Through Christina’s Eyes
A Novel
By Julia Anderson
Copyright © 2012 Julia K Anderson
All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition
Introduction
Overall this book is a work of fiction. Many of the elements within it are factual – Christina Nilsson was my great- grandmother, Walter was my grandfather, Anna Christina is my daughter. I have tried to accurately represent historical facts from Sweden and the United States’ history. Dimensions of individuals’ lives are fictional as there are no witnesses to all of the events described in this book.
I dedicate this book to those who inspire us. Some have passed into another world and some are still living here on Earth. This group of people, for me, includes my Great-Grandma Christina, my Grandfather Walter, and my three daughters, particularly Anna Christina.
I also thank those who have gone before us who smoothed out the path of life for subsequent travelers.
I hope you enjoy this book – Julia Anderson
I invite you to:
Visit the website: www.throughchristinaseyes.com
Like my Facebook page: Julia Anderson
Christina
Like most people, I have a story to tell. Mine was trapped in history, grasped in the hands of time for over one hundred years. To release it, to make it known, I searched for a path, several times unsuccessfully. At last, a pathway was opened. My story has surfaced through my great-granddaughter, who heard my voice and understood the markers along the path of our family’s history. This was how these words came to be; this is my story, seen through my eyes.
My story, my life, winds its way through continents, generations, and experiences. Along the path of my life there were so many choices to be made that shaped the future. Some of the choices were mine to make, more often they were made by others and then my life was changed in some way. Their effects rippled through the generations to come after me, weaving a path through my family’s lives. The course of my descendants’ lives was changed in many ways by events and actions they couldn’t have been aware of that had occurred many years prior.
Viktor Frankl, the prominent Austrian neurologist, notes in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, that “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” As Viktor said, even in the confines of physical and mental prisons, “there are always choices to make”. His perspective was mirrored in my life; how I chose to act and react to events in my life made a significant difference for me and for all of my descendants. Sometimes people aren’t able to successfully navigate the circumstances of life by the choices made in their lives. They arrive at an emotional or physical end, crumbling under the weight of their experience. From my experience I can tell you that heartbreaking events are part of every life. No one is immune from situations that are detrimental. Some have more challenges than others - the quantity and impact of the challenges are not metered out in some grand plan. Things just happen that humans have to adapt to. During my life and now watching the lives of my descendants unfold, I’ve seen how a person chooses to react or adapt to a given situation affects their life, along with many others’.
I can’t wait to tell you my story. Mine doesn’t involve a physical prison or the horrific circumstances that Viktor Frankl experienced during World War II. My world was comprised of logistical, social, and emotional barriers and boundaries. Within the realm of my life, choices were made that were crucial points to my very survival. I would like to explain them to you.
By way of introduction, I am Christina Nilsson, born in the area called Hagnarp, Sweden, in December, 1866. The closest community which still exists today is called Verum. Hagnarp was a small, rural farming community as 85% of Sweden was at the time. Sverige is the Swedish version of our country’s name; Sweden is how it is referred to in the English language. We were Svensk, referred to in English as “Swedish”. Our family knew all of our neighbors, visited with them Sundays after church, and generally spent the other six days a week working on our small farm. I was the youngest of six children, which consisted of one boy, then the five of us girls.
As was typical in Sweden at the time, our last names were based on our father’s first name. By the late 1800’s most Swedish families had settled on a last name that they would hand down from generation to generation, as mine had done. A smaller percentage of families selected a surname relating to the name of the area where they lived or some aspect of nature. Most decided on their last name to be based on the father’s first name, with ‘son’ as the ending. This is how my last name came to be Nilsson, or Nils’ son. (Customarily in Sweden, the suffix added to the father’s first name was patriarchal. In another Scandinavian country, Iceland, a person’s last name also followed the gender of the child, for example: Nilsdotter, for Nils’ daughter). Since Anders was a very popular first name in Sweden, one of the most typical surnames is Andersson in Sweden.
Just before I was born there was a great shift in the political system in Sweden. The King, Charles XV, wanted to continue his dynasty of power, which was proliferated through the House of Nobles. Representation of Sweden’s people in this House consisted only of large estate land owners. In 1865 this system was converted into a parliament like group that was nominated or elected. Then further changes occurred in June, 1866 where the First and Second Chambers were established; these were similar to two legislative houses of representation. Members of the First Chamber were indirectly elected local level politicians. Members of the Second were elected by the people (those eligible to vote). This system stayed in place over one hundred years, until a single house of parliament was enacted.
When I was growing up in Sweden in the 1870’s, the area of land under the Swedish King’s control was much greater than it is now. It included what is now present day Norway (which has existed as a separate country from Sweden since 1906) and had previously controlled the land where present day Finland exists. My family lived in the area of land that has been a part of the country of Sweden since the days of the Kalmar Union, which was formed in 1397. Later in 1523 the unification of Sweden occurred under King Gustav Vasa. The land was divided up into provinces, called landskap, that describe a geographical area. Skane is one such landskap. It persists even today, when a landskap could now contain multiple lans (a lan resembling a county or smaller geographic region of a larger country.) The lans, of which there are presently twenty one, are governed in a pattern similar to individual states of in present day United States.
