to deal with the responsibility, and Herman was an ideal candidate to play the role of support figure. More to the point, Jakob had enough money for salaries. Herman and Vilhelm would have a place to live, a future to help design, and job security. Father and son said yes to the offer. As far as is known, they did not even go back to Eureka. The two men headed down to Fresno County immediately, knowing they could depend upon Augusta and/or Amanda to ship them whatever clothes and other personal possessions they had left up north. As of January, 1908, the era of the Smeds farmers of Reedley had begun. It became a multi-generational endeavor that would last more than a century.

For the next four years, no other family members moved down. Herman and Vilhelm were each other’s main source of companionship. They got along well -- though given how soft-spoken and contemplative they both were by nature, it was probably a rare day that more than a few sentences were uttered in total, probably most of those words having to do with tasks at hand. There were plenty of those. First, of course, the pair needed a roof over their heads. They didn’t want to continue to impose on the neighbors, even though said neighbors were other Finland Swedes from Ostrobothnia. That said, the first structure they built during that chilly January was not the house. Instead, they put up a sauna hut. In later decades family members and long-time friends would chuckle when they referred to this having been their choice. But Herman and Vilhelm’s motive wasn’t whimsy. It made sense. In one stroke, they transformed a tiny piece of Fresno County into a tiny piece of Finland. They used the hut not only for sweat-baths, but as sleeping quarters while building the actual house. The latter was a very basic sort of dwelling by modern perspective, lacking such amenities as electricity, running water, a bathroom, furniture, carpeting, etc., but the two men didn’t mind. They were accustomed to a rustic existence. They now had walls of good clapboard, a floor, a roof that didn’t leak, a fireplace -- Herman and Vilhelm were content with their circumstances.

In January, 1912 the household expanded due to Vilhelm’s marriage. His bride was Maria Rautiainen. She had come to San Francisco from Finland in 1910, sponsored by her sister Anna, wife of Jakob Smeds. Jakob and Anna -- by now they were increasingly known as Jack and Annie -- had played matchmakers in order to get Vilhelm and Maria (soon to become known as Billy and Mary) to take a fancy to one another. Their efforts had paid off. Immediately the farm began to be transformed as the result of a womanly presence -- the bride would not even move her possessions indoors until Billy jury-rigged a means to bring water to the kitchen sink without requiring her to go out to the well and fetch it. Herman, who had not learned English and spoke Swedish with his son, was not really able to communicate in sentences with his Finnish-speaking daughter-in-law, but Mary later recounted to the younger members of the family that Herman was greatly entertained by her teenaged efforts to cope with the household’s menagerie, which included milk cows, dogs, a cat, and a wedding-gift pig.

Herman lived out his last fragment of life with Billy and Mary in the farmhouse. In the fall of 1913 Mary trekked up to San Francisco to give birth where a doctor was available, and came home with a baby boy, named Roy William Smeds after the son that Jack and Annie had lost four years earlier. It was the eighth time Herman had been made a grandpa. Other members of the generation would come along in due course, but Herman would not be around to celebrate those occasions. By the end of the season Herman developed tenderness in the throat. The cause was a rapidly-worsening case of cancer. (He is thought to have been a user of chewing tobacco.) The tumor was soon causing him tremendous pain. Knowing that his condition was terminal, Herman decided to end his suffering. He strung a rope from one of the huge oak trees along the river downhill from the farmhouse and hung himself. His date of death was 2 February 1914.

The majority of the Herman and Greta Smeds family in 1919. (Unrepresented are Augusta Smeds Malm and Maria Elisabeth Smeds Johnson and their spouses and children.) Back row from left to right: Vilhelm “Billy” Smeds, Lillian Anna Smeds, Anna Margaret Smeds Strom, Agnes Amanda Strom, and Charles John Strom holding infant Karin Anna Strom. Front row left to right: Roy William Smeds, Maria “Mary” Rautiainen Smeds, Joseph Alfred Smeds, Sylvia Alice Smeds, Lawrence Jakob Smeds in his father’s lap, Jakob Herman “Jack” Smeds, Anna Gustava “Annie” Rautiainen Smeds, Ina Marie Jacobson Smeds, Howard Jacob Smeds in his mother’s lap, Axel Smeds, and Clarence Axel “Kelly” Smeds in his father’s lap.

Children of Jakob Herman Mattsson Smeds with Greta Mickelsdotter

Jakob Herman Smeds

Augusta Sofia Smeds

Maria Elisabeth Smeds

Vilhelm Smeds

Axel Smeds

Anna Amanda Smeds

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