01/03/2026
In Memoriam:
Peter Stebbins Craig, 1928-2009
Everyone who joined the Swedish-American Historical Society (SAHS) 1997 tour of the New Sweden colony in the Delaware Valley
(1638-1655), which also included seeing the launching of the Kalmar Nyckel replica ship, remembers the gentleman who
sat behind the driver and, as the bus rolled along, talked about
the colony, its history, and the Swedes and Finns who came and
stayed permanently.
That was Dr. Peter Stebbins Craig, F.A.S.G., who died at age
eighty-one on Thanksgiving Day following a very brief illness. Less
than five weeks before, he had been in Philadelphia to receive the
Swedish Colonial Society’s (SCS) first Lifetime Achievement Award,
given during the banquet held in conjunction with the Swedish Council of America meeting.
Also a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, Peter
was especially grateful that King Carl XVI Gustaf in 2002 saw fit to
appoint him a Commander First Class of the Royal Order of the
Polar Star (Nordstjärneorden) for his contributions to the understanding of Sweden’s history as well as that of the United States.
Peter was descended from several of the colony’s residents, the
earliest being the settler Olof Stille from Roslagen, who arrived in
1641 and became a miller and head judge of the colony court. His
eight-year-old daughter, Ella, eventually married Peter Jochimsson,
who had been born in Schleswig-Holstein, enrolled as a soldier in
Göteborg, and sailed to New Sweden in 1642 with the colony’s new
governor, Johan Printz.
Just as many of the nineteenth-century Swedish immigrants
changed their names, the name Jochimsson, spelled as pronounced in Swedish, made no sense to the English speakers whose numbers multiplied after England took control of the region in 1664. The name morphed into different spellings of how the name sounded to English ears: Yoakem—Yocum—Yokom, etc.
As a child Peter listened to his great-grandmother (farmorsmor),
Martha Yocum Tucker, talk about the family’s Swedish roots and
about how they had eventually settled in Illinois. One story told
about how happily surprised the Yocums had been one day (in 1846) when a group of Swedes turned up in the neighborhood—Erik Jansson and his followers—and founded Bishop Hill. The Craig family today still owns some of the Yocum farmland near Galva.
Peter grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, where his father, Clarence Tucker
Craig, a noted theologian, was on the faculty of Oberlin College.
Peter graduated from Oberlin, obtained his J.D. degree from Yale
Law School, and moved to Washington, D.C., where he remained
for the rest of his life.
His career included posts as general counsel for the U.S. Depart
ment of Transportation and for the Southern Railway. At age 59, he
retired to work full-time on a hobby that had turned into a passion—
researching New Sweden, The project that developed out of this interest grew to include the genealogies of the several hundred identified Swedes, Swede Finns, and Finns who came to the colony between 1638 and 1783.
Peter relentlessly tracked down land records, wills and probates,
archived newspapers, vital records, personal journals, church records, court and tax records, and government and historical society files in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, and New York (because of the Dutch colonial influence), and in Sweden. Having a background in the law, a strong sense of right versus wrong, the ability to evaluate data accurately, and a remarkable mind for detail assuredly helped.
Today we owe Peter endless thanks for giving us a lively picture
of life along the Delaware during the days of the New Sweden colony and over the ensuing 150 years. Because of his work, we know who the Swedes and Finns were, where they lived and who their neighbors were, their occupations, and the names and whereabouts of their children and grandchildren. We also know many details of daily life—the weather, the plants and animals, sicknesses, relations with the Lenni Lenape tribe, and such details as who contributed to the building and repair of the church, who got the license to operate the ferry across the Schuykill, and what the resolutions were in tiffs over land boundaries.
His work also shows how, in the 1700s, the Swedes gradually
melded into the larger community around them, and we learn more
about the complaints of the area’s Swedish pastors, who repeatedly
wrote to the Archbishop in Uppsala about their declining congregations: “Our congregations cannot grow if, as you have instructed us, we must preach only in Swedish, because the young people understand only English!”
We also find more and more people with names like Yocum, Stallcop, Rambo, Friend (Frände), Justis (Gustafsson), Mullica, Bankson (Bengtsson), Barry (Berg), Dalbo, Mounts (Måns), turning up farther and farther west, south and north.
One of Peter’s friends and mentoring colleagues was Nils William
Olsson, who published more than a dozen of Peter’s articles in Swedish American Genealogist (SAG) and included him on his staff at the annual SAG Workshop in Salt Lake City.
In addition, Peter’s work appeared in other journals, and his two books elaborating on the 1671 and 1693 censuses of the Swedes of the Delaware have become classics.
For more than the past decade, Peter devoted his time and
energy to compiling the records of Gloria Dei (Old Swedes’) Church
in Philadelphia and its predecessor church on Tinicum Island, Governor Printz’s headquarters in the 1640s. Included along with the typical church vestry minutes, lists of income and expenses, and such, is a wealth of material from the Church of Sweden’s archives, correspondence with Pennsylvania officialdom, and exchanges with the leaders of other religious groups in the area, especially the German Lutherans.
The SCS has published five volumes so far with the help of many
donors in the United States and Sweden. We have reached the
1760s, the days of the French and Indian War, when Philadelphia,
then the largest city and port in the colonies, lay within reach of
French embargo and possible attack. Volume 6 covers the pastorate
of Carl Gustaf Wrangel (a surname familiar to anyone who has visited Skokloster) and is in draft. As Peter’s proofreader, untangler of translated phrases and sentences, and general helper on the Gloria Dei records project, I can only say that it will be very difficult to continue without him.
Peter was SCS’s historian and genealogist for many years. The
Society is indeed honored that he elected to leave his collection to
us. It will be housed in our archives at the Lutheran Seminary in Mt.
Airy, Pennsylvania, and there is a tremendous amount of work to be
done to put the material in searchable, readily available form. Peter
also had plans for two more books, one a reissue of his series of eight articles in SAG 1997-99 with the addition of his numerous later research findings and corrections. We very much want to do that for him. For these reasons, among others, SCS is establishing the Craig Research and Publications Fund in his memory so that his work will continue. (See notice below.)
ELLEN T. RYE
COUNCILOR AND CHAIR, PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE
SWEDISH COLONIAL SOCIETY OF PENNSYLVANIA
BOARD MEMBER, SWEDISH-AMERICAN HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Donations in honor of Peter Craig should be sent to the Swedish
Colonial Society, c/o Gloria Dei Church, 916 S. Swanson St.,
Philadelphia, PA 19147, marked “For the Craig Fund.” For information about the Society and the New Swedish colony on the Delaware, see www.ColonialSwedes.net
Photograph: Peter Stebbins Craig.
