Hi Carla,
As Kristina says, he probably just wanted another name. It is not a modern phenomena that some things suddenly becomes popular. That is what happened in Sweden in the late 1800's. It became modern and popular to skip your patronymic and get another name. And there was no law prohibiting it. Such a law didn't come until 1901. So until then, you only had to tell the clergyman in your village that you had adopted a new name, and so it was registered. And where did these names come from? The answer is that people made them up.
When my ex-husband's great great grandfather in the 1880's left the small village of Sandhem, where he was born, and moved to another county, he adopted the name of Sandström. We can't say for sure, of course, but it is a good guess that the first part of the name is from his home village Sandhem. And the second part? Well, I guess it just sounded good in his ears. And it was a common ending. “Ström” means current, today mostly in the sense of electricity, in those days probably fast-running water. So, “current” is a common ending (or beginning) of a Swedish surname.
My own great grand-father, Per Persson, adopted the name of Brolund (bro = bridge, lund = groove) in the 1870's. Where he got “bro” from we don't know, there is no village or anything like that with a “bro” in it where he came from. But there was another family, in another parish not so far off, that had started using that name. Perhaps he met some of them, and took a fancy to the name.
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