My final thoughts on this topic. It seems to me that Silander is a Finnish name, and some Silanders may have migrated from Finland to Sweden. Some of the theories below are probably true. I think that Pehr & Lovisa gave the Andersson children a straightforward option when they wanted to choose a proper surname that did not look like a patronymic. So, my grandfather and his siblings adopted the name Silander, with no connection to any other Silander.
Pehr Johan Jonsson Selander is the earliest reference to the name Silander / Selander in our family tree. He could have adopted it about 1863. He was 16 then and it seemed a common age for children to choose a surname, if they were not going to use a patronymic.
The law had been changed (around 1862) to allow the common people to have surnames, previously only the ruling classes, clerics and soldiers could have surnames. Eventually the law changed again, around 1900, to enforce the use of surnames for all.
His younger sister Lovisa started using the name Silander in 1886 in Gothenburg. When her sister Christina, my great grandmother, died in 1891, it seems that Lovisa looked after the family, and she eventually adopted the youngest, Agnes Kristina. I cannot prove that she took the name Silander because of her brother's choice of Selander 20 years earlier, but it seems probable.
The name Silander was next adopted by Johan Alfred (3rd son, born 1879) apparently in 1892, which is the year following the death of his mother Christina. Herbert Georg and Carl Oscar adopted the name in 1894, presumably in anticipation of the change in the law.
It is a possibility that Per Johan started using the name Selander as a result of meeting people in or near Järpås, which was his mother's birthplace. He seems to have visited Järpås parish several times in the 1860s. A family in Uvered, very near Järpås, adopted the name Selander in the 1870s. This possible connection requires further research.
We also found a couple of gravestones in Jung for people named Kjellander - pronounced Shellander in Sweden. Järpås, Uvered and Jung are only a few kilometres apart.
To be continued ...
It is only right that I note a few other theories on the origin of our Silander surname.
I once thought that it was the equivalent of Anderson. "Sil" meaning son of. I presume that I heard this from my parents, though I may just have made it up myself.
In the early 1980s I was on a course and discussed the name with a Swedish delegate. He told me that the name was invented, presumably when surnames became mandatory. But I do not think that it is an invented name in Finland, where there are many Silanders. Despite finding, via the internet, a Herbert George Silander in Finland, I am sure that we have no connection with the Finnish Silanders.
Another theory is that it is a concoction from great grandmothers home village of Sil, and the name Andersson. This theory comes from the Swedish branch of the family, via my distant cousin Harald. However, I have not been able to find any family connection to Sil.
To be continued ... but unlikely to be conclusive!
My theory that my grandmother's brother changed his name to Selander because he knew people named Kjellander (pronounced Shellander) has received a little credibility.
I recently watched the DVDs of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. In "The Girl Who Played With Fire" there is an explanation of Lisbeth Salander's surname. Her original guardian Holger Palmgren tells journalist Mikael Blomkvist that her mother's surname was originally Sj lander (pronounced Showlander). She changed it to Salander to match the father's name - Zala or Zalachenko.
In my copy of the book, this is in Chapter 28 "Wednesday, 6.iv" on page 491. In the DVD, it is at 1 hour 16 mins in.
Stieg Larsson might have invented this detail himself, or he may have encountered something similar during his life. Whatever; a Swede has described a name change similar to the one in my theory.
But both are fiction!
To be continued ... perhaps