The countryside of the landskap of Skane, where I was born, is a farming community, even today. During my lifetime, the lan where we lived was Kristianstad. (It has since been combined into the lan now referred to as Skane). Skane generates much of the crops cultivated in Sweden, as it is in the southern area of the country, with less harsher winters than the far north. The soil is excellent for growing crops and has been farmed for well over a thousand years. Skane makes up much of the southern coastline of Sweden, where the Vikings, most famous for their ruthless crusades of much of Europe from 800 to 1050, lived.
Sweden is geographically roughly the size of the present day state of California in the United States. Like California, it varies in terrain and temperature from the north to the southern most regions. In the north is Lapland, with a peak elevation in the Kjolen Mountains of about seven thousand feet. Reindeer roam in these mountains, and in the winter castles carved from ice are made. Sloping towards the sea, in the south and east, are Sweden’s central lowlands. The most southern region comprises fertile areas for farming and plains, where my family and I lived. Our climate was to have cold winter weather and warmer summers.
The land my family and I lived on in the Skane lan was distributed to my father’s family during the Svaneholm Estate’s redistribution of land reform. Between 1782 and 1785 Baron Rutger MacLean divided his estate land (called “fralsejord” – owned by the nobility) into pieces which were sometimes rectangular – others were square shaped. The novel part about what the Baron did was to move a farmer’s home (wood, bricks and all) onto the piece of land that they rented from the nobility “fralsejord”. Many countryside villages, including ours, were literally disassembled by this process. This process came to be known as “laga skifte” and expanded to other lan’s starting in 1827, mostly completed by the mid 1800’s.
This system is how my family’s farmhouse came to be located on our small plot of land near Hagnarp. Farmers, who did not own the land (referred to as “torp” or “croft”) they farmed, were called “torpare” or “crofter”. This meant they paid rent to the landowner by working a number of days per year. There just wasn’t the ability to amass the wealth required to be able to purchase land. By the end of the 1800’s, the torpare system was replaced by tenants paying their rent for the properties monetarily. Larger pieces of land were leased out to others by their owners.
Another change that occurred in land ownership and tenancy was how it was passed down amongst families. Because of the large population growth in the 1800’s, there were typically more children to divide the Swedish family’s farm amongst. Work off of the farm was difficult to obtain – inheriting part of one’s family farm allowed continuation of the family’s way of life. Sweden’s laws differed from other countries’ in that as of 1845, both sons and daughters have had equal rights to inherit property. Children cannot be disinherited by their parents. While this put Sweden well ahead of other countries in granting property ownership rights to women, it also created a situation where each child must receive a portion of their parents’ inheritance. Thus the piece of land would be divided up amongst all of the parents’ children. Over the years it could be very difficult for the children’s families to sustain themselves and their families from a small plot of land.
The population of Sweden grew exponentially in the 100 years between 1750 and 1850, doubling in size to 3.5 million Swedes. With such accelerated population growth, fears began to brew of overpopulation, influenced by the theories of Thomas Malthus. To alleviate this fear, the Swedish law that disallowed emigration was repealed in the 1830’s. The door to leave, previously closed, had now swung wide open. The population continued to swell to 4.1 million people in Sweden by 1865, straining the support system in the agrarian based economy. Repealing the law permitted emigration for the large number of Swedes that chose to leave in the latter half of the 1800’s.
Lars & Pernilla
My parents, Lars and Pernilla Nilsson, were part of the agrarian society. When they were born in Sweden, the average male and female, respectively, had a life expectancy of thirty nine and forty three (years of birth 1816 – 1840). It was somewhat of a miracle of their lives that they had met when they both were 31 years old, with only around ten years left to live, by the numbers. They married and then had their children late, compared to others of their generation. I don’t really know much else about their background. There were no older relatives to ask as I got older. Neither of them spoke of their parents much, if at all. As in most Swedish homes, emotional feelings and history weren’t verbalized. Infrequently, if ever, was there any raising of voices or shouting, indicating anger or someone being upset. Doing so would mean a person didn’t have self-control to stop an outburst of emotion such as that.
In the 1830’s my parents were in just starting out their lives as a married couple, working the plot of land my father had inherited in the Swedish countryside. As they were now their own household, they were responsible for paying the taxes the Swedish monarchy levied. For the largely agrarian workforce, the taxes were almost impossible to pay with the meager profits obtained from their farming activities. It was difficult for many farmers to clothe and provide for their families. Contrastingly, during this timeframe, extravagant, ornate castles housed the Swedish royal family, including Drottningholm. It was physical and cultural divide between the small percentage of wealthy landowners and the rest of the population.
My parents’ marriage was not arranged by their families. Father made a ‘suitable’ choice in selecting my Mother. The criteria of selection included that she had not been previously married or involved in any scandals surrounding her (such as being romantically involved with another man). The drawback was she was ‘old’ at thirty one and didn’t have any wealth or inheritance to bring to the marriage.
Our mother, Pernilla, gave birth to Lars, her first child, when she was thirty three years old. That was ancient back then to become a first time mother, with the average life expectancy in Sweden for a woman in her age group just over forty years old. Her life would be almost over according to that standard. She was a teacher prior to marrying our father; if a woman wasn’t married after age eighteen she had to have some way to support herself – by either becoming a teacher, cook, cleaning person, or other non-legal means. I don’t think mother thought she would ever marry, given that she was 31 when she did marry Father. But she did and they were married almost fifty years. She was also eight months older than Father, which was somewhat unusual in the small village where we lived. People thought that a wife should be younger than her husband, to provide a better chance to have more children and the health and stamina to survive childbirth. Mother was a sturdy, healthy woman, who would raise six children.
