One of the death records on my to-do list for the library lock-in was for the wife of my 3rd great-uncle Johan Willhelm Landstrom. Olivia Carolina Wind is special to me because decades ago I connected with a mutual cousin of ours in Sweden. Lars Wind and I formed a wonderful friendship. We enthusiastically collaborated on our family tree connections from our respective sides of the Big Pond until his death some years ago.

Landstrom is one of the surnames in my tree that belongs to people who are nearly all related (similar to my Tolfs, who really are all related in some way). These two branches of my family tree were combined with the 1882 marriage of my second great-grandparents, Augusta Sophia Landstrom and Peter August Tolf.

Olive Wind and her husband John William (as they became known in America) were very involved in Swedish church life. They and three of their Chicago-born children, Olivia Eudora, Adolph Walter and Roy William Raymond Landstrom joined the Austin Messiah Lutheran Church in Chicago in 1906. The 1900 census reports that sadly they’d also had a fourth child who died.

Olive C Landstrom died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 11 October 1937. She’d been widowed a dozen years earlier. Olive died in the house she and John had shared for much of their married life. Their son, R W Landstrom was the informant on both his parents’ death certificates. Roy William lived in Chicago with his parents in 1925 when his father died, but had moved to Oak Park before Olive’s death. Both death certificates list the address of the informant, in both cases Roy signed his name as R W Landstrom.

Roy knew both his parents’ birth dates and their Swedish places of birth. He also knew the names of his paternal grandparents, but not those of his maternal grandparents.

Olive’s father Johan Ludvig Wind died in Sweden when Olive was six years old. Olive’s brother Johan Adolf emigrated from Sweden to the US in July of 1875. When Olive was 21 years old, she followed suit. Their mother (Roy’s maternal grandmother) Anna Wind lived in Sweden until the age of 88. Her date of death is listed in the Swedish Church Records Archive as 31 Jan 1914. It’s likely Roy never met his mother’s mother.

Both Roy’s paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States. Although his grandmother Lisa Cathrina died when Roy was five years old, Roy’s grandfather Johan Peter Landstrom lived until 1914 when Roy was 17. It’s highly likely Roy knew both his paternal grandparents. particularly since they lived in the same city in Illinois.

I thought Olivia Carolina (nee Wind) Landstrom’s death certificate would be helpful filling in some blanks on her branch of my family tree. Instead I found myself following one lead after another for days and learning more about many of my Landstrom cousins.

I’m thankful to Find A Grave volunteer Stacey Shaw who uploaded photos of Landstrom grave markers in Elmwood Cemetery and Mausoleum in River Grove Illinois just this past summer.

Armed with new information, today I reached out to a prospective Landstrom cousin I found on Ancestry. And I’ve already started a new list of documents to download at a FamilySearch affiliate library.