The Family of
Jakob Herman Mattsson Smeds and Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs
This family history website is devoted to sharing information about the family of Jakob Herman Mattsson Smeds (1856-1914) -- better known as Herman Smeds -- and his wife Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs (1852-1891). The site is maintained by Dave Smeds, a great-grandson of the couple. Follow the links to reach pages containing a description of Herman and Greta and their lives, a discussion of their ancestry, a photo gallery, an essay describing the fifteen-year journey of the clan from Finland to permanent homes in America, and biographies of each of the six children and fifteen grandchildren. To get to those pages, click on one of the main links immediately below, or go to the “Simplified List of Descendants” page and click on individual names.
Note: Two pages dealing with the distant ancestry and the story of the clan as a whole have yet to be uploaded. In addition, some individual biography pages are still only draft versions and will eventually be revised and expanded.
Herman Smeds and Greta
Mickelsdotter Fagernäs
The Ancestry
of Herman and Greta
Photographs from
the Immigrant Years
From Finland to Reedley -- The Smeds
Journey
A Simplified List of
Descendants
The Six Children
The website also features a sub-section that presents information on the Rautiainen Family. Anna Gustava (Annie) Rautiainen was the wife of Jakob Herman (Jack) Smeds, the eldest son of Herman. Her sister Maria (Marie, Mary) was the wife of Vilhelm (William) Smeds, the second son of Herman. Over a third of the grandchildren of Herman Smeds and a full half of his great-grandchildren are also descendants of Josef Rautiainen and Maria Henriika Perttunen, the parents of Annie and Mary.
What
you will and will not find here:
This website includes standard vital-stats data -- such as names, birthdates, birthplaces, deathdates, marriages, offspring, and burials -- about Herman and Greta and their children and grandchildren. This information is rendered in biographical format, as full paragraphs. If you’re looking for charts, family group sheets, systematic listings of sources, etc., as is common on genealogical websites, my apologies. I don’t favor the raw and dry approach, and I prefer not to slavishly refer to public documents because to do so sometimes requires propagating the mistakes found in those sources. My work is devoted to people, not to statistics. I hope you will find this approach refreshing and more interesting than the run-of-the-mill family history site.
The list of Herman and Greta’s children shown here is complete at six. The list of grandchildren is complete at seventeen. These individuals have individual biographical pages on this site. As for great-grandchildren and their progeny, you will not find them delineated here. Nearly all of those individuals are still alive and I don’t want to broadcast their personal information over the web. However, I maintain an extensive archive that includes all descendants I have been able to identify, and if you’re a relative, feel free to ask for further information. At present, the archive contains the names of 22 great-grandchildren (including two stepchildren adopted as infants, and another adopted from outside the family), 36 of their children (including two children adopted as infants), and 33 of the youngest generation (including three adopted as small children). To request access to the archive, email me, Dave Smeds. So as to thwart the spammers’ webcrawling address harvesters, there is no handy link to click on. Instead, you’ll have to assemble my address like so: Put “dave” and “smeds” together as one phrase, add an @ symbol, and follow that with the server name, which is comcast dot net.
Regarding photos: If possible, each page contains a photo, sometimes two or three. This really helps liven up the website, and is much more compelling than plain text. You are free to download these jpgs. However, be aware that they are relatively low-resolution, small file-size versions of scans made from original photographs. I am happy to provide versions at high resolution suitable for top-quality print-outs, and sometimes I can supply additional images of the person or persons you are interested in, above and beyond the ones I have posted. I would love to have been able to simply upload all photos in their highest quality form, but that would have made the webpage slow to load and would have taken up too much server space. And speaking of photos, I’d love to receive more.
A few members of the modern generations are unknown to me and have yet to be included in the master archive. If you can supply information and/or corrections, please contact me.