From beyond the seas
Svenska – English
From beyond the seas – A history of the Alfort family.
Chapter 1
From beyond the seas
© Esben Alfort 2014-2023
The Alfort family came to Sweden in the middle of the 17th century when a master shipbuilder emigrated from England, but according to family tradition his ancestors were originally huguenot refugees fleeing religious persecution in France. Church registers and other archives of historical documents can tell us a lot about the history of the family in Sweden, but very few sources give direct information about this early period. Even so, we can make some educated guesses.
On Christmas day 1865, the old lady Anna Maria Ahlfort died after a long and prosperous life in which she had married one of the wealthiest and most illustrious men in the county, army registrar (mönsterskrivare) Sven Johan Bergman, who owned several large estates in Östergötland. The reason that she had been able to marry so well was of course the relative wealth and local importance of her own family, the Ahlforts (or Alforts); her father had been secretary in the royal court of appeal and heir to the beautiful family estate Liljeholmen on the shores of Lake Sommen, an estate which she had afterwards inherited. His father and grandfather had both been successful captains of the royal Swedish navy, and his grandmother’s father had been one of the richest men in the kingdom, who had invested so cleverly that he ended up owning more than 60 manors and farms.
When the old woman had been laid to rest, the priest sat down to register her burial in the church register. Church law demanded that he note down her name as well as the date and the reason for her decease, but in addition to this he always liked to add a little extra information about the person who had died. What was he to write about Anna? She had been a charismatic human being, and he wanted to honour her in the registry, so he set forth to record her family history in broad outline, right down to the arrival in Sweden of her great-great grandfather, an immigrant English master shipwright whose name is unfortunately lost to us, in the middle of the 17th century. One passage in this paragraph is particularly precious to us, since it is the only source we have that tells us where the family came from and how they came to settle in Sweden. It reads as follows, in the original Swedish version and in rough translation:
Daughter of vice district judge [i.e. court of appeal secretary] Erik Anders Ahlfort and his wife Mrs Ingrid Elisabeth Busser from Lyckö; great-great granddaughter of the master shipwright Ahlfort, who arrived in Sweden from England in the middle of the 17th century.
Translated from Swedish
With the help of church registers, military archives and other documents we can trace the family back to the unnamed master shipwright’s son, captain of the admiralty Erik Alfort, but nowhere are we told anything about his parents or place of birth. We can make an educated guess based on the fact that his father must have worked at a shipyard, but let us first of all consider the question of the family’s origins abroad.
Huguenot roots
Family tradition has it that the roots of the Swedish Alfort family are ultimately to be sought among the French Huguenots fleeing from France as a result of the religious prosecutions in the late 16th century. It hasn’t been possible to positively confirm this story, as the family cannot as yet be traced beyond Sweden, but oral history is often just as reliable as the kind that is written down, and it is at least highly likely that this one is true. Even so, the following can only be described as speculation.
Let us start by taking a look at the traces left in France. Is anything to be gleaned from the names of places and people left behind? Possibly. The modern Parisian suburb of Maisons-Alfort is effectively a fusion of what used to be two villages, Maisons and Alfort, the latter having acquired its name from the Château d’Alfort. This estate was the building eventually chosen to house the famous Alfort veterinary school founded in 1765 which made the name of Alfort known around the globe. Incidentally, it is only a stone’s throw from the headquarters of French protestantism in Charenton just across the bridge from Alfort, a point which may be highly significant given the theory of huguenot origins.
Alfort had not been the original name of this place; in 1312 it is referred to as hôtel d’Harrefort, and in 1495 possibly as Harcourt , but in 1612 the name surfaced as le château d’Hallefort, and when the area was transferred to the bishop of Paris in 1641, it had ended up as Alfort. So how did this change take place, and what is the connection with the family?
The château was built by the bishop of Hereford, Peter of Aigueblanche (d. 1268), and it is tempting to see the original Harrefort as a corruption of Hereford – indeed many sources favour this interpretation. Others disagree, however. Indeed, Peter of Aigueblanche was not British; he was born in Savoy but came to England as part of the party accompanying Henry III’s bride Eleanor of Provence. Is it really likely that he should have named his mansion outside Paris for his English bishopric Hereford?
A more plausible theory is that the name was much older and originally contained the Germanic man’s name Hari. It was a common way of naming places when the Germanic language Frankish was spoken in northern France, not least with the suffix -court, which in fact seems to have appeared on this name in 1495 at least. According to this alternative idea, the name would have been reinterpreted after the area had ceased to be Germanic-speaking. It would then have acquired a Norman reading in which the word halle, which was the word for rock in the new language, replaced the original prefix. Though certainly possible, and perhaps more natural, this sequence of events does not really explain much.
