The Issaquah History Museum recently solved a 30-year-long genealogy mystery.

Erica Maniez at the Issaquah History Museum was contacted by Alan Clark of Calgary, Alberta, who was looking for information about his wife Marianne’s grandfather, an immigrant by the name of Per Erickson. Per Erickson came to the Issaquah area in 1909 from a small village in the Jamtland province of Sweden.

The problem was, however, that Erickson’s granddaughter until recently had no idea who her grandfather was, as Erickson had left behind his sweetheart and daughter Magdalena, just a few months old at the time, in the Old Country.

“He left for America and was never heard of since,” Clark said. Ever since he and his wife found out about Per Erickson’s existence on a trip to Sweden in 1986, they became curious about the rest of the immigrant’s story. “For the last 30 years, my wife has been wondering, ‘What became of my grandfather?’ And I’ve been working on that for 30 years.”

With the age of the internet, Clark found old Swedish church records online and located Erickson’s tracks. He learned that Erickson had obtained permission from the local parish to go to America (as was required at the time), and had sailed from Liverpool, England to Quebec City, Canada, arriving after a one-week sea journey on July 2, 1909.

Through passenger records, Clark found that Erickson trained from Quebec to New York to Seattle, ending up in Fall City, a hot spot for Swedish immigrants working as loggers. The census record for 1920 showed that Erickson, who had Americanized his first name to Peter, was now living in Minnesota with a wife and children, including another daughter named Magdalena (which, it was found, was Erickson’s mother’s name). By 1930 however, Erickson and his family were back in the Issaquah area.

Now with this new information, Clark felt “confident that I had the right person,” and reached out to Maniez and the History Museums. Maniez was able to send an in-depth 65-page biography of Per Erickson and his family with photos that had been donated to the museums by Per’s son Ed. “The biography we sent clinched the guesswork,” Maniez said.

At this same time, relatives in Sweden found a collection of old letters, including one very revealing piece of correspondence between Erickson and his girlfriend in Sweden.

The Clarks used the biography and the letter to fill in the missing gaps in the story. As a third son, Erickson didn’t inherit, so he made plans to go to America, the “promised land” for Europeans. In the New World, he could make money logging for a few years, and then return to Sweden independent and wealthy enough to buy a farm that his family could live on comfortably. For two years, Erickson worked at the logging and shingle camps in High Point (which was then its own settlement, complete with a schoolhouse, church and 12-room hotel) until he saved $3,000; then he journeyed east by train to head back to Sweden.

Along the way, Erickson stopped in Minnesota to visit his cousin Brite. While there, he had a new idea; he would buy 160 acres of land under the Homestead Act (which allowed settlers to attain 160 acres very cheaply), farm it and then sell it after three years for $3,000. It was in Minnesota that Erickson met and fell in love with Julia Bjerkle, his future wife. However, Erickson had not forgotten his Swedish family.

According to a letter he wrote his girlfriend, he wanted to save enough to come to Sweden and get her and Magdalena, then bring the two of them back to America and start a new life together.

“He was expressing how lonesome he was for his sweetheart and how anxious he was to see his daughter,” Clark said. “We speculate that during this time he got a letter from her saying that she was not willing to uproot … to come to the U.S. and leave her family behind.”

“The idea of getting on a ship and never seeing your family again was overwhelming,” Maniez explained. “Most people [in Sweden] never traveled more than 10 miles from home.”

Therefore, Clark said, “it wasn’t that he abandoned her, but that she didn’t have the courage to make the move to the U.S.”

Per and Julia Erickson married and had children, then in 1924 moved the family back to Issaquah — but this time in a Model T Ford. Quite a change from originally traveling to Washington by ship and train. Erickson’s former girlfriend also married and had five more children of her own in Sweden.

“My wife is very satisfied she knows something of her grandfather, and it’s also exceptional to have something as well-written as what Ed Erickson put together,” Clark said.

Maniez said that she gets perhaps one research request per week, but only six to 10 times a year does she dig up something this groundbreaking. “Finding the information is really satisfying,” she said, referring to it as one of the most fun parts of her job as museum director.

Thanks to Maniez, the Issaquah History Museum and Per Erickson’s Issaquah descendants, Clark and his family now know that Erickson was “an upstanding, hardworking man who raised a family — someone to be proud of.”