Michael Peverett: The Gustafssons

Tuesday, May 10, 2022

The Gustafssons

My Sundsvall grandparents were Klas and Sigrid Gulliksson.

This post focusses on the family of my maternal grandmother (mormor). She was born Sigrid Gustafsson on 26 June 1906.

It's a companion to an earlier post which focusses on my grandfather's side of the family, the Gullikssons: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/05/min-morfar.html

Sigrid was the youngest sibling.

Karl Gustafsson (1868 - 1937) m. Amanda (1872 - 1927)

Anna (1898 - 1976)

Ida (died in childhood)

A boy (Signe? died in childhood)

Greta (1901 - 1988)

Sigrid (1906 - 1997)

One of the surviving nuggets of family history is the coincidence that the birthdays of Karl, Ida and Greta all fell on the same day, 24 August.

Karl's name was also spelled "Carl", e.g on his Kungliga Patriotiska Sällskap medal.

Inscription on a pewter vase, a birthday present to Karl from his children in 1929.

Karl Gustafsson

Karl once owned the Belgian pinfire pistol that I remember from my dad's gun collection. Dad used to say it was so flimsily made that it was more likely to injure the user than an assailant.

Karl came from Uppsala. He travelled long distance between Uppsala and Sundsvall with the brewery's casks of alcohol. There was some danger of being robbed on the way. His forebears had been Walloon; Huguenots who brought iron-mining expertise to Sweden.

(But I feel there's a chronological mismatch in the idea that the pistol has anything to do with his Belgian ancestry. Karl's pistol was modern. But with a surname like Gustafsson, Karl must have been at least two generations removed from any Belgian connection.)

It wasn't necessarily strong alcohol. He also brought the casks of "svagdryck", very weak beer that townsfolk drank instead of water, which could still carry disease in those days. (This was the basis of the "beer soup" that my mother, according to family legend, largely lived on as a child. She was a nervous eater, a condition made worse by anxious relatives fussing over her.)

Amanda Gustafsson

Amanda was from Sundsvall. When Karl and Amanda married they lived near the river in Sundsvall (Selångersån). Karl worked for the brewery in Sundsvall.

Amanda died when Sigrid was about 21. By the time of Sigrid's marriage Karl was elderly and not very well. His feet had been frozen on those Uppsala-Sundsvall trips so he had bad circulation.

His house was Albäcksgatan 4. This was also Klas and Sigrid's first home. They lived there to take care of him. He died when Eva was about one year old, and they left Albäcksgatan when she was two or three.

She could already talk. Both her memorable phrases are cellar-related. She used to say "Är de jåttar, mamma?" (Is it rats?) and "Kas eldar!" (Klas is lighting the stove!) He had to do this once a day. Banked up, the stove in the cellar would stay alight and provide warmth for the next twenty-four hours.

Sigrid was fourteen years younger than her husband Klas. I don't know when they got married but Eva (my mum) was born on 7 September 1936. Sigrid was 30 and Klas was 44.

Anna never married. When I knew her she lived in Falköping. Greta did marry (Erik Andersson; they lived in Stockholm), but they did not have any children. My mum was in effect an only child and an only grandchild, on both sides of her family. (There were other children on Klas' side of the family but they were in America and no-one would ever meet them. In those days, emigration was a forever thing.)

I knew Mormor and her sisters Anna and Greta far better than I ever knew Morfar or his relatives. (In her later years, after Erik's death, Greta lived much of the time with Sigrid.) I knew them all as beloved presences, as kindly and loving relations.

But as a child I lived only in the present: their nice homes and generosity and food and laughter. Because of the language barrier, I never knew much about them.

And generally I still know less about the Gustafsson side of the family than the Gullikssons. Maybe one factor is that Eva herself never knew either of her Gustafsson grandparents.

Two of the Gustafsson girls. Anna and Greta, I think.

Anna Gustafsson

I loved Moster Anna dearly. Partly because of her delightful personality, and partly because we usually visited her near the beginning of our summer holiday in Sweden, after long days of driving through France, Belgium, Netherlands, West Germany and up through Denmark, the distances ever elongating. To arrive at Anna's welcoming apartment in Falköping was to feel that now the most precious part of the whole year had well and truly begun.

But I have only one fact about her to hand.

It was this: that when Anna was still living in Sundsvall she worked for a certain doctor Svensson. And so did a lady called Berna.

Thus it came about that Berna and Willem Eriksson became friends with Sigrid and Klas. Berna and Willem had a son Bosse who was three years younger than my mother Eva. Lacking any young relatives of her own Eva always referred to Bosse as "my little brother". They have remained lifelong friends. Bo and Gunilla live in Borlänge (Dalarna).

Greta

Greta married Erik Andersson and they lived in Stockholm; they had no children. I remember visiting them as a child, first at a flat in Central Stockholm and later in the "dormitory town" of Kista. After Erik's death, Greta lived most of the time with her sister Sigrid.

Sigrid

After Greta's death in 1988, Sigrid was lonelier than ever. Her health declined and she eventually went into care, with symptoms of Alzheimer's before the end. My mother flew back and forth from England; she went nine times in Sigrid's final year.

Mum's cousins.

Amanda had siblings, though I don't know how many or their names. Anyway, it was through one of them that Sigrid had a first cousin called Bernard, married to Anni. I don't remember them, but my Dad met them.

Bernard and Anni had two daughters.

One was Sylvia, who married Ragnar, one of eleven children from a poor family from the remote hamlet Återvänningen. Sigrid remained close to them and I remember Sylvia and Ragnar fondly. It was at their house that I first tasted surströmming. They had a daughter Inge, who married Lennart. Inge died recently (2023).

Bernard and Anni's other daughter was Aina, who married a bus driver called Yngve. They had two children, Monica and Lage.

When Sigrid died in 1997, I met mum's cousins at the funeral; Inge, Monica, Lage and their partners. They were now Mum's closest relatives in Sweden. For the next fifteen years or so Mum and Dad used to meet up with "the cousins" each summer while they were in Norrland.

I've visited Monica's home several times and am still in touch with her. She and husband Leif (truck driver, now retired) live in Ljustorp. They have one daughter, Annica.