My mother, Jenny Olsdotter, was born in a house called Norra Tomten in Ostra Furan, a small village in Brunskog Parish, Varmland, Sweden, on March 27, 1871. A few days later her mother, Britta Jansdotter, a young school teacher, died from complications of child birth. There were no doctors to handle maternity cases in those days and sometimes the midwives encountered complications that they could not handle. And so it was that little Jenny was taken by her maternal grandmother, Kaisa Andersdotter, who had a baby of her own less than three weeks old.
Kaisa lived in a one-room log cabin near the neighboring town of Lerhol. Each home had a name of its own and this one was called Banstaroningen. As described by Jenny in later years this little house stood in a clearing of the surrounding forest, facing west with three apple trees south of the house outside the one big window. The house was surrounded by flowers in the summer, some of which came up every year, such as the blue lilies, and others came each spring from seeds carefully planted by the grandmother with the help of her two small children. These flowers grew in beds which were built up higher than the surrounding ground. There were also lilacs and other shrubs whose blossoms scented the air in season. These, together with the trees of the forest, brought birds of many kinds for the children to admire and watch from the big south window. They also loved to listen to the different songs of the birds. Jenny particularly loved the sweet melody of the doves.
This area, being almost 60 degrees north in latitude, had summer days with sunlight lasting all but four or five out of the 24 hours. Conversely, the winter days had darkness lasting the same amount of time. Jenny remembered the winter snows blowing and drifting until her grandmother’s little house was entirely covered to the roof top. A neighbor, whose own house stood on higher ground in the clearing, came and dug them out.
Kaisa made her living by spinning and weaving. The two little children, Jenny and Emil, woke in the morning to the sound of the clock on the wall ticking away the minutes and the whirring of the spinning wheel by the crackling fireplace. The clock had two weights hanging by chains. Each night, before going to sleep, the children watched with fascination the ritual when Kaisa would pull down one weight while the other weight lifted up to the clock—the ritual which would assure that the clock would keep ticking throughout another day. The cooking was done in the fireplace and the bread was baked in the oven recessed in the brick fireplace wall. Their diet was simple. Kaisa used to bake a bread called tunnbrod.
The little house was sparsely furnished. A cabinet, built by Kaisa’s brother, was especially attractive to little Jenny because of the secret drawer built into it where a ring that had belonged to her mother was kept. Occasionally the grandmother would give in to the pleadings of Jenny and reluctantly bring out the treasure for her to look at, but after a few minutes it was always carefully returned to its hiding place. The beds, built into the walls, and a small table and chairs completed the furnishings, all made by Kaisa’s father and brother, who were carpenters. The house itself had been built by her father before he drowned one early spring while trying to cross a lake on ice that had softened. Candles burning in the two brass candlestick holders and the light from the fireplace brightened the little house during the long dark hours of winter.
Kaisa was a tiny woman with black hair and dark bluish-gray eyes. She had had two children—the daughter Britta, who was Jenny’s mother, had been born in 1849 and 22 years later, at the age of 45, she gave birth to the son Emil. The two children had different fathers and research in parish records has not disclosed what happened to either of the two men, but neither lived with Kaisa or provided for his child so far as can be determined. Kaisa has always been a fascinating person for me to wonder about. All I know of her, other than statistics found in the Brunskog parish records, is from stories told me by my mother, who dearly loved her grandmother. She told me that Kaisa ruined her eyes by crying so much, but of course crying alone couldn’t have accounted for the troubles she had with her eyes. One time when Jenny was quite small Kaisa made a trip to far-off Karlstad to see a doctor about her eye problems. He prescribed drops for her to use and gave her dark glasses to wear, which she wore the rest of her life. Surely her spinning and weaving must have been made more difficult because of this condition. She must have grieved very much over the death of her beloved daughter Britta. Jenny always hesitated to question her grandmother about her mother because Kaisa would break down and cry. She probably also cried with worry about the two children because she was so poor and had such difficulty in feeding and clothing them as she would like to do. However, there was one time when Kaisa’s eyes were filled with tears from laughter, rather than from crying. That was the time when little Jenny determined to catch the mouse which had crawled into her bed and had run across her face as she lay sleeping. Awakened, she jumped out of bed and ran out the door to fetch a piece of slate. This slate she propped up off the floor with a stick. To the stick she attached a string. After placing three sugar lumps under the slate as bait she went back to bed with the string firmly in hand and patiently waited for the mouse to come back and seek out the bait. She didn’t have long to wait. As the mouse was consuming the third lump of sugar she pulled the string and the heavy slate fell, crushing its victim. Jenny relished the success of her effort, but even more she enjoyed the laughter of her grandmother, who had watched the entire episode with much enjoyment.