My Mother’s life after she married my Father was that of a typical Swedish farm wife; she cooked at least twice a day, cleaned, laundered, fed the farm animals, and gardened to provide food for our family. The food we ate was referred to as humanskost, in English that translates to “plain food” which it was in terms of taste and variety. Our three meals consisted of frukost (breakfast), Äta (lunch) and Middag (dinner). Breakfast and dinner were typically hot meals – lunch was more of a cold meal, eaten faster so as to continue working. Breakfast would usually be fairly large, served after our morning chores on the farm. It would usually include by bröd (bread), ost (cheese), ägg (eggs), and strömming (herring). Lunch would be possibly meat on a piece of bread with kaldolmar (stuffed cabbage). Dinner was our largest meal, being served at the end of our chores and workday, with one hot entrée (usually ham or meatballs) and other side dishes, served cold. For a special treat, Mother would make risgrynsgröt, which is a rice porridge made with eggs.
The foods we ate in Sweden were fresh during the months they were available. We grew vegetables (those that could survive the short growing season in Sweden, such as potatoes, beets, carrots) and fruits on our farm. Our family fished in local lakes for varieties of fish. Father hunted wild animals such as deer, and some of our livestock was butchered for us to eat, including cows and chickens. Our diet would be called bland by modern day standards. We didn’t have many spices or have fancy sauces with our meat and potatoes. The Swedes also learned, starting with the Vikings’ preparations for long sea voyages, to preserve food by salting, dehydrating and curing. This was mainly done for fish and other meats. We preserved other vegetables in a root cellar, which was a small room dug into the ground to keep foods cool for months on end.
Since Mother had been a teacher, she read quite well and would read to us children in the long, dark winter nights in the Swedish countryside. Sweden, being located in the far north of the Earth, receives little more than five hours of daylight in the winter, making the winters seem long and sometimes intolerable. Our family often went to bed as early as 6pm in the winter, with daylight long gone and only so much lamp oil to light our home. The cold, snow and ice made it difficult to get into town but once a month in the winters. We had to socialize within our family – reading to each other, playing games we made up amongst us siblings, or simply occupying ourselves somehow for hours.
There was a natural phenomenon that brightened those dark days of winters, called the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis. We so looked forward to catching a glimpse of the streaks of green and pink seemingly painted across the dark night sky, giving a somewhat eerie glow during the nighttime. The Lights occur when a large numbers of electrons originating from the sun stream in towards the Earth along its magnetic field and collide with air particles. The air literally lights up, the colors based on the gases present in the atmosphere. We didn’t see it very often, as the most visible time to see the Lights was between 11pm – 2am. We children were not supposed to be awake during these times, having gone to bed in the early evening hours. It was so exciting and special we would lay in our beds, hoping for a glimpse through one of our home’s small windows of beautiful colors against the dark night sky.
When it finally did become warmer in the late springtime of the year, Sweden is then bathed in almost 19 hours a day of daylight, the opposite of the winter which has so many dark hours. In May the sun goes down around 11pm and then rises again around 4 am. Farther north from where I lived is the “Land of the Midnight Sun”. The northernmost area of Sweden has this moniker due to the sun literally not going down in the sky all twenty four hours of the day during mid-summer. No wonder we Swedes celebrate many times over in May. The daylight is a welcome change from the long, dark winters. We also celebrated surviving the previous winter. We called these the Midsummer holidays, where pickled herring and new potatoes are part of the festivities.
With six children in our home, Mother didn’t have time to focus on each one of us and what activities we wanted to pursue. She also had many tasks running our farmhouse that took up the majority of her time. She was generally a happy person, although typical Swedish stoicism kept her from displaying affection and verbalizing her emotions towards us children. We knew by her actions she loved us, although I don’t actually recall ever hearing that aloud from her.
Both of my parents were reserved; they seldom if ever spoke of their feelings. Instructions to us children were given to teach us how to perform daily living chores. My parents did sometimes talk in the main room after we children were in bed. Most often they sat, each in their own chair, in wordless silence working on their own project of either mending something or possibly reading.
Reading books held a high place of importance in our house, although it was an activity engaged in only when all one’s chores were completed. We didn’t have access to a variety of books – the central book in our home was the Bible, which was read, re-read, and re-read again. Mother would read aloud in the evenings to all of us, where we heard the entire contents of the Bible over about two years’ worth of evenings.
Father was what most Swedish men were like. He wasn’t ‘cold’ emotionally – he just lived as he was taught: to hold in his emotions and not talk all that much. He did love us children, I know, in his quiet, reserved way. His love was like loving someone from afar, not involved in their everyday lives, but love still there. Our physical proximity was quite close, as we all shared the space in our two room farmhouse.
Father worked hard on our farm to keep our family fed, clothed, and sheltered. He would rise every morning early in the day to tend to the animals – the cow, the horses, the chickens. I could hear his boots scrape the floor as he went out the door every day in the early morning. During most months of the year, due to Sweden’s far north latitude, Father rose in the pitch blackness to tend to the animals. In winter the cold temperatures came, well below freezing, where icicles would remain on our barn for months it seemed. I liked looking at those icicles – so clear and translucent, each one unique. When the sun shone through them so many radiant colors of the rainbow were on display.
