Linnea and Hildegard

"Now let us talk about Linnea. Linnea was a happy, jolly lady, and when I was growing up, I loved it when Linnea came. In the summertime, she would come and kick her shoes off and run barefoot out there and play with us. We played skatten, and we played kurragömma (hide and seek), and something we called Vinker-leken. This was a game where you hid somewhere very hard to

This is Mom's handwriting describing who is in this harvest photo.  I love that she included
the name of the horse :)

find, but you had a stick with a white handkerchief, and you waved it in the air so people could see about where you were. Then you had to get away from there fast before they found you and go to another place.

Well, Linnea, she had worked somewhere, I don’t know where, but she met Gunnar Nilsson. Linnea and Gunnar, they farmed somewhere up close to Linköping but harvest was a lot of work so everyone used to help out at times. I don’t remember the name of their farm.

Linnea Boberg Nilsson
taken in 1915

Linnea had a very hard time to have children. The first girl she had died at birth. I believe they had one more girl who died at three months old. She was what they used to call a blue baby. She had a heart problem. Then they had a girl named Svea come along, a cute girl. I vaguely remember Svea. She was about the age of Sara or Henrik, so she was older than me and then after a few years they had Rune. Rune was her only child that lived to adulthood because Svea died under tragic circumstances.

Years ago before refrigerators, they used to saw up blocks of ice on the lakes in the winter, and they would store them in a pile of sawdust, and they would have that to keep their food cold in summer time. They would have a big wood tub in the storehouse where they would store food items and put one block of ice in at a time. Anyway, Farbror Gunnar, he had been down helping saw the ice; the neighbors helped each other. He had been helping one neighbor that day and Svea saw which way her dad went, so she went after, but they went down one

Rune Gunnarsson in 2009
He has since passed away
and is sorely missed.

way and up another from the lake and she didn’t see them going up. She went all the way down to the lake and she fell in that ice cold water and nobody missed her until it was too late, so Svea drowned when she was eight years old.

Rune is still alive and many of you have met Rune when we went to

Sweden. He and one of his boys, Magnus, and a granddaughter, Linnea, have been here to visit us too. We talk on the phone. He has always been like another brother to us.

Well, now let’s go to Hildegard. That was Dad’s youngest sister. She had rheumatic fever when she was

This is Hildegard Boberg's confirmation
photo from 1914 or 1915

nine years old and there was nothing they really knew to do in those days, so she was crippled. Her legs were not straight and she couldn’t get her arms up to comb her hair or anything. There was no after-treatment. She was up at the hospital in Stockholm, Karolinska, the biggest hospital in Stockholm, and they had a floor for rheumatic patients. She was up there and got some training afterwards, but she could never completely take care of herself and she never got married. She was always kind to us kids though."