There is, however, a third possibility which might tentatively be suggested: Within France, the Alfort family seems currently to be most numerous in Provence, a region known to have fostered (and concealed) many Huguenots. Could the name have been brought to Paris from Provence by the Huguenots? Was it in fact an old family name common among the Huguenots of Provence? According to this theory, the sequence of events would be similar to the one previously described, with the difference that the original name Harrefort (whether it be originally named for Hari or the bishop of Hereford) would have been replaced by the similarly-sounding name of Alfort when the Huguenots arrived. The sudden arrival of a new group of people and their wish to preserve a connection to the ancestral region might have prompted such a change in a way which is hard to imagine if the name had simply been reinterpreted to mean ‘the rock fort’. The idea is further corroborated by the fact that the Parisian Alfort was certainly a highly important place for calvinist activities and was to figure in critical religious conflicts in the latter half of the 16th century, after the calvinists occupied the bridge at Charenton in 1567. The protestant Huguenots were strongly inspired by the teachings of Jean Calvin, so the Huguenots would probably also have felt a strong attachment to the place. Of course, they might just as well have brought the name in the opposite direction, from Paris to Provence, and in the end, we may never know the true sequence of events.
The Catholics were appalled at the new religious ideas; in fact, they were so afraid of their possible effects that they prosecuted and killed the huguenots en masse during the late 16th century. The Edict of Nantes, published as the century neared its end in 1598, explicitly granted the huguenots eternal religious freedom, but this unimpeachable right was later revoked by the ruthless cardinal Mazarin who reigned while Louis XIV was still too young to rule, and in the second half of the 17th century the huguenots were once again the victims of persecutions and massacres. Those who survived fled in their hundreds of thousands to more protestant-friendly countries such as the Netherlands, England and Scandinavia. In light of the above reference to England, our ancestors were most likely among the 50.000 or so who chose to settle on English shores, perhaps one or two generations before the descendant master shipwright set sail for Sweden in the mid-1600s.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing exactly in what part of England the Alfort family made their home, but we do know that most Huguenots settled in London, Norwich, Southampton, Canterbury, Colchester, Thorney in Cambridgeshire, Bristol, Stonehouse in Plymouth and Thorpe-le-Soken in Essex, nearly all of them seaports. The master shipwright is of course likely to have come from a major shipbuilding site such as London, Southampton or Plymouth, but we can only guess at the exact spot. Finding traces of the family in England is difficult to say the least, when we do not even know the name of the emigrating shipwright. He is often said to have borne the name of Hindric, an old Swedish version of Henry, but this supposition seems to be wholly unfounded. There simply does not seem to be any mention of Erik Alfort’s father’s name in the surviving documents. Judging from the names chosen for the children in the following generations, Charles and George might be suggested as other likely candidates.
As if this wasn’t difficult enough, the search for British relations is further hampered by the fact that at least two indigenous and completely unrelated British families also bear the names of Alfort and Alford. These families derive their names from British place names and have no connection with France or the Huguenots. Most American bearers of these names descend from these same British families, although one American Alford family was indeed established by a great-great-great-great grandson of the master shipwright who brought our family to Sweden, one Frans Ahlfort who emigrated with his family to Missouri in 1866 and became known there as Frank Alford. Another branch established itself in Illinois under the name of Ahlforth.
As the family cannot be definitely traced beyond Sweden, and as the immigrating master shipwright’s exact identity is unknown, I have chosen to consider his son Erik Alfort the founding father. After all it is with him that the recorded history of our family begins. So far, the oldest document recording the presence of any member of the family on Swedish soil is a rather informal entry in the naval records at Karlskrona from 1688 on the occasion of Erik’s promotion from arklimästare (master of artillery) to konstapelsmat (vice constable), but the search for older sources continues.
Why come to Sweden?
So what made a British master shipwright emigrate to Sweden in the middle of the 17th century? In order to answer this question, we need some background information. First of all, it should be borne in mind that this was a time of constant warfare in Europe, in which the seas were ruled by powerful navies. The Dutch and British in particular commanded large fleets equipped with cutting-edge technology, and when the British sailed into the Baltic sea, the Swedish king was so impressed that he immediately invited British master shipwrights to settle in Sweden and help him build a new and powerful Swedish navy to conquer the northern seas. The plan succeeded; the know-how brought by these men helped Sweden become one of the most powerful European superpowers of the century to come.