As I grew up, it was clear that Father made the decisions for our family and Mother’s role was to perform chores that would support our family. Her efforts focused on the tasks that women were presumed to be responsible for in those days: those inside the home. I don’t recall hearing them raise their voices at each other. If there was a decision to be made my Father made it. Mother may have been able to subtly suggest her opinion or stance on a particular issue, but in the end it was Father who had the final say. In the event Mother disagreed with Father, she didn’t verbalize or indicate her dissent. It was simply the way it was for her role as a farm wife at that time.
Father’s work and daily life were at the whims of the weather. If it was raining hard when it was time for him to do his chores, his clothes would become soaked, sodden with the wet rain. Raincoats didn’t exist back then, the only possibility being a leather coat which would keep some of the rain off. Farming, therefore our income and household livelihood, was very dependent on the weather. There were some years of either drought (little rain) or flood (too much rain) that ruined the crops. These situations greatly impacted our family’s survival for the crops were both a primary source of our food and our ability to earn money to purchase other goods we did not grow. How frustrating that the very things needed to sustain us (sun, sufficient rain) were completely out of our control. We just had to accept that we would do the best we could, and then another force took over.
As I mentioned, what I knew of my parents’ relationship was what I have observed – the situations and exchanges I saw and heard. I assume they loved each other – each spoke respectfully to the other. I never saw them actually touch each other. That public of a display, even within our family, simply wasn’t done. They didn’t argue or bicker with each other. My mother, as the female and the wife in the relationship, deferred to what father decided or said.
Mother did, however, influence Father in her quiet way prior to his decision or statement. She had an unassuming way about her. She just continued calmly and smoothly through her work day on the farm. I can only recall her being upset very few times, where she seemed distraught or unsettled. She must have been a very strong woman to be able to subvert her emotions and express them only in a reserved manner, never in front of us children.
The concept of love in our family was just that – a concept – not tangible or audible. I’d heard of it from the Bible – the Father’s love for us humans. Our parents didn’t expressly state they loved us children; we had to surmise their feelings from the signs they demonstrated. We were all taken care of : fed, clothed, kept warm, provided schooling and guidance. Those external factors, combined with a reserved demeanor of guidance to us children, were how we knew our parents loved us.
Siblings
My oldest sibling was my only brother, Lars. He was 13 years older than I; the hope of my family to carry on the family surname and prosper. Our family wanted him to get an education greater than high school – and, as the only male, funds and resources would go towards this end of bettering the whole family’s welfare. Our father wanted him to have a trade or profession other than farming.
On a personal level, as older brothers go, he was a kind sort. Since our ages differed so much he was like an uncle to me. In this time period, the 1870’s, boys and men were not involved in helping “around the house”, doing household chores such as laundry, cleaning, or gathering kindling wood. When he was at home, he would be outside with Father, while I was inside with Mother. He was kind, when he spoke to me. There really wasn’t much of an opportunity for us to interact – thirteen years and gender difference were a chasm difficult to leap over as we were growing up.
He left our farmhouse at age seventeen, to move to the university town of Lund, Sweden, about 40 miles away. In the mid to late eighteen hundreds in Sweden, the idea of a wider range of people attending a university was just coming into being. Prior to this, the number of students and space available for advanced studies was limited to only those who came from wealthy families. As the vast majority of Sweden’s families’ livelihoods were based on agriculture and farming, not many were in the group who had sufficient monies to pay for an able bodied young male to leave their household to study. The universities in the cities of Lund and Uppsala are among the oldest in the world and those that were among the first to offer higher level education to the broader public. (None of my family had ever visited Uppsala – it was much too far away from where we lived. It remains an important place of Swedish history, including Gamla Uppsala ("Old Uppsala"). Ruins and burials in the shape of mounds of the earth were there since as early as the third century AD. From that time on it was a significant religious, economic and political and learning center.)
Lars attended Lund University and graduated with a humanities degree. He then stayed on at the university to further study and become a teacher. He would never live in Hagnarp again; his life had moved to a new circumstance and place. Since he left our farmhouse when I was barely four years old, I don’t remember him living at our family home, just when Lars visited during his school’s breaks.
Next in succession in my family came my four sisters: Nilla, Anna, Johanna, and Elna. Nilla was born two years after my brother, then Anna within a year of Nilla. Our mother had three little ones under the age of three to care for. It must have been a very challenging time for her to keep up with all of her farm duties and care for her three children. Mother had a few years until Johanna was born, when Lars was six years old. Since he was deemed old enough, Mother tasked him to watch out for his three younger sisters while she might be outside performing a task of hers. Lars had a lot of responsibility for a six year old. On the farm that’s what Mother needed, so that’s what Lars did.
A few more years went by, then Elna arrived. By now Nilla was seven, so she replaced Lars as the child minder. Lars had moved on to tasks outside our house, helping Father with his farm duties of the crops and tending the livestock. Nilla made up games for her now three younger sisters to her, playing with them and even changing Elna’s wet clothing. She was grown up in many ways by a very young age.
