Somehow the subject of the name Eklund came up and Dad asked if we knew how we got the name. The name of the family in Sweden was (and stlll is) simply Ek. Peter Håkansson who was born in August of 1833. He went to the Swedish army and the story goes that there were so many Håkanssons in his group that they told Peter that his new name was Ek. Note that my Dad said he was not that sure of the details of this story. As an aside, ek means oak in Swedish. So, Peter Håkansson became Peter Håkansson Ek. Sometime in about 1866 he immigrated to the United States with his daughter Anna Hedda.
Peter Håkansson Ek was registered as a soldier. The family lived at Segloraberg Soldiers Home of Farm in Seglora Parish. He and his wife came to America probably in August 1886 with Anna Hedda, his daughter. Herrman, Frans Oscar, and Hilda also came to America in the 1880s. Two of his sons (Herman who is my great grand father) and Frans Oscar and his daughter Hilda immigrated to the US in the early 1880s.
When Herman and Frans Oscar went through immigration in New York, they added "lund" to the Ek and became Eklunds. Dad was not sure what their motivation was and it seems unlikely there that many Eks that they thought they should change it to avoid confusion. I have looked in phone books in Sweden, and both Ek and Eklund are relatively common names, but not like Johnson or Peterson. "Lund" means grove of trees in Swedish, so Eklund means a grove of oak trees.
I asked my Aunt Doris (Dad's sister) if she had heard this story or could confirm it. She said that the details were new to her. So, I'm not sure how accurate this is. I'm going to ask some of our Swedish relatives what they know about this story.