Time Travel (On the Trail of Our Ancestors)

(3 August, continued)  

On our way back from lunch at the old mill café, I wanted (if possible) to check some distances between a few places in the neighbourhood of where our paternal grandparents grew up. Back in July 2012 we managed to locate both the farm where our grandmother was born and lived until she got married (easy enough to find), and the small wooden cottage on the grounds of a neighbouring farm where our grandfather grew up (more difficult to find the way to). But I forgot back then to make note of the distances. Over the years since then, I have been going through a lot more old photos and letters and family history; and often find myself wishing I had a better grip of places frequently mentioned.

However, this time we even failed to find our way back to the childhood home of our grandfather. Rereading my old post from 2012 again now, I'm thinking we probably made some of the same mistakes now as we did back then - and gave up quicker... On the other hand, as our last expedition was 12 years ago, even more thoroughfares on narrow dirt roads across farm land may also actually have been closed to the public since then. So we decided not to pursue. I did get one distance properly confirmed, though - between the farm house and the railway station (which back at the beginning of the previous century also served as post office) it's around 1½ km (or 1 English mile). Just about the same distance as my own walk into the town centre these days - so not really "all that" far.

We also drove a roundabout way (more car-friendly) to one of the other places often mentioned in my grandmother's letters (Komlösa). A hundred years ago, I understand there was a chapel there that she walked to sometimes. Nowadays there is a rural museum with a collection of old wagons at an old farm in that neighbourhood. They're the kind of museum that is only open occasionally, though - or on special request. Their website did say it would be open on Saturday afternoons throughout summer (June-August); but when we got there, it looked as closed as the last time we tried (also years ago). We wandered around a bit outside but no person appeared. Never mind - I got a few nice countryside photos, anyway!

 

Three Young Men (1922) - Sepia Saturday 475

Last week my Sepia Saturday contribution was a Sunday school group photo from my grandfather's photo album. On the next page in that album, there is this photo from "around 1922". My grandfather (Gustaf) is the one on the left. (Easier to identify in this photo than in that other one!) Born in 1904; so in 1922, he was 18. The guy in the middle is his brother-in-law-to-be (although they would not have known that yet!): my grandmother's brother Nils, born in 1902. The third young man is unknown to me, but according to the note in the album, his name was Gustaf too.   

My grandmother Sally was four years older than my grandfather. They grew up in the same village, but when exactly it was that romance started to grow between them, I don't know. They did not get engaged until September 1929 - when she was 29 and he 25. And they got married a year later, in 1930.

As the three young men here are all dressed up, it may have been a special occasion. On the other hand, perhaps just an ordinary Sunday, and they were dressed for church...

But if it was a "special occasion"... like a birthday...

My grandfather's birthday was June 23, which back in those days was always Midsummer Eve. That changed in 1953, so all my own life (I was born in 1955), Midsummer Eve has always been a Friday. But back in my dad's childhood, his father's birthday was always on Midsummer Eve; and used to include big family gatherings to celebrate. 

I'm not sure how big a deal it was back in 1922 to turn 18. Nowadays that is the age of majority here - as in a lot of other countries - so quite a major occasion. But back then, that was not until you turned 21...

On the other hand, it's Nils who is in the centre here, and not my grandfather. So perhaps it is his birthday - which was August 17. Checking the calendar (oh how easy these days to do that online!), I see that in 1922 that was an ordinary Thursday. In 1923, though, it was a Friday - and would have been Nils' 21st...

Ah well. Whatever the occasion for the photo: Tomorrow is June 23, and the 115th anniversary of the birth of my grandfather. (Sadly he died rather "young", at 64.) (I'm calling that "young" now because 64 is what I'll be myself in a couple of months!!) (Gasp!!!)

So besides the "threesome" theme, that's another reason for me to choose this photo for...

Sepia Saturday 475

December 12/13 - Lucia

I have blogged about our celebrations of 13th December as Lucia/St Lucy’s Day several times before – for example last year. This year’s official crowning of a Lucia in my town took place as usual last Saturday; but it was such a dark, wet and stormy day that I was not even sure they’d go through with the event… So I did not go. (To be honest – even if I had known for certain that the ceremony would take place as usual, I would not have gone out in that weather for it!)