My siblings were separated from me ranging in age from five to thirteen years. The gap of our age differences also created gaps in our relationships. As the youngest of the children, I was the baby to be taken care of. Each of my siblings looked after me at various times during my life. Mother was very busy with household tasks and at times, such as when she was preserving food or helping Father gather in our crops, she didn’t have time to watch me during the day. I don’t recall spending much time with my Mother – one of my sisters was my typical companion. Father of course was out all day working the farm.
Nilla was my oldest sister. She seemed so much more knowledgeable than I, facing life’s cross roads eleven years ahead of me. I looked up to her as role model. I watched how she conducted herself and how she interacted with people. I learned a lot from her by observing. She was a few inches over five feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes - what most people think of ‘looking Swedish’, except for her height. In the 1800’s with the access we had to nutrition, she was of average height. As the oldest of the five girls in the house, she was like our second mother. She received the new clothes and shoes first; if she outgrew them they were handed down to one of us other four girls. She brushed her long blond hair every night to keep it shiny. I loved sitting off to the side of the room watching her brush carefully and methodically.
Nilla fulfilled one of the traditions of Swedish culture each year on the night of December 13th. As the oldest girl in our family, she assumed the central role of our celebration of St. Lucia Day. Before the Gregorian calendar was changed, this day was the shortest day of the year; the darkest day. Lucia was a Christian who died for her faith and was said to have brought food to Sweden during a famine, centuries after her death. Her representative visit once a year reminds us she lives on. St. Lucia comes in the morning to signal the family that light has triumphed over darkness. Per the tradition of this celebration, Nilla would put on a white robe or dress, a crown of branches on her head (sometimes with lit candles!) and waken each of us in the household, starting with our parents. She brought us special treats, including saffron buns. Since it is most often dark and cold during December in Sweden, being woken up from sleep by a young girl with light and aromatic scents is a welcome change from most winter mornings.
Some of my most memorable childhood moments are of Nilla, awakening on a cold, dark day in December, seeing her from where I slept. She really did look angelic holding the lit candles, the soft glow flooding her face. Sometimes they were inserted in the crown she wore on her head – other years she held the candles in her hand. The fragrant scents of the saffron buns and the candles were a sensory burst to awaken us.
Next in our family came my sister Anna. She was so close in age to Nilla it was almost like they were twins. In more current times this spacing of children is sometimes described as “Irish twins”, since many Irish in the 1800’s had children very close together in age. With two children still in diapers and needing parental attention for the basics of life, parents were challenged. Anna, being the younger ‘twin’ of Nilla, was most often trying to keep up with what Nilla was doing, although at a disadvantage due to being a year younger.
Anna was the feisty sister in our house; she often rebelled against what Nilla wanted or said. Of course she didn’t verbalize it or make a scene in front of our parents; she would be reprimanded if she had. The undercurrent of competition and resistance was definitely present. I didn’t get to know Anna very well – she was always ‘out’ somewhere, helping another neighbor with their chores or working on a church project. She wanted to be away from home, I think.
Anna would grow up to marry Lars Tulin when she was seventeen years old. This was the exit from our parents’ house Anna was looking for. She was one of those children who didn’t find fulfillment in the home she grew up in. Anna and her new husband formed their own household, ten miles from where my parents lived. They had one daughter, Alice. Then she successively had four boys. This was an achievement, to have four strapping sons to carry on the family name and participate in the farming duties. The boys were excellent assets for their parents in supporting the family’s farm. Anna became somewhat distanced from the rest of our family, with her own five children to look after. She wasn’t emotionally close with any of the rest of us sisters.
Johanna was next in the succession of children; she was quiet and reserved. Johanna was one of the most typical names for Swedish girls. She was what is known as a classic middle child in birth order analysis; she blended in with the patchwork quilt of our family. She stayed strong and steady; she connected those on the outer edges of the family. She was always helpful to Mother and did as she was asked. Johanna married when she was eighteen to Olaf Linde; I was nine years old when she left our childhood home. She was a kindly, quiet sister to me, although we weren’t emotionally close.
Olaf was a man concerned with how things and people looked, and much less concerned about what condition they were in or how a person felt. I am fairly certain Johanna lived a fairly lonely existence after she married – Olaf was distant and always working at something away from their home. He was very ambitious, always striving for more than what he had at any given time. This drive pushed him to succeed at a stone quarrying business, which he later sold. They had two daughters, Anna and Ellen. I think Olaf never forgave Johanna for not having a male child.
Elna was my closest sibling in age, although she was sickly as a child, and thus wasn’t able to be as active as typical children. She most often stayed indoors and helped mother where she could. As a teenager, Elna developed a cough that persisted for a very long time. She was very tired and had to rest most of the time. She was like a flower that didn’t quite reach its potential; she died at age twenty from lungsot (a lung disease now known as tuberculosis or TB). In 1875 tuberculosis was at its peak of deadliness in Sweden, Elna being only one of the hundreds of thousands to fall victim to it. 4 million people per year across Europe died of tuberculosis in the mid-1800’s. It was the most deadly disease in all of history – a death toll even greater than the plague. It was not yet known how a person contracted tuberculosis; it took until the 1880’s to establish that it was a communicable disease. Around 1900 it was identified as a bacillus, a microorganism that attacked the lungs. She just wasn’t able to fight off the infection in her lungs.
