Cletus Hasslinger, a registered architect in Milwaukee grew up on a farm near Hartland not far from where the first Swedish pioneers settled east of Pine Lake. Cletus is a 5th generation descendant of early settlers George and Ebba Bergwall, and 6th generation of Ebba’s parents Bengt and Charlotta Petterson.
Cletus has researched the lives of members of his family tree extensively. At a Society meeting at St. Anskar’s Church in Hartland in May 2022 Cletus presented his family history and the associated research accompanied by his fellow descendants.
Speech Delivered May 14, 2022 to SAHSW at Saint Anskar’s Church, Hartland, Wisconsin
“My ancestral origins are in Europe. My father’s ancestors are from Germany; my mother’s are from Ireland, England, and Sweden. Of all my European ancestors, it is the Swedes who came first to this part of the United States. In 1842, two men, George Edward Bergwall and a man calling himself Bengt Petterson, came to New Upsala, a Scandinavian settlement that came to surround Pine Lake in Southeastern Wisconsin in the northwest corner of what then was the Wisconsin Territory’s Milwaukee County and is now Waukesha County. Within a year, Bengt brought his family to New Upsala, and, within five years, George married Bengt’s daughter, Ebba.”
Possessions of a Swedish Pioneer
This story written by Harry H Anderson was published in Swedish American Genealogist, 1988. The story is about Bengt Peterson’s (New Upsala Pioneer) detailed property inventory that was submitted as a part of probate after Bengt’s sudden death in December of 1845. Cletus Hasslinger is a 6th generation descendant of Bengt Peterson and has researched the family tree extensively and following Harry’s writing, presents his findings, of information that needs to be corrected or clarified.
“In the lonely corner of a rural cemetery in Waukesha County, Wisconsin stands the neglected gravestone of one of the tragic figures of early Swedish immigration to the Midwest. The stone’s inscription identifies the deceased as ” K. M. Peterson/BORN Sept. 2, 1797/DIED Dec. 12, 1845.” Remarkably, almost every bit of this information is either incorrect, incomplete, or at least misleading, and deserves to be corrected”.
The Possessions of a Swedish Pioneer
Cletus Hasslinger research and comments
“Bengt Petterson is my great, great, great grandfather—3 greats added to one grand. In other words, I am of the sixth generation to follow Bengt. He emigrated from Sweden to the United States and to the northwest quarter of what is now Waukesha County in 1840. In 1988, Harry Anderson wrote a short article for a magazine named the Swedish American Genealogist. The article concerned the probating, by Bengt’s wife and her lawyer, of Bengt’s estate when he died, and it was titled Possessions of A Swedish Pioneer.“
Swedish American Historical Society of Wisconsin 