I’ve written about Black Sheep ancestors in the past, but I just disovered yet another one!

Many thanks to cousin Krister Thorell for his thorough research on this branch of the Molin family.

When I first wrote Commit the Crime, Do the Time! and Commit the Crime, Do the Time! Part 2 – Johan Alfred Molin, I was not expecting this to become a Molin crime family series, but it seems there were some ancestors who skirted the laws or were outright criminals.

In order for you to understand who these Molins are, I need to provide a simple road map, a summary of previous Molin family posts.

Anders Molin and Sara Brita Krok are my ancestors from today’s Skane County, Sweden. They had two surviving children of their own, one of which was my direct ancestor, Hans Niclas Molin, born in 1778. Sara Brita later had three illegitimate sons. The youngest, Hans Samuel Molin, born 1798, was the subject of the first Commit the Crime, Do the Time! post, but his “crime” was being unemployed and unable to provide for himself and his family.

Commit the Crime, Do the Time, Part 2 told the short story of Johan Alfred Molin, born 16 September 1843 in Lund to the unmarried mother, Anna Christina Molin. Anna Christina was the daughter of my Hans Niclas Molin. Although she had six children – Johan Alfred was the fourth – she never married and all the children did not have the same father. Johan Alfred served time first for “snooping” (but I don’t know if that means he was a peeping tom), and later for violence against the police, assault and finally got seven years hard labor for robbery. This happened in the 1870’s and he hasn’t yet been found in the 1880 Swedish census. He may have been back in prison or he may have died. The big discovery about Johan Alfred was his mug shot included in his prison record.

Anna Christina Molin’s oldest child was Carl August Molin, born in her home village of Öved in 1826.  His father was the Circuit Judge Wingelblixt, who died when he was young. It doesn’t appear that he ever knew his father; his mother couldn’t care for him and his first jail record in Malmo states that his grandparents (my ancestors, Hans Niclas and Anna Kjersti Molin) cared for him while he was growing up.

Malmo Jail Record

Carl August had a few run-ins with the law, too. However, his “crimes” were more on the level of Hans Samuel Molin as Carl August was charged with gambling in 1847 and sent back from Copenhagen, Denmark in 1849 and jailed because he couldn’t hold a job and care for himself. Eventually, he married and settled down.

I knew little about this family until a recent email from Krister, my Swedish cousin. He discovered the story of Carl August’s son, Carl Alfred, while researching Anna Christina’s children. Carl Alfred Molin was born 19 November 1871 in the town of Horby in the old Malmohus County, Sweden.

It appears that if Carl Alfred’s half-uncle, Johan Alfred, lived a life of somewhat petty crime and his grand uncle, Hans Samuel, and his own father, Carl August Molin, had minor scrapes with the law, Carl Alfred lived the life of an increasingly hardened criminal. I wonder what made him choose that life since he seems to have had a more stable family life than these other relatives.

Krister found an amazing amount of records documenting Carl Alfred Molin’s life. His criminal record includes accounts of drinking, stealing and using counterfeit money. He was described not only as lazy, but also as violent.

Here is a chronology of part of Carl Alfred’s life. The overlapping dates reflect the span of time covered in each record, but Carl Alfred was obviously not in each place for all of the months included in each book:

10 Aug 1899-1903 –   in records of Karlskrona Prison
22 Sept 1900 – 20 Jan 1902 – in records of Kristianstad Prison
20 Apr 1901 – 20 June 1902 – back in Karlskrona Prison
20 Aug 1902 – in Kristianstad Prison
31 Aug 1902- 8 Nov 1904– in Karlskrona Prison

Carl Alfred apparently stayed out of trouble, or at least wasn’t caught, for off and on periods of time. He and Mathilda, his wife, are in the Horby congregation record. His name has several notations in the comments section all mentioning courts in 1912, 1913, 1914 and 1915.

20 Oct 1912- 18 Oct 1913 – in Kalmar Prison records
26 Sept 1914 – 9 Sept 1915 –  back in Kristianstad Prison
3 Dec 1914 – 13 Apr 1915 – in Kalmar Prison

Next, Carl Alfred changed neighborhoods:

27 Jan 1917 – 31 Jan 1918 – in Malmo Prison

Then he was back in familiar territory:

23 Sept 1920 – 14 Mar 1921 – in Kalmar Prison

Carl Alfred Molin was last found living in Vaxjo, where the congregation record appears to show him moving out about 1930. Mathilda is not with him and it isn’t known whether she finally had enough and left him or if she died before 1930.

Let’s hope that this is the last of the Molin family crime stories. I will post an update if and when any more information is found about Carl Alfred. I don’t want to sound too judgmental, but it appears that he had no children, which given his personality description and the facts documented about his life, is probably a good thing.