Ich versuche, die Ergebnisse meiner Abstammung und die Dokumente, die ich gefunden habe, zu verstehen. Mein Urgroßvater wanderte aus Schweden nach Neuengland (USA) aus und schrieb „Gotingberg“ auf seine Einberufungskarte. Aber ich kann diese Stadt in Schweden nicht finden. Ist das phonetische Schreibweise? Ich gehe davon aus, dass dort „Göteborg“ stehen soll, möchte aber von Ihnen allen Anregungen erhalten, damit ich meinen Stammbaum genau verstehen kann.
https://i.redd.it/0obh5yf898pg1.jpeg
Von throwaway_jutolls
12 Kommentare
Most likely Gothenburg.
Guessing he didn’t write it, but spoke it. And the person taking notes just wrote what they heard.
English spelling of the city might not have been standardised whenever this cars was issued.
Almost definitely Gothenburg, that’s where most Swedish emigrants to the US came from, and the emigrants weren’t perfectly literate so spelling mistakes were common.
I doubt, if he had written it down himself, that it would be written like that. But it’s not uncommon for immigration officers to write down just what they hear. It’s possible that your great grandfather couldn’t write, or he may not have been given the option to write it down himself. Lots of people moving through, and little care from the immigration officers to get it exactly right.
Gothenburg. Immigration officers at that time didn’t really care about spelling and the immigrants themselves weren’t that good at reading and writing and wouldn’t know what the English word was. That’s why the -son/sen names have a single s in many American names despite them being written with two ss’s up here.
It’s probably a misspelling of Gothenburg.
„Göting“ could be another name for a [Geat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geats) (but „Göte“ is much more common) and „berg“ means mountain, so it’s not impossible that götingberg could be a place name. But there’s no entry of either „gotingberg“ or „götingberg“ in the historic Swedish place name register ([ortsnamnsregistret](https://www.isof.se/namn/ortnamn/vara-ortnamnssamlingar/ortnamnsregistret)), which is pretty exhaustive.
Thank you everyone for the very fast and thorough responses, much appreciated!!
Gothenburg, most definitely. Makes even more sense when you take into account that this was written as the immigration officer heard it, and what he heard was probably broken English at best and then saying ”Göteborg” in a likely very heavy Gothenburg dialect.
You should be able to access the church books to be able to pinpoint where in town he was born and places where he lived before emigrating.
The th sound in goth is not (from what I know) actually found anywhere in the Swedish language. So if he didn’t write this himself it’s pretty easy to see what the mix up happened
Most likely the writer is not a native Swedish speaker and gramps said the Swedish name for Gothenburg (Göteborg) and the writer wrote what he heard.
Or if he asked your gramps might be illiterate and didn’t know better. A lot of those that emigrated where the poor which also had a much higher instance of being illiterate.