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.
If You Want to Copy What I’ve Written to Other Places -- ASK ME FIRST!!! While anyone is free to make use of the raw statistical data, such as the date of a birth or location of a wedding, the same liberty does not extend to copying the sentences and paragraphs of the biographies. That material was carefully assembled. It took a lot of work on my part. Writing. Rewriting. Editing. Proofreading. It’s “creative” writing and it is copyrighted by me, and the only place I want the stuff to be is right here, on this website. That’s not to say you can’t download the biographies and tuck them away on your computers to have for your own reference, it just means you shouldn’t try to distribute it to anyone else via a public platform. This is particularly the case with Ancestry.com. Do NOT put it on Ancestry.com. I have my own Ancestry.com account. If I wanted the material there, I would put it there myself. What’s the problem, you may wonder. It’s not that I’m trying to be a control freak. It’s that if people find the biographies there, it is inevitable they will be reading versions that someone uploaded a number of years in the past. The material will be lacking in any revisions or improvements I’ve made in the meantime. I want people to experience the biographies in their best, most up-to-date form. The solution is quite simple. Don’t post the text itself. Instead, post links to this website, so people can read the text here. I plan to maintain this archive here for many years to come. If someone clicks on the link, they’ll get what they need. Please do things that way, rather than spreading versions of my work that may soon be obsolete.
This site is and always has been offered free of charge. But if you find it useful, there is one way you could show your appreciation that does involve a little money. I’m not just a genealogist. I’m also an author of fiction. As in, at a professional level, for more than forty-five years. However, despite those credentials, the money doesn’t just flow in by itself. I always need new customers to purchase copies of my stuff. Please consider tracking down my books and purchasing something, whether it’s one book or half a dozen. Just search for the Dave Smeds author page on Amazon, or better yet, if you prefer to read ebooks instead of print editions, visit my author page on the site of my latest publisher, Book View Café. I really prefer that option because after all, Amazon is a monopoly and I think it’s great when small stores (even ebook-only ones like BVC) get a piece of the action instead. Here’s the link: BVC. Please do not be put off by the fact that much of what I write is in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. If that sort of material is not your thing, there is a solution: Make a purchase anyway. You could give the item to another person, or even just throw it away. While I naturally would love to lure in more readers, not just customers, a sale is a sale is a sale. It’ll still count as a customer transaction even if no one reads that copy, and said transaction not only represents income, but will boost my sales ranking which in turn causes more “foot traffic” to come my way. If you pursue this strategy to help out a poor family historian slash fiction writer, I do have one additional favor to ask. Please don’t buy used editions. Amazon loves to tout them and will try to point you toward them, and they make the price point attractive. But here’s the thing -- not one penny of whatever you pay them for that second-hand merchandise will get to me. The money goes entirely to Amazon and whatever used-book vendor is supplying them with the artifact. In particular, don’t purchase the old paperback editions of my first two novels, The Sorcery Within and The Schemes of Dragons. They exist in new editions. Please buy those instead. Not only does it help my pocketbook, but the text of those new editions is revised and improved. I would much rather you get to enjoy my work at its current standard, and not have to put up with fumbles I made as a beginner. Thank you!