This page contains three images: the record of Alex Passamani and Svea Holm’s marriage by the Baptist pastor Axel Anderson; their marriage license; and the front cover of the marriage record booklet. The documents were provided by Mark Passamani, a great-nephew of Alex.
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Why Alex and Svea were married in the Baptist Church is a puzzle.
When I was growing up, my family was not religious. We never attended church. I don’t think that Victor did either. I think Jenny, his second wife, attended the Christian Science Church across from the high school. My dad was baptized in the Lutheran Church in Canada. Svea probably would have been baptized in Sweden in the Evangelical Lutheran state church. If she were religious, I would have assumed her orientation would have been to the Lutheran Church in Michigan. According to the “Frames for the Future” book that was published by the Iron County Historical and Museum Society in 1981, the Iron River Baptist Church was first organized as the Swedish Baptist Church in 1889. The services were conducted entirely in Swedish. Eventually that church became the First Baptist Church of Iron River and the language changed to English. “Frames for the Future” does not provide a time scale for these changes. Svea wasn’t Catholic so she and Alex could not have been married in the Catholic Church. This history of the Baptist Church in Iron River gives some possibility that Svea might have attended it or had some other relationship with it. Hence, it seems to me that there was some logic behind their choice of the Baptist Church for their marriage. We’ll probably never know the truth. |
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