Sto cercando di dare un senso ai risultati dei miei antenati e ai documenti che ho trovato. Il mio bisnonno emigrò nel New England, negli Stati Uniti, dalla Svezia, e scrisse “Gotingberg” sulla sua carta di leva. Ma non riesco a trovare quella città in Svezia. È questa l’ortografia fonetica? Presumo che dovrebbe dire “Gothenburg”, ma voglio ricevere input da tutti voi in modo da poter comprendere con precisione il mio albero genealogico.
https://i.redd.it/0obh5yf898pg1.jpeg
di throwaway_jutolls
10 commenti
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.