GIDLOF.COM

Our Family Tree Online.

Gidlof

The name is constructed of two parts, GID and LÖF.

GID comes from the Swedish village of Gideå and LÖF is the Swedish word for leaf.

 

Thank you to Lennart Gidlöf for the translation.

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This all started as a little project to find out the history of our family.  I had little knowledge beyond the basic data on my Great Grandparents.  I started doing some digging and came up with pretty much nothing.  There was nothing in the mainstream genealogical sites on the Gidlof name.  There were no living Grandparents and not much family history was ever documented.

The first big break were some old letters that described a couple generations back of the family that I got from Mom.  When armed with this new information I got some hits and was off and running.  This fueled the desire to find more.

While this didn’t turn up any data on the Gidlof side of the family there was some really interesting stuff to be found on the Maklin line.  I found that Mom’s Grandmother Mollie Maklin aka, Amalia Macklin was descendant of Theobald Mechling.  A German immigrant born in 1701 and came to America in 1728.  The Mechling family is well documented on the web so this was a very exciting find for me.

I continued to research the Gidlof name and still came up blank until I stumbled across the 1890 census in Sweden.  I found a Gidlof family that seemed to match but couldn’t be sure.  After more research I dug up the marriage record in Vancouver BC of my Great Grandparents and that positively made the link to the records in the 1890 census.  I finally found something on the Gidlof family.

So, as the information that I have found began to accumulate I thought a web site would be the best way I could share this data with the rest of the family.  That’s when this site was born. 

The next big break was actually a contact that found me.  One day I received email from a wonderful woman in Sweden, Tina, who was researching her Gidlof family history and came across me on Ancestry.com‘s forum pages.  As it turned out she was not related to my family but she was looking for information of descendants here in the US.  So we have been sharing information.  She has provided with loads of data on the Gidlof family as well as putting me in contact with another researcher that got me even more data on the Hertzberg family, that would be my Great-grandmother, Signe Josefina Hertzberg. 

Through this research I have contacted another family of Gidlof in the Pacific Northwest and have found out about a third.  Funny none of the three families are related, yet all came to the NW in about the same time.  In fact Jonas Gidlof and my Great-Uncle Carl Hjalmer Gidlof both came to America on the same ship in 1910.

NOTE: this page is a slow evolution always under construction so be patient with me.

If you would like to learn more or you think you might be related please feel free to contact me.  If you are a Gidlof related or not and have a non-commercial family page you would like linked here contact me and I’ll put up your link.

 

To contact me:

E-mail: glenn@gidlof.com

"Lilla Riksvapnet" is the swedish national crest. In the blue shield there are three golden crowns. On the top of the shield there is a royal crown surronded by the chain of the Serafim-orden. The crest was introduced by Albrekt of Mecklenburg in 1365.