The print I have of this photograph is faded almost to the point of obscurity. But when I recognized a pair of my ancestors in it, I learned something I hadn’t known before: my second great-grandfather Frans Oskar Svärd, known as Oskar, was quite a substantial man. I need hardly clarify that he is standing on the far left; he would, I think, loom over the group even if he took a step back to bring himself in line with the rest of the front row.
”How tall were they?” is not the first question I ask myself about the people I’m researching. I wouldn’t lead with it if I were telling you about Oskar; I’d start with his early years as the son of a soldier in Hakarp, near Jönköping in Sweden, or explain that he, like many other residents of the area, found himself employed at the Husqvarna Rifle Company as it began to branch out into manufacturing sewing machines and motorcycles. I’d talk about him as the father of eight children, of whom seven survived to adulthood and three emigrated to the United States.
And yet, when I first saw this photograph, I was shaken. There was Oskar, familiar to me and at the same time a stranger. It seemed important that I hadn’t known this basic fact of his physicality, which now jumps out at me when I look at the other pictures I have of him.
As I’ve thought about this some more, Oskar’s height seems like a metaphor for the unknowability of history: all the things we don’t know, and all the assumptions we make to fill in for those things. This certainly isn’t the first time finding something new has pulled me up short. It’s part of what makes doing research, especially research at such a small scale, so fascinating. No matter how much information we have, we’ll never know all the moments of a person’s life, all the things that made them who they were—and I think that’s what keeps me coming back.
Frans Oskar Svärd family, c. 1925, Huskvarna, Sweden. Gelatin-silver print, collection of Christine L. Howard.