Summary
At the legislative council on Kopparberget in 1473, the three brothers Olof, Markvard and Hans Olsson are mentioned. Their father was Olof Nilsson, ancestor of what was called the Stjärna Kopparberg family [1].
A family line to the present from son Olof (Rottnebygrenen) and one from Markvard (Storbogrenen) have been DNA tested with Y-DNA37 and proved to match each other as expected. From the Rottneby branch there are two matching results with a common ancestor in the 18th century. SNP tests on one of the results have shown that the family belongs to the approx. 4300-year-old haplogroup R1a-CTS3402.
Background
Olof Nilsson lived in the 15th century in the Kniva mountain range east of Falun. A stained glass of a star in Vika church's chancel window is associated with him, which is why he is assumed to belong to a Stjärna family, but nothing is known about this. Rasmus Ludvigsson said in the 16th century that he came from Denmark [1].
Olof's sons Olof Olsson, Markvard Olsson and Hans Olsson are mentioned in documents from the legislative assembly at Kopparberget in 1473. From that, it can be assumed that Olof Nilsson should have been born around 1420 or earlier.
All three sons have been considered to have descendants for several generations [2]. The son Hans would be the ancestor of the noble families Swedenborg and Schönström, but this has been re-examined in modern genealogy and with the Adelskalendern 2016 they have instead got Otte Persson from Sundborn as ancestor [5].
The son Olof had several descendants, i.a. Hans who gave rise to the Rottneby branch.
The son Markvard became the ancestor of Georg Stiernhielm, who was ennobled in 1631 and was granted the estate Wassula outside Tartu in present-day Estonia. The Stiernhielm family lived at Wassula until late times. The last agnatic descendant Nils von Stiernhielm who died in 2003 was born on the estate.
Family lines
Rottnebygrenen and Lind
Helmer Lagergren, postmaster and genealogist whose collection is at Falun's library, mentions a line from son Olof to the Lind family [3].
It ends with a colleague of the same age as Lagergren, the postmaster Axel Rudolf Lind, born in Mora in 1866. The line has been shown to be correct with the DNA test, although the fact that Axel Rudolf was a postmaster made me suspicious at first. It could possibly have been that Lagergren deliberately constructed the line to his friend.
Storbogrenen
The son Markvard had descendants in Storbo, Vika from which it is possible to find male lines into the present.
With this, there were candidates to test and I asked Bengt-Erik Lind as representative of the Lind branch and Olle Alvroth from the Storbo branch for a DNA sample. They live in Falun and they had both heard that they had ancestry from Stjärna.
STR test Y-DNA37 was ordered for the kit.
At the same time as these results were completed, another one tested by chance appeared, it was Jouko Lindh in Jyväskylä. Jouko Lindh knew that the family came from Dalarna, but did not know the earlier ancestors. It turned out that Johan Lind's son Gustaf had moved to around 1800 Kajaneborg / Kajaani in northern Finland.
DNA results
Complete family lines can be downloaded here [6]
The results can also be seen in The Copper Mountain DNA project [4].
The kits match each other at normal genetic distances and there are no other close matches to the group. Jouko Lindh, who tested Y-DNA67, has in the Sweden project her closest match at genetic distance 13 (67 markers). The large distance to other tested Swedes strengthens the assessment that the result shows that the three tested have Olof Nilsson Stjärna as a common ancestor..
SNP test has placed Bengt-Erik Lind in haplogroup R1a-CTS3402.
Thanks
Thanks to Bengt-Erik Lind and Olle Alvroth for DNA samples and thanks to Jouko Lindh in Jyväskylä who tested herself and unexpectedly appeared as a match. All three have agreed to have their names published.
Thanks to Stefan Jernberg and Torsten Berglund who did a basic check of the tested family lines.
Jakob Norstedt
Email: jakob@hoijen.se
Sources
- Elisabet Hemström - "The progenitor of the Stjärna family - a Danish parliament?" Fahlu Genealogy Journal no. 14 / 2004:4
- Bertil Boëthius – "The Copperberg Law until the breakthrough of the 1570s" p 578-580
- Helmer Lagergren – Star line to the Lind family, notes 1936-04-18
- FTDNA Project Kopparberget https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/kopparberget
- The nobility calendar 2016
- Complete family lines
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