Growing Up Years
During the mid to late eighteen hundreds, the majority of monetary wealth in Sweden was held within less than 5% of families. Those families typically had some relation to Sweden’s Royal family – which was among the most powerful politically and economically in all of Europe. The grandiose castles of Slottsbacken (located in Stockholm, with 608 rooms is the world’s largest castle), Drottningholm, and Kalmar and were only for the Royal family. These palaces and homes were totally out of my horizon – both literally and figuratively. We lived on the south west side of Sweden – Stockholm, the capital, is on the far eastern shore, about 260 miles (over 400 kilometers) away. The thought of a palace, such as Drottningholm Palace near Stockholm, was not tangible to me at all. The luxuries available in the palace on Lake Malaren were in another world, far outside of my own. This palace, built in the 1600’s, was the Swedish royal family’s summer house (where they lived only part of the year). In current times it is their full time residence. Apparently it is so grand and ornate that it is called the Versailles of the North (Versailles being the elaborate French monarchy’s palace).
As for my family, we were about average for Swedes in worldly possessions – we had a rough board wood home, made up of two rooms – one for sleeping the other for our daily living. There we sat by the fire, ate our meals, completed our studies, sang songs, told stories, cooked and mended. We did a lot of living in that small space. Our conversations centered on current events that were happening in our part of the world – how the crops were doing, what the weather happening that day meant. We didn’t discuss our dreams and hopes for the future. During that time period our goal was survival. We didn’t think of fancy dresses and having free time to compose a letter or play the piano. That was well beyond what was seemed possible for us Nilsson girls. Any finery we or our neighbors had was limited to possibly a small piece of jewelry or a lace handkerchief.
My parents gave us, their children, the gift of a comfortable life. I had a warm place to sleep, clothes, and enough food. They also gave us the gift of family. We would all sit near the fireplace in our home on the cold, dark winter nights. All of us would be working on something. For us girls that might be needlepoint or a mending task. I so enjoyed being with my family, being part of that community of seven or so people, depending on which time of my life my siblings were living at home. Most often we weren’t even talking aloud; we were just there – together. We were, on a nonverbal level, sending messages back and forth via our attentiveness to what the others were doing: a nod of approval for a cross stich row finished, a small smile for a finished piece of wood carving.
Our parents brought us up to respect the church and the country of Sweden. Even though it was difficult for my parents to make a living in Sweden, with taxes making up such a large percentage of any income they had, they were patriotic. Church was a weekly commitment we always kept. We rarely missed attending on Sunday.
We went to church in the closest town, Verum. The Church of Sweden is the largest organization of the Lutheran faith. It was founded by King Gustav I Vasa in the fifteen hundreds, after his negotiations with the Catholic Pope did not end in an agreement. The church was where we saw a glimpse of art, writing, and life beyond our small village of Hagnarp. There were a few small, beautiful stained glass windows in the church, which one of the local craftspeople at the time donated their time and energy to create. Those windows were so lovely to look at, with their deep hues and shining color when the sun shone through them. It was a welcome sight during the long, dry sermons the minister delivered, and allowed me to sit staunchly on the hard wooden pews for over an hour ‘listening’ to the minister’s words. I say ‘listening’ because I appeared to be listening, but really I was somewhere through those stained glass windows, floating through space in the beautiful streaming colored sunshine. A child was expected to sit still and listen throughout the time the minister was speaking, without either of my parents needing to intervene by a word or gesture for me to behave. If one of us dared to ‘act up’ in church, we would certainly receive a punishment, such as no supper later on. We knew the consequences of misbehavior; so we didn’t do it.
The building itself was not large by today’s standards, but had significant ornate details that made it stunningly beautiful to me. The gold encrusted chandelier, from which 50 candles were lit to illuminate the interior hung as a centerpiece over the area in front of the altar. As a child I used to count those candles as a way of passing the time. The minister, Olof Stille, made it difficult to sit through a long sermon telling us the evils of the world. Most of the time I tried to focus on something, like the ornate lectern where he stood above and separate from us in the congregation. All these years later, I’m glad that practice has changed to have the minister on the same level as the rest of the congregation. The minister is a part of the congregation just like everyone else.
It was there I was baptized on January 31, 1867, when the record of my birth was added to the church’s records. That meant I was officially recognized as having been born in Sweden, under the care of my parents Lars & Pernilla. Inga Dopvittnen was the witness to my christening. Long before I was born, in 1686 church law was established that required each church to keep a registry of the residents of the congregation. The Church of Sweden was the official vital statistics record keeper for the entire country of Sweden until 1991. In the present day world this system established so long ago is recognized as one of the most complete of record keeping of families in the world. In 2000 the church and the government officially separated. There is no longer a link, financially or otherwise, between them.
Each lan (or county) was divided into parishes for church attendance and record keeping purposes. All through the eighteen hundreds the minister of the church was in charge of keeping the records of the households that lived within his parish. Most did so with great detail, by visiting each household to check on their wellbeing. This system was put into effect in the latter half of the seventeenth century; quite forward thinking to have a system of checks and balances for families’ social wellbeing. This system is analogous to the concept in the United States today of a social worker, visiting families to see how things are going and noting any needs the family may have. The minister was responsible for connecting people and things. If someone wasn’t able to feed their children, he could ask a family with more resources available (specifically the man of the house) to assist them.
