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Note: est of ten children, born when his father was fifty and mother forty-five. His father died when he was a toddler and he was raised by his mother at the family farm in Gillaruna parish, and later in Kyrkhults parish, where the family moved in 1882. At some point in his teens, he was apprenticed to a master shoemaker in Karlshamn, the nearest major city to Jämshög and an important port on the Baltic, where he lived at 114B Carlskrona.
Apparently finding a shoemaker’s life disagreeable, he received permission to emigrate, and left Karlshamn via Malmö and Copenhagen for America on October 29, 1890, arriving in New York (or Boston - it is unclear) a month or so later (He does not appear in the available Castle Garden records, so it may be Boston). Years later, he would still tell the story of his first experience in America - falling off the ship and getting rescued from the Harbor with a big hook, and later getting conned by dock-workers into paying to see a naked black man in a tent. An interesting first impression of America, no doubt.
Fritz adapted to his new country quickly. He anglicized his name to Fred SWANSON and settled in Malden, where he found work in a grocery store and boarded with his co-workers at a home on Bishop Street. He learned English quickly, married in 1902, and started his own business - Swanson’s Market, selling groceries, baked goods, freshly butchered meats, and meat pies from his pie wagon. By 1910, he had also bought the home at 67 Gilbert St., in the Maplewood Neighborhood of Malden, that would be his for many years. He became a U.S. Citizen on September 20, 1911.
He remained active and healthy for many years, working in his son’s stores (where, as “Grandpa Swanson,” he would be memorialized in souvenir postcards and enjoying outdoor activities and the seacoast. He died of heart disease a few months after his ninetieth birthday.
Note: Born as Fritz SVENSSON in Jämshög, a small town in the Scanian hinterland, Fred was the young
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