Nowadays, the celebration of Lucia also every year causes heated debates in schools and the media etc. An article from The Local Sweden may give you a rough idea: Six things not to say on Sweden’s Lucia Day.

Clipart from forskoleburken.com

For some reason, we (and by “we” I mean all mankind, not just Swedes) seem very prone to assume that traditions have always been what they are – or should always remain as we remember them from our own childhood, or whatever other time in our lives that we consider to have been the best of times…

For me, my most fun Lucia night was probably around 40 years ago, when I was member of a youth gospel choir, and some of us planned a kind of coup. The initiated ones (8 people) gathered very early in the morning, dressed in various Lucia kinds of outfits. And then we went all over town to wake up and surprise one after the other of the other choir members in their homes, and ask them to come along. (I don’t remember details but we must have had a few cars to begin with. And I think we were supposed to sing in the church later or the next day, so that even those not initiated in the prank probably had their outfits ready.) The final visit was to our youth pastor with family. By then there were 25 of us; more or less the whole choir. I know this because of photos with notes in an album. 

Doesn’t feel right to share those photos here, so instead I show you one from one of my grandmother’s albums, which provides evidence that Lucia traditions have not always been about an Italian saint wearing a crown of candles handing out saffron buns – and points, perhaps, to even older magic being connected to this night (once upon a time considered the longest night of the year).  

It is a rare photo, and I’ve never seen another like it. But a note beneath it in the album connects it to “lusse”=Lucia night. The note also gives the name of a village; but it’s not the village where my grandparents lived, and I don’t know who they may have known who lived there, or who the people behind the masks are. There is no date, and the photos have not been put into the album in chronological order either. Possibly the couple sitting in front could be my grandparents, though. In which case I think it would most likely be from around 1929 (which is the year when they got engaged).

PS. This post will have to cover both today and tomorrow. I feel I need a bit of a break! 

PPS. And Windows Live Writer is refusing to post to Blogger again. Driving me mad. I was hoping yesterday that it would just prove temporary but the same thing happened today. I haven't had time to investigate why. It's been quicker to just do the last two posts over again in Blogger...

On the Trail of Our Ancestors

In September 2011, I blogged about my grandparents, both sets of them; with photos of the houses/cottages where they grew up.

Last week while my brother was here, we decided to try to find the respective childhood homes of our paternal grandparents. We knew they both grew up on the outskirts of the same village where they built their own house when they got married (also on the outskirts, but not the same outskirts).

We did have a rough idea where to find the farmhouse where our grandmother Sally was born and lived until she married our grandfather Gustaf. I’d even managed to locate it on Google before we set out, so that one was not hard to find at all.

▲  The farmhouse in the late 1920s.
▼ And this is what it looks like now:

I was less sure about the small cottage where my grandfather grew up. I had tried to locate that on Google maps too, but all I could find was a spot marked with a similar but not quite identical name. However, that place was not very far from my grandmother’s farm, so we decided to try and find it.

The map showed two alternative roads. The first one turned out to be a dead-end, only leading up to a farm. The second road also led up to a farm, but proved to go on beyond it. And then… There it was.

There was even a sign to remove all doubt. The Google map said “Johanneslund”. But the sign on a post at the gate says “Johannelund” which is the name I know from my grandfather’s notes and book. (He was a journalist with special interest in the old cottages in the area where he grew up – I guess it started with his own background.) From the book I know that it was named after a woman by name of Johanna (not a man called Johannes). I suppose Google did not read the book!

Back in my grandfather’s days, the cottage was not quite as picturesque as it is now. It was unpainted then. There is a note under the photo in his photo album saying “the grey cottage – the childhood home”.

They must have had pretty much the same lovely view from the front of the house, though:

And the road probably hasn’t changed much either!

View towards the farm the cottage used to belong to.

After this excursion, at least one question can be put aside. I’ve been wondering (as I’ve begun to look into the stories of their lives a bit more) when and how my grandparents got to know each other. But seeing now that they were almost neighbours (from a countryside perspective) they would have been aware of each other’s existence since childhood. However, since my grandmother was four years older, it probably took  a while for “romance” to grow… (She was 30, he 26 when they got married.)

