Herrefall and the lake farms

This is a photo from Birgitta's baptism. Standing, left to
right, are Hildegard, Midi, Elin, Thor, Brita, Henrik, Axel
and Adla. Sitting down, left to right, are Margaretha,
Mom, Ingrid (I think) and Rut, Henrik's sisters.

"Going the way the road goes now, we come next to Herrefall. That was a torp under Mellangården. When we were little, there lived Axel and Adla. They had several kids. The oldest was Henrik, and he married my sister Brita. Then was Greta. She was a year older than me, but I started school a year early, so she was in my class. Then there were twins, Rut and Carl-Axel. Rut was a real do-er and over-bearing type of person and Carl-Axel was really scrawny and skinny kid but Rut she looked after him wherever they went. Then there was Gunnar and Ingrid.

If you went up along that road, you came to Grönede, but there was a road over to Kisa along the lower part of Lake Föllingen and there was another lake named Glymmingen and next to that lake there was a little torp named Grönebo. I don’t remember too much about the people there. The kids were all younger than us. There was a girl named Avor and there was a boy there too. If you went further around that lake, you came to a torp called Grönliv. That was a torp under Grönede, I guess. There lived a man named Nilsson. His wife was

Sofie, sitting on the porch at Ulvhäll in 2002

Hannah. They had kids; Gösta was the oldest. Their daughter Brita was a couple years older than me but she had to stay back in school and since I started early, she was in my class. They had a boy named Kurt. He was the same age as me, born on the same day, but he was in Margaretha’s class because they weren’t too swift, these kids. There was also a girl named Göta and one named Karin. Then a little further over, you came to Boos. There were two small farms there. In one lived Otto and Cecelia and they had one girl, Ingrid. And I will talk more about Ingrid as time goes on. In the other farm, there was a man named Arvid. His mother lived with him. Arvid was never married.

The playhouse at Ulvhäll in 2002 with Sofie and Amanda.

Then down by the lake, there were several summer homes. On our side of the property, they bought property from my dad. It was called Ulvhäll. Sara and Ingemar now own Ulvhäll. They bought it. Also on our side, there was a torp that belonged to Farfar. That was called Mostugan. There lived an old man named Johan and he had a housekeeper named Clara. Then after you went over the bridge, you came to a farm named Sundsnäs. There were two farms in Sundsnäs. The kids from there came to Kjettestorp school. By the upper side of Föllingen, there was a farm named Ulvingebo. There lived a girl named Gertrude who was in my class.

Henrik Johansson Kindeskog, 1942

Also by Lower Föllingen, there was a farm called Sandshult. There was a boy who lived there who was called Sixten Färnström. Sixten didn’t come to Kjettestorp School. He went to Kisa, but he was the same age as Henrik i Herrefall; I think 

  they were confirmed

Sixten Färnström, 1941

at the same time. He would come along with Henrik. He was kind of by himself otherwise. There were no other young people right in his area. Sixten played accordion and he and Henrik were friends.

That's pretty much all I remember about what the neighborhood around Kjettestorp was like when I was a kid."

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."

Strömsborg Mill

"Then there was place named Stenstugan. There lived a lady named Almeda Turnvall. I’ll talk about her later when I talk about our Sunday School.

This is a current picture of the Strömsborg Mill. According to a Kinda tourist website, the interior remains intact from the late 19th Century and you can call ahead to book a guided tour! http://www.kindaturism.se

Then down by the crick there was a mill called Strömsborg, and there were three siblings living there. Gustav i Strömsborg was the miller. He milled flour for home use, so the flour that we used in our household, and the other farmers around there was from grain taken to Gustav.

There was a sister named Sandra. She was a good cook. When they had special parties, they’d all call Sandra i Strömsborg to come and help cook. She knew how to make ice cream.  I remember when she was at our house once, and she made some Ice Cream. It was so wonderful. One time when Lennart was little they were going to cook for some party. Lennart had been put down for a nap in Mom and Dad’s room and Mama had said to us kids, “Now you don’t go in there. Lennart is sleeping.” But Sandra needed something from the skafferi so she flew in there. When she turned around and was coming back, she realized that Lennart was sleeping in there and hollered, “Oh då! I forgot about the boy sleeping!” Of course, Lennart popped up crying. Us kids thought that was pretty funny because she could have just crept out quietly.

