Help please Hans Jannsen Ahlfors born 1861 in Malmo - Swedish Records

[majm]

   I think I know why Maude left Broken Hill for Melbourne in 1899.    I have just found a couple of trove reports dated 18th February, 1899, strangely in Queensland papers although the incident was at Summerhill, Sydney.   These tell us that Charles Lawson a Swede cut his throat and then stabbed himself in the abdomen and then threw himself into a canal (the Hawthorne Canal runs through Summerhill).   That was just under 8 months after he married Maude and 4 months before the birth of Percy.    He had found out that he was suffering from an incurable internal illness.   Nevertheless the only death that looks like him was in 1941 when a Charles Lawson living in Stuart Town died aged 74 and that fits the age of Charles who was 30 when he married in 1898.
    Stuart Town is not far from Mudgee where Peter Lawson married Louisa and she gave birth to Henry Lawson the Poet.    Peter Lawson was really Nils Larsen, a Norwegian Miner so they really did change their names quite a lot.

May I please note that Henry Lawson was not born anywhere near Mudgee.  He was born out near Grenfell, and his birth registered at the Forbes Court House.   NSW BDM uses that birth registration as a sample  :    http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/Documents/b1867-11928.pdf

May I please note that there's more than one Summer Hill Creek in NSW.  In fact I am fairly sure there's several  not just a suburb of Sydney.  I am fairly sure there’s Summer Hill Creeks : near Orange, near Bathurst,near Mudgee, near Wilcannia. 

The National Library of Australia allows the live links they provide to the articles in the digitised newspapers to be cited on forums like RChat.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/113708520 Evening News 17 Feb 1899
and also
http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/113705187 Evening News 20 Feb 1899 .... his condition improved, still in hospital, alive and improving considerably . 

JM 

[Malcolm33]

  Thanks JM I did see that Henry Lawson was born in Grenfell but his parents married in Mudgee.   There are still a few different deaths of men named Charles Lawson and another likely one died in 1921 in Broken Hill.     It gets so complicated with both the Lawson's and the Trenwith's using different given names as well as their surnames being varied.    For example Ede's Dad who was baptized as Percival William Thomas Lawson, went by the name of Tom Gibson in his teen years and later on.    His mother Maude May Lawson, nee Trenwith had children by a father unknown and then by William John Gibson in 1907.   She married William John Gibson in 1912 and he died on the 14th July, 1912, so probably a marriage to a dying man she had lived with for years.

[majm]

The habit of names changing was a fairly easy thing to do for generations of NSW residents (male and female alike).   It is really only from the mid 1990s that it has become a chore to go about changing the name you wish to be known by.  I think it would date from the the need to have 100 points of ID in your preferred name before you can effectively receive wages/social security income support payments into a bank account in that preferred name....   The late Christopher Skase's flight out of Australia comes to mind. 

Some of the changes are simply alternative spellings caused by the use of verbal information being recorded by clerks in longhand on NSW BDM registers facing the clerk rather than the informant (Larsen/Lawson etc)  (NSW BDM HQ did not get a typewriter until after WWI and I am not sure when deputy registrars in regional/rural/remote NSW commenced with typewriters, but I know my own NSW birth in the 1940s was registered in the long hand of the registrar and my parent, no typewriter at that office);   some are by the persons of interest choosing to be known by another name (nothing illegal in so doing, provided of course the intention does not include attempting to deceive or commit a fraud etc); some are because the parent/s/foster parents of a child want their local social group to know the child by the surname of the rest of the family;  some because mum has become widowed and has a new partner, so the children's surname changes when mum becomes known by newer surname;  some as adults choose to change their surname to avoid confusion with someone else in the same locality with the same first name and surname. 

Part and parcel of family history is searching for the 'known by' name rather than the official name.   

JM