During this part of history, Sweden was in an incessant state of warfare with her neighbour Denmark, but lately Sweden had got the upper hand; in 1645 Denmark had been forced to cede the Baltic islands of Gotland and Øsel (Saaremaa) as well as the county of Halland (originally meant to be handed back after 30 years) and a section of Norway to the Swedes. Sweden had long felt threatened by Denmark, surrounded as the country had been by Danish territories, but this was all changing as Sweden was fast becoming a Baltic superpower. The Danes were not about to give up, however, and they consequently declared war on their neighbours in 1658 with the view to regaining the lost territories. The plan backfired terribly, and at the end of the war many more provinces had to be surrendered: Scania, Blekinge and (briefly) Bornholm and yet another part of Norway went to Sweden this time.
The Swedish king did, however, face a serious problem. Sweden was dependent on imported Dutch expertise for her navy, but now the two countries had suddenly ended up as opponents in a new war. This is the backdrop for the scene in which the Swedish king Karl X Gustav witnesses the British fleet and immediately appoints British master shipwrights such as Francis Sheldon and Thomas Day to oversee the construction of his new navy that is to rule the seas for times to come. Never again would Sweden be bested by its Baltic neighbours.
Having acquired the old Danish region of Blekinge on the southern coast of the Scandinavian peninsula, the Swedes set about to construct a new naval base there, which was to replace the one in Stockholm as the country’s new military headquarters. The city of Karlskrona was founded on the spot in 1679 under the auspices of the young king Karl XI. The Skeppsholmen shipyard in Stockholm was shut down, and the personnel was sent to Karlskrona and two other new shipyards – one in Kalmar and the other in Riga in present-day Latvia, which was an integral part of the Swedish realm at the time.
Sheldon had left England in favour of Sweden in 1655 after an attempt to free king Charles I from his prison. He worked in Sweden for 30 years, but then decided to leave the country in protest, as he had never been recompensed for the capital he had invested in the Swedish navy. To add insult to injury, he went to the archenemy, helping to modernize the Danish fleet. Although he tried to persuade his children to follow his example, they chose to stay on in Karlskrona, where the Sheldons built magnificent naval ships for several generations.
We do not know in which part of Sweden the master shipwright Alfort settled. Indeed, I have not found a single reference to him in any document apart from the burial epitaph from 1865 cited above. Most likely he lived in the capital. We know that his son lived their in the 1690s, and it would seem highly likely that that was where his father had made his home. Indeed, the very size of Stockholm would explain how the family can be so difficult to find in the documents.
As regards the exact year of immigration, we can only speculate, but it is highly likely that Erik Alfort’s father arrived with the invited shipwrights in the late 1650s, possibly as late as 1659. That would still definitely make it “in the middle of the 17th century”, and his son seems to have been born later that year, which might indicate that he married a local girl on arrival. Unfortunately, we do not know whether Erik’s mother came with him from Britain or not, or even whether Erik himself was born in Sweden or Britain. The sources only tell us that when he died on 8th December 1729 he was 70 years old, so he must have been born in 1659, or at the very earliest in December 1658.
Noble and Well-manly [i.e. rev.] Naval Captain Mr Erik Ahlfort at Lillieholmen, 70 years old.
Translated from Swedish
The matter is complicated by the fact that his son Gabriel kept a diary in which he reports from his travels in Spain that he has been informed of his father’s death at Liljeholmen, and that he reached the age of 73 (if indeed we can trust the transcript – I have unfortunately not had access to the original). However, there are reasons to believe that the diary was in fact written several years after Erik’s death, using old notes, so his information may not be entirely accurate. It is more likely that the priest was right when he wrote that Erik was 70 years old.
Francis Sheldon and Thomas Day were installed at the shipyard in Gothenburg in 1659, and no British shipwrights seem to have been invited after that year. Of course, we do not know whether Erik’s father was actually invited at all, or simply came on his own initiative to try his luck in the wake of the invitations.
Whatever the circumstances, Erik grew up somewhere in Sweden, presumably at a port town, surrounded by magnificent vessels, and he decided when the time came to register as a seaman in the navy, where he made a long and brilliant career. On land, he behaved like a fish out of water, as his temper was clearly not cut out for peaceful life among civilised folk. However, one does not marry a nobleman’s daughter and acquire a beautiful estate without some attempt at civilised behaviour, as he found out to his cost.