Then there was a brother named Johan. He had been in America. He had gone there as a young man, and he had been home to visit twice, and then when he retired he came home and stayed. He must’ve had a good job because most people who went to America could never afford to come back and visit. Johan brought back the first bicycle that was seen there in that area. I don’t know what year that was, before I was born sometime. When I was a kid, we all had bikes and Papa and Midi and Ragnar had bicycles. Well, the Sunday before I left for America, this Johan i Strömsborg, he came walking. He walked up

Mom always missed blåsippor. When I was a kid, the only

fake flowers that she had in the house were some silk

blåsippor and vitsippor, the white equivalent.

through Hagen, as we called it, from the schoolhouse and up. He had picked some blåsippor – that’s those blue anemones, the first wild flower we see in Sweden – he had picked a bouquet down there in Hagen where they were plentiful. Those were the first blåsippor that I saw that year and the only ones I would see for years and years after that. He sat there all afternoon and told us about his trips to America. The first time he went to America, it sounded like he was going on a ship like they describe in the Immigrant books. They ate dry moldy bread at the end and salt sill. The last time he came home and retired, he had come on a steamship. He thought about how much it had changed in his time.

Then there was another house up there named Anebo. I think I mentioned the girls who lived up there, Anna and Astrid who used to come and help Mom wash and Lång Anders was our hired man at times. Then next you came to Skogsbohylta. We always said “Skobyhyte.” There they had a couple of kids. I mostly remember Linnea."

Misterfall, Vimantorp, Skogbyhylta and Sågstugan

"In Misterfall, there was one farm named Åsen, one Dalen, and then there was the main farm, Misterfall. In Åsen, I don’t remember the old folks but there was a man named Martin and he later married Ulla i Blåsten. In Dalen there lived a strange family. There was a father. The mother had died.  There were several boys; I don’t remember how many. One was named Melker. There was one girl and I don’t think she had a very easy life. They used to say that both

Tant Tora i Vimantorp

the father and the brothers were intimate with the girl. She had a son named Karl-Erik and he was never quite right in the head.

If we go the other direction towards Tidersrum, then we get to Vimantorp. Vimantorp was high up on a hill just like Kjettestorp. In Vimantorp, there were two farms that I remember. There was Farbror Gunnar and Tant Tora. They had three boys, Ingvar, Birger and Gösta. Birger was the same age as Lennart, in his class at school. 

In the other farm, there lived Elof and he had a housekeeper, Elsa. It was never talked about that they were sambos. She was called his housekeeper. Well, there was one time in the middle of the night where there came a bad storm, banging with thunder and lightening all of a sudden, all unexpected. A few days later the neighbor women were at a coffee party and they started to talk about this storm. Elsa got so excited talking that she said, “Ja! We heard it too and I poked on Elof in my fright.” When they heard this, the other women started laughing because if she wasn’t in bed with Elof how could she poke him in the middle of the night. I guess Elsa looked around and started laughing then too.

This photo is labeled Kjettestorp Folkskola 1933

There were torps around, some way out in the woods. There was Klacken and Havredalen. These people often got a little odd because they lived so out of the way and they were alone so much and didn’t see people very often. In Venus lived a girl named Alyce and a boy named Janne. He wasn’t quite right. I caught up with him in school, even though he had started school before Sara started so he was older than Sara. One time we were in the lower grades and the teacher noticed some bad odor in the room and she said to Janne, “Janne! Vad gör du nu?” (“Janne! What did you do now?”) There was a girl from who came from a place called Skogbyhylta who stood up and said, “Det var inte Janne. Det var jag.” (“It wasn’t Janne. It was me.”) The teacher said, “Linnea! Gå utt och vifta på kjolarna.” (“Linnea! Go out and shake out your skirts.”) I thought it was a little too late then. 
The people who lived in Venus were related to Axel i Sör. I don’t know if that was his sister. One of the boys there was named Helge and he now owns Sör and lives there. Anyway, there was another place up there too named Sjänninge.

Further up along the road, you come to Sågstugan. Why it was called that I don’t know. It was a little cottage down in a glen and there was a little crick that went right by there. The man had died -- he had been a shoemaker -- but the woman lived there with her kids. There were Kalle and Stig who was in my class and Svea and Ina. They were on the kind of welfare they had in those days. Every year people would come with shoes from shoe stores that were new but were too old to sell, out of style or what not. These kids from these poor homes could pick out a pair of shoes each. These kids from Sågstugan got a pair of shoes every year."