The records kept by the minister gave an overview of the details of a household: who attended church services, all the inhabitants of a particular household (including boarders or older relatives), and which persons had completed communion in the church. They also detailed other aspects of life, such as a person’s occupation and character, for example if they were a chronic alcoholic or mentally challenged.
Today the records containing the parish’s household documentation are kept in regional archives, called landsarkiv. There are approximately 5 of these locations throughout Sweden, usually in the largest city within the lan. A few cities in Sweden, such as Stockholm, have their own landsarkiv, due to their size.
There were nine of us recorded into the church records that year: 4 boys and 5 girls. One of the girls, born in June of 1867, didn’t receive a Christian name, as she passed away before a christening ceremony was held. This person’s life was commemorated by being recorded, that she had been a part of this world and then departed within a few months. It was common practice not to receive a given name until the infant was christened in the church.
In the years between 1815 and 1865, Sweden’s population had almost doubled, from 2.4 to 4.1 million residents. The population growth was primarily due to the increasing birth rate of children. The years of crop failures and the increase in the population in the mid-to late eighteen hundreds made being able to sufficiently nourish and economically support an entire family quite difficult. Thus I was part of a great population boom in Sweden, while agricultural production and the economy were anemic. Because of these strains on Sweden, of population growth and food shortages, starting around 1850 and continuing until 1930, over 1.2 million Swedes emigrated, comprising approximately 25% of the entire country’s population. Economic related issues were the primary reason people chose to leave Sweden.
During my first year of life, in 1867, there was a severe crop failure due to a very wet summer with lots of rain, causing much of the crops to rot before they could mature to be harvested. This year’s food shortages caused many people to not be able to feed their families or themselves, and many looked at other alternatives such as emigrating to another country, the most common being Canada, the United States, and Denmark. The provinces of Norrland, Dalarna, and Varmland experienced the worst crop failures; not enough food was produced to feed the burgeoning population.
Then in the following year, 1868, came an extremely hot summer with a devastating drought. There were simply few seeds to be sown. Between one third to one half of the cattle had to be slaughtered in some areas, due to the lack of crops and grass to feed them. The 1868 drought was particularly severe for the ‘breadbasket’ of Sweden, Skane. Most every household was affected by the failure of the potato crop, either by malnutrition or death by starvation. (Much like Ireland had endured). I was born in the peak years of the famine; with people literally starving at every door, I was one person to feed at our farmhouse. It was a tough choice for many parents – who to feed what and how to obtain enough food to sustain the family members. Since we did live on a farm, we grew most all of our own vegetables, had a few cows, pigs and an even greater number of chickens to provide nutrition to our family. I was very fortunate. All totaled about 15% of the population of northern Sweden died from this famine.
In 1869, when I was about two years old, there was an epidemic outbreak of smallpox. These were difficult years in Sweden for people to survive – if not from health concerns, from economic concerns. Infectious diseases such as smallpox, influenza, and diphtheria, as noted earlier, caused 20% of the yearly deaths among Swedes. As it was when I was born, the average age I would live to was forty six, given the possibility of disease, lack of food, and lack of medical knowledge of the basics of hygiene.
Our lives on the farm were run by routine. Time to milk the cows, time to feed the chickens. Our lives revolved around the needs of the farm. To survive we had to plan as accurately as possible – to not be out alone in a snowstorm or to preserve our food when it was ready for picking to last us through the winter. There was much planning, figuring, and factoring to optimize the results of our labors on the farm.
All of us children had to help with the chores, tasks that were necessary to sustain our lives. We children did what was asked of us without protest. We knew if we didn’t our very survival would be at risk. Elna really couldn’t help due to her illness, so she did what she could indoors – darning socks, helping Mother with the kitchen chores.
As a child my expectations, if I even had the concept of that word, were very basic. I was hoping to have enough food to eat, fuel to keep us warm, and not to get so sick that I would die. That was my world. Since we had no newspapers or written documentation of happenings outside of Verum, I knew very little of what was outside of my town. As to my future, I figured somewhere in the back of my mind when I was a teenager, about eighteen, I would get married to a man who was a farmer and then begin a new chapter in my life.
As a young girl, I recall going to church on Sunday was something we prepared for all week. We had to make sure our clothes were washed and clean. The Sunday dinner was prepared as much as possible the day before, on Saturday, to allow for a day of rest on Sunday. Living on a farm it is pretty much impossible to take a complete day of rest, as animals still need to be fed and tended to, crops watered, and daily living tasks such as fetching water from the well completed. Whatever tasks we could complete before Sunday we did. The process of the five of us girls out the door, into the wagon, and the one and a half miles to church was no small feat. My mother rose especially early on Sunday to ensure we all made it in the wagon on time. We knew we’d be in trouble if our Mother had to speak to us about hurrying up to get ready or we weren’t meeting her exacting standards for our clothing and personal grooming.
Sunday was a special day; we would see our friends and neighbors at church. The grownups talked about the business activities of farming – the crop yield, the price of wheat or maybe the latest ideas about farming. I don’t really know the details of what they talked about; I would have been outside after church to play in the yard with the other children. We children would play a game with a sock that had beans or rocks in it – kicking it around the yard. Other times we played tag – where you have to run away from the person who is “it”. After about age ten, the boys and girls didn’t play those sorts of games together – it wasn’t really socially acceptable for a young man to touch a young girl, even on the arm or back. The boys would walk down by the river and toss rocks in or swing on a tree branch. We girls would talk while walking around the church yard.