From British French to Swedish Latin – The Alfort name through the centuries
Today, there are five surviving branches of the family descending from that original immigrant to Sweden, each with its own distinct form of the name – one of them even has two different subbranches each with its own variant form: Alfort, Ahlfort, Ahlforth, Alford, and Alforn and Ahlforn. This is a pure coincidence as the forms Ahlfort and Alfort were both in more general use across the branches in earlier generations along with many other variants and might both easily have survived in several branches, but it reflects the developments that have changed the name through the centuries.
Although we do not know whether the original immigrant’s son Erik was born in England or in Sweden, it is likely that having a British father he would at least occasionally have used an English pronunciation of his surname in which the A is short, unlike the only Swedish pronunciation of the name used these days. Perhaps it is this version of the name that is reflected in the only signature we have from his own hand, Erik Allfortt. The form with two l’s reappears occasionally down the centuries, right up to 1845 in the case of one person, but it is always decidedly rare, and the pronunciation with a short A does not occur today, except in the branches that have established themselves in other countries and consequently have adopted pronunciations adapted to other languages like English, French and Danish. In all of these cases, the A has been shortened again.
However, we also have another somewhat later signature where his name is spelled Erich Ahlfort, and when others write his name, they use a range of different spellings: Ahlfort, Alfort, Allfort, Alfordt, Alhfordt. This is to be expected; it was only relatively late that the idea of having one correct spelling of a name was adopted, and in fact this principle only really established itself in the 20th century, at least as regards other people’s spellings. In earlier times, even people’s own signatures would vary from time to time, depending on their mood and influences from what was popular at the time. Indeed, general trends like the enlightenment and romanticism probably had a noticeable impact on the evolution of our family name.
The commonest form of the name in Erik’s time was Ahlfort, although Alfort was also widely used. The former is clearly a Swedish adaptation where the vowel has already been lengthened, whereas the latter is ambiguous in this regard.
His daughter’s name is likewise represented in a wide variety of forms: Ahlfort, Alfort, Allfort, Ahlfordt, Alfordt, Alhfordt, Alforth. The only signature of hers that has come down to us, Maria Catharina Ahlfot, is unfortunately a contemporary copyist’s reproduction, and hence could be a scribal mistake for Ahlfort. On the other hand, one particular clergyman (presumably) uses the form Ahlfot (and Alfot) for a decade (1742-1752) with reference to her brother Gabriel, before he realises his error and corrects himself. Is this similarly to be interpreted as a sign that they also would (occasionally?) pronounce their name in English – in which the r i silent to a Swedish ear? We do not know, but interestingly, this spelling is also used on occasion with his sons as late as 1793, although this is so rare as to be uncertain. On the other hand, even from Erik’s very earliest appearance in the military records from ca. 1688, his name is spelled Ahlfort, so this Swedish form seems at least to have been established from the start as a possible variant if nothing else.
The son Gabriel always writes his own name Ahlfort, but in addition to the forms without the r mentioned above, others use the forms Ahlfort, Alfort, Allfort, and occasionally Ahlforth, Ahlfordt, Ahlfortt or Ahlford, although the form Ahlfort is by far the commonest. Their brother Carl Henric is called Ahlfort, Alfort or Ahlfordt.
To sum up this early fase, then, the form Ahlfort was well established as the main Swedish form, with Alfort and Allfort as regularly occurring variants, however the former should be interpreted as regards pronunciation. In addition, other forms appeared quite regularly.
The same is true of Gabriel’s children’s generation. The signatures left to us all have the form Ahlfort, except in the case of Gustaf Adolph Ahlfort (b. 1753), who uses all of the three main forms, Allfort (1780-1800), Ahlfort (1794) and Alfort (1809-1816), thus emphasising the variability in the spelling of the family name.
However, the forms are not randomly applied, as from around 1804, the form Alfort becomes almost universal with him, both as regards his signatures and other people’s spellings. This is part of a general trend, probably spurred on by the late phases of enlightenment, where people started to have a wider outlook and hence to modernise their names to suit a more international culture. In such an atmosphere, the Swedish h clearly had to go, especially in the case of Gustaf Adolph, who seems to have been slightly pretentious, having married into a well-to-do family and settled on a manor where he lived life fully with his family.
With his siblings, we do not have any signatures from this period, so we do not know whether they too started to prefer this spelling. However, in others’ hands, the form Alfort becomes dominant across all branches during this period.
The tendency only lasts until romanticism makes everything originally Swedish fashionable again. Then, the form Ahlfort once more becomes dominant, although there are many later occurrences of the by now well-established spelling Alfort, and even the form Allfort occurs regularly with certain people. After all, these are just rough tendencies that appear on close analysis; there is a lot of variation during all periods until modern times.
