Augusta Rütterskjöld was 16 years old when she sat down to copy the following lines on a card for Cecilia Koch’s memory album. L’amitié vient du ciel habiter ici bas Elle embellit la vie et survit au trèpas (Friendship comes from the heavens and dwells below it embellishes life and survives death) The poem is actually the last stanza of a longer poem, “Même Sujet” […]
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One of Cecilia Koch’s friends gave her a card with a cryptic message. Charlotte Lindström had drawn a picture of a blue flower – a Forget-Me-Not – and included the text: pas une véritable amie (not a true friend). It doesn’t make sense to me. Or did she copy the phrase and mistook par for pas? The phrase, par une véritable amie (by a true […]
A couple of years ago, Kerstin and I made 1840s bathing costumes. At that time, I remembered a description of bathing costumes in an autobiography by a Swedish young woman. She had visited Charleston, South Carolina in 1854 and described them in a letter to her brother. The other day, I found the book again: Travels in America 1851-1855 by Rosalie Roos (translated and edited […]
IMG-7920 Amelie Ahlberg made a drawing for Cecilia. I have now learned that these pencil drawings were not original creations but copies of prints. Drawing was a subject in Edgren’s school and copying prints might have been part of the curriculum. I uploaded Amelie’s painting in Google Lens and it was an instant hit. The original print of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, England, was […]
Lovisa (or Louise) Edgren (born Dethmar) was a beloved teacher. Unfortunately, there is not a single portrait of her. When the family Edgren’s private school for girls closed in 1844, the students kept in touch with each other and with their former teacher through letters, reminiscing about this wonderful time in their lives. Lotten Westman’s letter to Augusta, Stockholm, 18 December 1845. “Lucky Augusta who […]
I pick a random page out of Cecilia’s memory album. IMG-7936 This one has a handwritten poem with the word Kärleks (Love’s) emphasized in larger letters. The page is signed with what I interpret as S. F. En. I am not sure about the S, but what else could it be? I wreck my brain; are there any friends of Cecilia and Augusta whose last […]
Cecilia was only 18 years old when she died from measles. Two years earlier, she had lived and studied in Stockholm. Like so many girls her age, she owned a memory album, filled with greetings from her family and friends. When she left Stockholm in the summer of 1844, to return home to Vågsäter, many of her friends wrote poems or made drawings for her […]
I never met my paternal grandmother, Eva Svinhufvud (married, Melin). She died years before I was born. But she was somewhat of a legend and a role model when I was young. She had a higher-education degree in gymnastics from the Royal Central Gymnastic Institute (GCI) in Stockholm and had traveled to Switzerland in her youth to teach the latest kind of gymnastics – Ling’s […]
It is a beautiful, late-summer Sunday. The Wester family at Loddby has attended church and listened to Pastor Mobeck’s sermon about the importance of rest and of keeping the Sabbath. Now they are back at Loddby and that is what they are doing. At least the women, resting. The three young men have decided to go fishing. The matriarch, widow, and owner of Loddby, Carolina […]