Next to our church in Verum was the church cemetery. Many generations of residents of the Verum area were buried there, including my grandmother. In the 1800’s when children didn’t survive birth or their first few years of life, the gravestones were marked simply “child” - no name, no specific dates. These children didn’t have a long stay on Earth or live to do ‘great things’ like publish a book, write a sonata, or start a business.
Looking back on this practice, it might seem odd in the present day to not commemorate the unique child who was here on Earth. The answer those of us who lived during that time period would give is of a practical nature. As many children died of a variety of diseases including the flu, typhoid, or polio, many parents didn’t get too attached to children as babies. They didn’t want to get their hopes up for one specific child, in the event they did wind up having to bury them. In the mid-1800’s one in five children, 20%, died before reaching age one in Sweden. In Copenhagen, Denmark, during the mid-1800’s parents made clothes for their babies that were used as either burial or christening clothes. What a sorrow laden task that must have been for a mother to sew clothes for her child knowing they could quite likely be buried in them instead of being christened in them, and live to outgrow them.
In the Verum cemetery the grave markers, for adults, usually noted a fact about their life, such as their profession. That gave the viewer a small insight into who the person was. Those who had less financial resources were buried with simple wood grave markings, which didn’t survive very long into the next generation. The etchings of name, birth and death dates were erased by the gradual sanding of time – the wind and the snow and the sun. All erased into history.
Since we were farmers, even on Sundays there was never truly a day off. The animals and our crops needed tending every day – rain, sunshine, snow, or mud. The brief bursts of joyous holidays we celebrated dotted our year’s calendar. Towards the end of winter/early spring would come Easter, a religious holiday celebrating new life. The next holiday occurred on the last day of April, where we Swedes celebrate the King’s birthday by flying Swedish flags in respect for him. On that same day, the celebration of Valborgsmassoafton (Walpurgis Night) occurs in Sweden, which celebrates spring. The festivities are named after an English nun, Saint Walburga, who lived from approximately 710 to 777 and was canonized on May 1, 870. She was said to have brought food to Sweden during times of famine. Also she is often credited with being the first female author from both England and Germany.
The very next day, May 1, is the celebration of spring, May Day. (Much, much later, in 1938, it was also declared Sweden’s Labour Day, celebrating workers and their efforts.) Along with our friends and neighbors, my family would light a huge bonfire of poplar tree limbs to celebrate the coming of the light and the end of winter. It was great fun to stay up as long as the light was in the sky, since at that time of year the sun doesn’t go down until almost 11pm at night. It was a welcome relief from the dark winter days.
May Day is the traditional dance around the May pole to celebrate spring. This is the event we children, especially girls, looked forward to. It was an opportunity to add more ‘sparkle’ to our clothing and maybe receive some special ribbons for our dresses and hair from our parents. The Swedish colors of royal blue and yellow were very prominent in our clothing on May Day. In our town of Verum, there would be a parade down the small ‘downtown’ street, where everyone dressed up in their finest Swedish decorative clothing. After the long cold winter it was truly glorious to be outside and visiting with so many people. (And hopefully the sun was out, warming up our pale, wintery skin!)
During the season of Advent (meaning “coming”), we celebrated the coming of the birth of Christ, as had been done since the fifth century AD in Sweden. This season was hectic for our family, as farmers we needed to have all of our work completed for the coming coldest winter months. The ninth of December was called “Anna Day”. This was the day that we were to begin soaking the fish in lye, to make lutfisk, so that it would be ready to eat by Christmas Day. (The Swedish word lutfisk literally means “cod soaked in plutonium”. This was a method to preserve the fish so that it could be eaten throughout the long, cold winter in Sweden.) And the baking would begin for the special Christmas holiday season. Following this was St. Lucia Day, December 13th, when candles were made and the meat for Christmas dinner to be prepared. And then Tomas Day on the 21st would be the end of milling and spinning, preparations for winter. After the 21st our town would have a Christmas fair, where all the farmers would convene and enjoy each other’s company and fruits of their labor throughout the year – such as meat and breads.
Nilla
Nilla, the oldest girl in the family, was the first of us girls to leave home when she married Karl Bentzen, a man from a neighboring village. She was eleven years older than I, thus I was only eight when Nilla was married and moved away from our family’s home with her new husband.
They’d met at a dance during mid-summer festival in May. Midsummer is such a joyous time in Sweden; we celebrated the arrival of summer, the long hours of daylight, and, quite frankly, surviving the winter. It is a time for renewal by many people to reengage with their neighbors and friends. Food, brightly colored clothing (especially the royal blue and yellow, our country’s national colors), and gatherings highlight this time of year. Nilla married at a most opportune time; she was still young (only nineteen) and had completed her schooling.
Nilla and Karl married at the church in Verum, and within six months we learned Nilla was to bear a child. Because of the economy and to support his growing family, Karl had decided to become part of the wave of emigrants from Sweden and relocated to America. He left Sweden in 1875, before his child was born. During these years of 1865 through 1918, a total of 24.4 million immigrants to America came from European based countries. Sweden contributed close to 1.5 million of these new residents. The lure of the American economy and the want for a better life for his family had put its hook in Karl’s mind.