Kaisa knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep the children with her for very long and dreaded the time when she would have find other homes for them. Until that time came the three lived together in their little log house in the forest. The children were like twins and were very happy although they had few worldly possessions. After all, how could they yearn for things about which they knew nothing? They romped about in the clearing during the long summer days, sometimes venturing into the surrounding forest. There were three or four other houses in the clearing. In one lived the shoemaker, who came to Kaisa’s house as well as other houses, to measure and make shoes. Jenny’s first job, when she was only five or six years old, was to stay with the old lady at the house called Asen when she had to be left alone by her family. One time Kaisa took the two children and they walked several miles to a neighboring village to visit Emil’s uncle. Another time she took Jenny a few miles in another direction to visit the child’s paternal grandfather and aunts. Jenny was to be left to visit there for a few days, but she was so homesick that she wouldn’t stop crying. Finally her Aunt Ulrika had to take her back to Kaisa that same night.
When Jenny and Emil were seven years old they started school in the village of Lerhol, walking to and from school along a path through the forest. The session was only ten weeks in duration. This was their first experience of being with other children and they had trouble adjusting. One day jenny pleaded and pleaded with her grandmother to let her wear her mother’s ring to school, probably to impress the other children. When she was walking home through the forest that day some boys teased her and told her that they were going to take the ring away from her. Foolishly she took the ring off and threw it into the trees so that they couldn’t find it. Unfortunately neither could she! Losing the one precious thing that she possessed was a sorrow that she could hardly bear, especially since the ring was as precious to her grandmother as it was to her.
The following year when the children were eight years old they both went away from Banstaroningen to work for their board and room in new homes. Jenny’s new home was Klockortomta on a farm a few miles away from Kaisa’s house. The farmer, Alfred Andersson, had been a friend of Jenny’s mother, having been in the same confirmation class at Brunskog. Emil also was placed in another home where he too earned his board and room until at the age of twelve he was sent to America to live with his uncle in Scandia, Kansas. He traveled all alone and was labeled like a package with his name and destination. It must have seemed very strange to Jenny when she went from living in a small one-room log house to Klockortomta, a very large house with many rooms. She was particularly impressed by the disappearing stairway which gave access to space under the roof where many things were stored. Jenny loved to be sent to pull the rope which brought down that stairway from the ceiling and to climb those stairs to fetch articles stored up there. Among those items were the thick lap robes which were used to keep warm the riders in the open sleigh which took them to and from church. The ride to Christmas services at Brunskog was particularly exciting. At that time the horses wore brass bells in their harnesses, which jingled in the frosty air as they pulled the sleigh over the icy roads under the starlit winter sky. All the roads that led to Brunskog were filled with similar sleigh loads of families from all over the parish. The church yard filled with the sound of merry voices shouting “God Yul” to one another, the laughter of children, the stomping of the horse’s hoofs, the jingling of the bells and the beautiful melodious sound of the bell in the church tower as it summoned everyone to the Christmas services.
At Klockortomta Jenny was a little servant girl with tasks such as tending the baby Anna Signe, whom she dearly loved and grieved over when she died at only one year of age. Other tasks were fetching potatoes from the root cellar, running errands and performing light duties connected with the cooking, cleaning, washing and other work necessary in a household which included an aging grandmother, small children, as well as adult hired help. It was her job to carry food and water to the man who stayed day and night at the mound out in the forest where fire was kept burning in the process of making charcoal from small pieces of wood. When she was older she was given the responsibility of driving a team of horses hitched to the wagon loaded with charcoal which was taken to the railway. She was very proud of being entrusted to perform this important duty, especially since the railway towns to which she drove were several miles away.
Jenny was kindly treated by everyone at Klockortomta during the years that she stayed there. Occasionally she was able to visit her grandmother and she was reunited a few times with Emil, the boy who was like a twin brother and with whom she had shared those first eight years of their lives. When he left for America she dreamed of the day when she might somehow join him in America, although this dream seemed completely beyond the realm of possibility at that time.
One summer Jenny spent some time visiting her paternal grandfather’s home below the mill pond at Gulsbyn. He had a dyeing plant where fabrics were dyed, using the water of the stream that flowed into the mill pond. Carl Reinholdson was a widower with three daughters at home. The youngest daughter was named Jenny and was the one for whom little Jenny had been named. Though this aunt was a few years older than Jenny there was a close bond between them. Besides the name they shared, both had lost their mothers. It was at this time that the grandfather and aunts persuaded Jenny that she should take their last name of Reinholdson instead of the Olsdotter surname which appeared in the parish registers. At this time the patronymic custom of using the father’s first name plus son or dotter for the children’s surnames was gradually being discontinued. All twelve of Carl Reinholdson’s children had used the name Reinholdson for their surname. Their father had been the son of Reinhold Naucler, a man whose illustrious ancestry in Sweden went back to the establishment of the Lutheran Church in that country. An early ancestor had been a student of Martin Luther in Germany. When the church was established in Sweden some of the Naucler family came from Germany to hold positions in the priesthood. Later descendants had switched to other fields such as management in mining of copper, iron and other metals. Most were well educated at the University of Upsala. Carl’s grandfather had established a paper mill at Gulsbyn in 1804. None of this family history was known to Jenny at that time.
