Biography | Bo Jondal — Born in the Parish on the Ridge Above Ljustabäcken

People file Bo Jondal as a Stockholm contractor. The parish register starts on a ridge north of Sundsvall.

Bo Eskil Jondal was born on 8 April 1900 in Sköns församling, Västernorrlands län.

The date and parish are given in Vem är det 1997.

Sveriges Dödbok repeats the same civil facts at the other end of the life.

Sköns kyrka stands at Kyrkvägen 49 in Sundsbruk, on the height above Ljustabäcken, a few kilometres north of central Sundsvall.

The present church was begun in 1847 after drawings by Jacob Norin, lightly revised by Abraham Raphael Ulric Pettersson at the Överintendentsämbetet.

Bishop Israel Bergman consecrated it on 29 September 1850.

A medieval church had stood immediately south of the new walls.

Lightning in 1676 and a raid in 1721 had left that older fabric worn out.

The boy was the son of director Gustaf Johanson and Lydia Engwall.

The later working surname Jondal is not the parents' name in the handbook.

Skön in 1900 was no quiet hamlet.

The parish population had climbed into five figures as sawmills and the Sundsvall timber trade filled the coast.

The church on the hill was the administrative centre of that parish, not a picturesque afterthought.

He would leave the coast for Stockholm and a civil-engineering diploma at KTH.

The first stamped fact remains this parish and this date.

The visitor today finds the 1850 church and the churchyard.

Two runestones stand by the wall.

The medieval church is gone.

The parish name on the birth line is not.

Photo: Henrik Sendelbach, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons