Script Tease

How some very old Swedish texts could tell us a lot about our history.

by J.F. Pirro

How patient is he? The translation project began with over 400 handwritten pages of documents bound in an ancient ledger-sized scrapbook found in the circa-1700 church in Queen Village. Assembled by the Colonial Dames, a historical society, in 1905, the 11-by-14-inch tome had been collecting dust since.

GLORIA BE! Rev. Dr. Kim-Eric Williams with some of the texts on which Colonial Records of the Swedish Churches in Pennsylvania is based. : michael m. koehler

"When anybody looked at it, they saw the old-fashioned script, spelling and language, then wanted no part of continuing to look at it," Williams says.

Script it was —in countless hands — but as the project's translator and assistant editor, he painstakingly made a key, charting each different-looking alphabetic character. There were at least 20 different versions of "e." Every time a script became more consistent, the hand changed; that recorder had either died or returned to Sweden. Then, Williams was deciphering a new script.

"It was slow work," he says. "I could spend an afternoon, and get maybe one paragraph done."

We'll finally get a peek at the fruits of his labor Saturday at the Sixth Annual New Sweden History Conference, "Gloria Dei Church: A Celebration in Print, Brick and Sacred Song" (www.colonialswedes.org). At the church at Columbus Boulevard and Christian Street, Philadelphia's Swedish Colonial Society will release the first two of eight eventual volumes collectively titled Colonial Records of the Swedish Churches in Pennsylvania. Centered on the historical records of four colonial churches —Gloria Dei, St. James in West Philadelphia/Kingsessing, Christ Church in Upper Merion and St. Gabriel's in Douglassville —the first is Volume 1: The Log Churches at Tinicum Island and Wicaco 1646-1696. The second is Volume 2: The Rudman Years 1697-1702. Both will be available Saturday at a conference discount.

This region's colonial history has always been dominated by English accounts. Now, the Swedish records will get their due. "This will change the way we read colonial history," Williams says. "For those who have already written colonial American history, they're going to have to revise their accounts."

While he remains guarded about what the volumes contain, he says it's not just a collection of baptismal records. Nor will the text only be interesting to those with an academic bent. There are proceedings of colonial courts, and letters describing Native Americans. The final volume will end with the installation of the last Swedish pastor, Nicholas Collin, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Thereafter, Williams says folks can do their own research: It's all been translated into English.

"This is all an absolute gold mine for genealogists," he says. "If a certain person was sitting in a pew in 1730, then you know he was alive. This might start with our eight books, but people will be writing books from these books for the next couple hundred years."

For Swedes, Williams says, it remains "irksome" that William Penn has always been accorded all the credit for settling this area. Pennsylvania, they contend, was already mapped and established when Penn arrived.

"It made his job a lot easier," he says. "[Officials] like to say Pennsbury Mansion was [simply] restored, but the truth is it was built from scratch. But on Tinicum Island, where Gov. [Johan] Printz's home was excavated in 1938 by the WPA, all they've ever done is talk about rebuilding it —and it was the first capital of Pennsylvania, the first governor's mansion, and the location of the country's first forts, courts and schools."

It wasn't until Williams returned from Connecticut in 1996 that he discovered he had colonial Swedish ancestors, a source of pride he's celebrated in other books he's written: The Eight Old Swedes' Churches of New Sweden and The Journey of Justin Falckner, the story of the first Swedish ordination in America.

An estimated 10 to 20 million Americans could be related to the original Swedes, he says, but 99 percent of them don't know it. Of late, even the presidential Bush family has traced its roots to New Sweden colonist Mans Andersson, who arrived in April 1640 on board the Kalmar Nyckel.

An 11th-generation descendant of at least three colonial Swedes (Carl C. Springer, Hendrick Jacobsson and Olof Stille), Williams, a second-term governor of the 900-member Swedish Colonial Society, is at the helm at a critical time. The Society is also at the forefront of a proposal by U.S. Sen. Tom Carper to create Delaware's first national park.

Tentatively called the Delaware National Coastal Heritage Park, its proposed "gateway" is the "Swedes Rocks," the original, natural landing dock at what's now Fort Christina State Park. There, in 1638, Swedes and Finns established the first permanent European settlement, Fort Christina, and befriended Native Americans with whom they shared agricultural interests. Penn's people, by contrast, Williams says, were virtually gentrified tradesmen, and thus too sophisticated for rural people.

Williams' Gloria Dei partner, Peter Stebbins Craig, the project's editor and the Swedish Colonial Society's historian, organized the church entries, largely chronologically. He's a Washington, D.C., lawyer currently in the throes of a pro-bono class-action case.

Williams is working on another book due early next year on the country's first eight hymnals, published in 1700 by Andreas Rudman, the first pastor of Gloria Dei. At Saturday's conference, the Swedish Museum Singers of Philly's American Swedish Historical Museum will perform a selection of the hymns.

Another book, too, has sprouted from the Gloria Dei project's biggest surprise, the absence of records for a decade beginning in 1759 when Carl Magnus Wrangel, another friend of Franklin's, was pastor. Six months ago, contacts in Sweden discovered a 1953 Wrangel biography. Williams plans to translate it, and reveal even more about colonial Philadelphia.

Originally, the church records were to be translated and published by 2000, the year Gloria Dei celebrated its 300th anniversary. The task, however, proved time-consuming.

"I mean, let's face it," Williams says, "there's practically no one in the United States who can understand 17th- and 18th-century Swedish script."

(j_pirro@citypaper.net)

The Sixth Annual New Sweden History Conference, Sat., Oct. 14, Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church, Columbus Blvd. and Christian St., registration begins at 9:30 a.m., $35 ($25 for students and high school teachers).