Now that she was older Jenny thoroughly enjoyed her time at the Reinholdson home. She loved listening to her grandfather playing his violin on the veranda during the long twilight of the Swedish summer evenings. He became a dearly beloved father figure to the little girl whose father had gone to a northern province when she was very young. In fact, she had only one dim memory of her father—the day when she and her grandmother had met and talked with him on the road between Branskog and Edane. She was too young to remember what he looked like. She had been even younger when he had come to her grandmother’s house to see her.
During the years between 1878 and 1885 while Jenny lived at Klockortomta she attended school for the annual sessions of ten weeks. This school was a short distance away at Krona. The summer of 1885, when she was fourteen years old, she went to confirmation classes once a week all summer long, walking back and forth the distance of three or four English miles between Klockortomta and the church at Brunskog. In her class was a boy named Gustaf Andersson, whose father was klockorvakteren (caretaker and bell ringer) at the church. Gustaf was attracted to Jenny and often walked part way home with her after the class. An older brother named Olof saw them walking and fell in love at first sight with the pretty Jenny. He was very jealous of Gustaf and set about winning her affection. Gradually she fell in love with him and they saw each other frequently at dances and parties until Olof went to America to seek his fortune in 1888 when he was 24 and she was 17. She was very sad when she bade him goodbye. From America he wrote a letter. She had no money for a stamp to reply. Whether or not he tried to reach her again she didn’t know, for she moved around to various places after she left Kocktomta and he probably moved around in America. For want of a stamp their romance was ended and they never saw or heard from each other again. But Jenny never forgot her handsome Olof and in her old age confessed that he had been the only true love of her life.
After completion of confirmation Jenny went to work for another family for about two years. This family lived nearer to her grandmother and so she saw Kaisa more frequently. For about six months in 1889-1890 she lived in Arvika, a larger town outside the parish of Brunskog. There she cared for and helped her paternal Aunt Hanny, who had broken her hip in a fall from a church window while escaping a fire. Hanny was a dressmaker and sewing teacher. She made some dresses for Jenny in appreciation for her help. These were probably the first really nice clothes the girl had ever had. Jenny got along very well with Hanny’s daughter Anna Carolina, who suffered from tuberculosis and later died from the disease on her fourteenth birthday in 1893. The two girls slept together and Jenny was exposed to the disease. She probably contracted it since she had the same symptoms suffered by her little cousin, but unlike her, she was able to throw it off.
Leaving Arvika Jenny spent a short time with her grandmother Kaisa again until in October 1890 she was asked to go to her maternal great uncle Nils Andersson, who lived in a village in southern Norway called Arendal. He needed help because his wife also had a broken hip and was badly crippled. In those days there was no way to treat a broken hip and the victims of this type of accident were doomed to lives of physical inactivity and immobility. Jenny lived and worked in her uncle’s home for about two and a half years. She learned the Norwegian language, which she found to be softer than the Varmland dialect with which she had grown up. She made many friends in Arendal and enjoyed living there. When Nils’ wife Kjersti died he decided to go to America to live with his only daughter, Mathilda, who had married a sailor and was living in Oregon. He asked Jenny if she would like to accompany him if he would pay for her passage. She could hardly believe that the impossible dream might come true—that she would be reunited with Emil and also, not realizing the immensity of America, she perhaps thought that somehow she might find Olof.
But first she would go home to Varmland to spend some time with her grandmother. It was at this time that she became acquainted with a distant cousin named Olof Olsson, who tried to persuade her to stay in Sweden because he loved her. She told him that she was only going to America to visit Emil and that she would come back to Sweden after visiting him. Failing to persuade her to stay in Sweden, Olof insisted that he would accompany her on the train to Oslo so that he could make sure that she and her personal belongings, packed into a handsome wooden sea chest, bound with iron bands and with iron handles and hasp for the lock, all hand made by Olof’s father, would be safely embarked on the boat which would take her to the meeting with her Uncle Nils and their journey across the ocean.
That day in late June of 1893, when Jenny boarded the train in the little town of Edane, little did she realize that she would never again see her grandmother or the scenes of her childhood. How could she have known that on Christmas Day of that same year she would marry an older American man of English descent and live the rest of her life in the mid-western state of Nebraska, USA!
... by Jean Nelson