A couple of weeks ago, I discovered a family tree in the genealogy database FamilySearch that sure looked like it contained our progenitor, Otto. The Otto in this tree married a Johanna Camilla in Denmark, had brothers names Salomon and Noach, and parents named Johannes and Christina. His birthdate was identical to our Otto’s.
I wrote to the woman whose tree it was and after some correspondence discovered that the Otto in her tree was even listed in some Swedish records as Otto Johannisson (Sporsén.)
I noted that our Otto had made up his American surname to reflect his Swedish origins. She said, “You are right that has to do with the village and house he was living in. The parish is named Ås, but the village/society was named Sporda, and the house where they lived when Otto was a kid was called Sporsbo.”
Her husband is the great grandson of Otto’s elder brother Noak. Her husband’s father, who was born in 1930, even remembers meeting Otto in Sweden when he returned to visit family in the mid and late 1930s!