The houses had names

This is three entries from Mom's address book
that show how she addressed letters using the
house or farm name as she describes.
What cracks me up here is that, among all her
corrections and additions, she notes when
Thorbjörn got a new dog!

"Then there was one more place called Sandstugan. There was a man named Krantz who lived there, and he was the professional thief of the area. Everybody knew that he was stealing, and everybody watched him when he came. When they were butchering for Christmas or in the spring, Krantz always came. He was a good butcher. Then he got to take home some things when they cut up the meat. He had kids and I don’t know if I remember all of them. There was Gunnar; he was the same age as Sara. And Tyra, she was a little younger than me. Evert was Nils-Erik’s age, so he was a year younger than Lennart. These kids all came to Kjettestorp school.

I think there were a couple more little houses there but I don’t remember the names of them. As you have probably figured out by now, in those days and still some today, out in the country, the houses had names. Instead of the street having a name and the houses having numbers, the houses or farms had the names, and if you mailed something to someone, you just wrote the person’s name and the house name on the envelope. There are still a couple of relatives who I write to like that; to write to Rune and Cia, I just write Enshult and the letter gets there.

On the other side of Kjettestorp, down towards Pinnarsbaden, there was a

This is a photo of some of the Finnish children who were

evacuated to Sweden toward the end of World War II.

Their parents sent them away to keep them safe from

incursions by the Soviet Union.

place Björndal. It was a little bigger farm than Kjettestorp. There lived a man named Johansson. I don’t remember the wife’s name. They had a girl named Karin. They had a couple of other girls too but they weren’t home. Karin stayed home and took care of the parents until they died and then she lived in Björndal until another girl, Olga and her husband came home and took over the farming. They didn’t have any kids so they adopted a Finnish war child. During World War II, Finnish children came by the trainload to stay with people in Sweden because it was safer. We didn’t have any Finnish children at Kjettestorp but most people had one. Well, this Finnish boy in Björndal, they sent money to his mother when he was a pre-teen so she could come and visit. She stayed there for a while and then the boy got to choose whether he wanted to stay there or go home with his mother and he chose to stay so they adopted him. Karin i Björndal moved to Kisa where she lived in an apartment. It was more convenient for her because she never learned to drive a car.

This is a photo of Nedre Föllingen, taken in 2007,
borrowed from the website Kindabild 

Now we’ve come all the way down to Lake Föllingen. It’s actually two lakes that went together. There was Ovre Föllingen which means Upper Föllingen and Nedre Föllingen which means Lower Föllingen. There was a bridge over the lake where the road went to Kisa. Along the lake there was Sundsnäs and Övingbo. And Föllingsö is the name of the island that you can see in Föllingen in a lot of the pictures that are taken from Norrgården. When I was a kid, the only road into Grönede went by our place. They went between the house and the barn. Now there is a road up to Grönede from the main road up there.

In Grönede when I was a kid, there were two farms – there was Morfar and Mormor and then there was a farm called Västergården because it was west of Morfar’s place. There lived a family named Peterson. I remember Farbror Petersson. He was a very, well, big or, well, fat man. I don’t remember his first name, but his wife was Tant Matilda. She wasn’t very well. I never remember

Taken from Norrgården in 1953, this shows Lake

Föllingen and Föllingsö in the background.

her up on her feet. If you ran an errand there, you had to go in by the bed and curtsey. She would ask you questions and you had to answer. They had quite a few kids, but when I was young, there was only Ida and Einar left. Ida worked so hard that she got so bent over. She must have had osteoporosis. She went so crooked and bent over when she got older. She lived kind of isolated and she didn’t have much education like lots of people out on these farms then. Us kids used to giggle so much because even after Tant Matilda had died, when Ida came to a women’s coffee party, she would come in and say, “Mama lacka hälse!” (“Mama sends her greetings!”) Well, Mama had been dead quite a long time but she still came with this greeting.

Also Moster Frida’s boy lived there until he got through school. I don’t think he went through more than the sixth grade. Then he went to live with Morbror Oskar and Moster Frida, his mother, and Morbror Oskar taught him the carpentry trade. When Morbror Oskar died, Fridoff took over the building firm. Axel, Oskar’s own boy, didn't want to it.

Nisse Palm's confirmation photo
from 1934

And in Västergården, they also had a foster son. I don’t know where he came from or how they got him there. His name was Nisse Palm. He was about Brita’s age or maybe a little younger. He was a real rascal. He played so many tricks and rascally things. He never did anything really bad but he just got into a bit of trouble all the time."