One person who never gives in to the romanticised spelling is the surgeon Adolf Fredrik Alfort, who apparently adopts the form Alfort as a natural consequence of the latinised form of his name Adolphus Fridericus Alfort that he uses professionally, at least in a scientific context.
He is by nature a man of the enlightenment, and the form Alfort has stayed with his descendants to the present day. It is not entirely clear, of course, how he pronounced his name. Presumably, the A would be short when pronounced in (Swedish) latin, and his name is indeed spelled Allfort in one newspaper article from 1807, but among his descendants, it has always been pronounced with a long A as though written Ahlfort. Today, this is the only branch that preserves the form Alfort.
Adolf Fredrik’s nephew Frans Ahlfort emigrated to America with his family during the difficult late 1860’s and established himself under the name of Frank Alford, probably influenced by the fact that there were already people of that surname in the area where they chose to settle. These were most likely not related to them in any way, but they were established and respected families, and so adopting their name may well have given the newly-arrived immigrants an added advantage from the start.
Frans’ sister Vilhelmina Ahlfort had several children who chose to readopt the name, as their father did not have a family name for them to inherit (surnames only came into general use later; at this time people just used patronymics unless they happened to have inherited a family name). The surviving Ahlfort branch descends from Vilhelmina’s son David Ahlfort, who left his home province along with one of his sisters to become a priest in faraway Jokkmokk in Lapland.
His children dispersed to Luleå, Dalarna, Gothenburg, and even Simrishamn, so that the family is now present in many parts of the country. Another son, Carl, emigrated to Illinois along with two of his sisters and established himself there under the name Charles Ahlforth.
There is also an Ahlforth family in Sweden, but they do not seem to be related, and certainly not to this American branch.
In the branch descending from Gustaf Adolph of the many spellings, the name died out naturally. Several generations on, however, it was readopted by three sibling descendants who took the name Ahlfort after their maternal grandmother (using the romanticised version of her name). One brother – Axel Ahlfort – took the name in 1893 as he moved to town and wanted to make a name for himself, while the others had presumably done so on the occasion of their emigrating to America in 1889, or did so while living there. They later returned to Sweden and brought the name back with them, but they never had any children, and even their brother’s branch died out with his only daughter.
Their eldest sister had no occasion to adopt a fancy name, but her son Arvid wanted to do so too when he moved in with his uncle, the aforementioned Axel Ahlfort in Stockholm, in 1907. By then, however, a new law had been implemented in 1903 forbidding the adoption of a name without asking permission of those already bearing it, and it appears that John Alfort, who had just established the company Alfort & Cronholm in Stockholm in 1906, found it undesirable to have another Alfort family around, which presumably he did not know was distantly related to his own branch.
It is likely that it was this form Alfort that Arvid wanted to adopt, given that the solution he came up with in 1913 was to take the name Alforn instead. His younger brother Theodor adopted the same name. They both later changed the form of the name to Ahlforn, however, as they were fed up with the phrase hos Alforns (i.e. at the Alforns) being misheard as though their name was Alfons. The extra h made it clear and unambiguous that the A was still to be pronounced long.
Perhaps surprisingly, at this point in time the name had actually only survived in Sweden with three fathers and their families, apart from Arvid’s uncles and aunts who had readopted the name: John Alfort in Stockholm, David Ahlfort in Lapland and the farmer Carl Gustaf Ahlfort back in Ekeby. This is why each existing branch has its own version of the name – in each case there is a bottleneck through which the family has passed. The Ekeby branch no longer carries the name, so we are left with the Alfort branch descending from John Alfort, the Ahlfort branch descending from David Ahlfort, and the Ahlforn branch descending from the brothers Arvid and Theodor, in addition to the American Alford and Ahlforth branches descending from Frank and Charles respectively.
Chapter 2, A fish out of water, is about Captain Erik Alfort’s life and career.
Selected sources for chapter 1
This text is a synthesis of many years of work and is derived from countless sources. Among them are the following.
- ArkivDigital / Riksarkivet
- Church registers
- Naval registers
- Probates
- Cercle généalogique de Maisons-Alfort
- The Huguenot Society of Great Britain & Ireland
- The Alford American Family Association
- Tranås Hembygdsgille (1955), Från Sommabygd till Vätterstrand: Ur Gabriel Ahlforts dagbok
- Familysearch.org
- Findagrave.com
02-12-2023
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