The kind of cottage my grandfather grew up in was/is called a torp in Swedish. These were small farm units within the estate of a bigger farm. The inhabitants of a torp leased rather than owned their land. Sometimes they owned the cottage but still had to pay lease for the attached piece of farmland. They paid through working on the main farm as well. The system changed gradually during the late 19th and early 20th century. Nowadays the old torp cottages are popular as summer cottages.

In my grandfather’s childhood and youth, it was his maternal grandparents who owned the cottage. (The grandfather was an ex-soldier.) In Gustaf’s early years, his mother and her brother lived there too. I blogged about their fate in life here.

My Grandparents

From my other blog, DawnTreader’s Picture Book, I take part in Friday My Town Shoot Out, with a different theme each week. This week’s theme is Grandparents’ Day. We do not have a special Grandparents’ day in Sweden, but I did (of course!) have grandparents… So I posted their wedding photos for FMTSO. But since I’m trying to sum up some family history anyway, I got inspired do an extended post here. It might be followed by more family history posts later as I continue to go through old albums and notes – we’ll see.

▲ My maternal grandparents, Gunborg and Hugo, 1928.

▲ The cottage far up in the north of Sweden where my grandfather Hugo (born 1901) grew up, with his parents and four or five siblings. His father was a sawmill worker. Hugo too started out working at the sawmill, but also studied per correspondence, and went on to become a teacher, and later in life headmaster.

▲ The house (here in Borås) where my grandmother Gunborg (born 1902) grew up. The house was demolished in the 1970s, but I remember it from my childhood, when two cousins of my grandmother’s still lived there. In Gunborg’s childhood, her family (with four children) shared the house with her aunt and uncle-in-law and their five children. All the children grew up like one family. Gunborg’s father was a clerk; and Gunborg herself before her marriage worked as a secretary.

Hugo and Gunborg actually got to know each other per correspondence – and in shorthand at that! The first couple of years of their marriage they lived up in the north; but then a year or so after my mother was born they came to live down here.

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▲ My paternal grandparents, Gustaf and Sally, 1930.

▲The cottage where my grandfather Gustaf (born 1904) grew up. He was born ‘out of wedlock’ and was raised mainly by his maternal grandparents.

In his youth Gustaf started out as a shoemaker’s apprentice; but later became a journalist, photographer and editor at the local newspaper, with a special interest in local history.

▲ The farmhouse where my grandmother Sally (born 1900) grew up. She continued to live there until she got married at the age of 30. She never had a job outside the home.

Sally’s parents were both widowed when they got married to each other. The father had nine children by his first wife (two of them died before my grandmother was born), and the mother had one daughter from her first marriage, eight years older than Sally. When Sally was two, she also had a little brother.

Her half-siblings on the father’s side were all grown up, but some of them still lived on the farm in her childhood. The eldest half-brother (30 years older than Sally) remained single and took over the farm a few years before the father died in 1907 (when Sally was 7 years old). Another of the elder brothers later also moved back to help with the farm. From then until 1930, the family on the farm seems to have consisted of those two brothers + their father’s widow with her two daughters and one younger son.

▲ My grandmother Sally on the right; her sister and brother-in-law(-to-be) on the left, and their mother in the middle.

I’m not sure when or how Sally and Gustaf first got to know each other. I know that for a while before they got married Gustaf lived at the farm too, as a lodger, but I think that was probably after he and Sally got engaged. In 1930 they got married and moved into their own brand new house – but not alone. 1930 was a year of Big Change because all three the younger siblings got married and moved out. Sally’s sister and brother-in-law moved in with Sally and Gustaf in their new house, and so did their mother (69 years old by then). In my dad’s early childhood, they were still all an ‘extended family’: He and his parents living in one room and kitchen downstairs; his grandmother and aunt and uncle-in-law sharing the upstairs flat. Later, the aunt and uncle built their own house just down the road. The grandmother died in 1941.

One of the things that strike me from the family history is how both my grandfathers “worked their way up” from rather poor circumstances; and also how both grandmothers grew up in large extended families (but in houses that still suggest a somewhat higher standard).