This section:
Lisa was born in 1800, and was the daughter of the jack Per Eriksson and his wife Cajsa Larsdotter. She was 13 years old when she started serving as a maid on larger farms, and until she was 27 years old, her life seemed to be quite similar to that of young girls from poor families.
Her late relative Peter Bergting in Bromma has searched for the story of Lisa’s life.
Lisa Persdotter was still unmarried when she, 27 years old, had a little daughter who was allowed to live at home with her grandparents while Lisa earned her living. When Lisa was 32 years old, she became pregnant again but hid her pregnancy as best she could and gave birth in solitude to a son whom she immediately after the birth buried in the manure pile. However, the people on the farm had become suspicious and managed to get the child out and bring him to life. He was christened Joakim and ended up as a foster son on the same farm but died after only one year. Lisa was imprisoned and when she returned she had another son with her Sven Fredrik. But now the parish meeting said no. She was not welcome there anymore.
Lisa eventually married a soldier and they had two daughters together – one of them is Peter Bergting’s petitioner.
Lisa’s youngest son Sven Fredrik went to Gothenburg when he was old enough and soon ended up on the wrong side of the law. He became a professional thief, repeatedly ended up in prison where he fought and quarreled, which gave him backing on the punishment. In the end, he was sent off for a fourth trip theft and he knew that if he got another penalty, it would mean a very long sentence.
When Sven Fredrik came out after his last prison sentence, he seems to have received help to get to America. Peter Bergting has searched and searched, but the last trace of Sven Fredrik is a note in the emigrant register that he boarded a ship to America.
Margareta Nilars was previously an archivist at the municipal archives in Åmål. She is writing all the minutes of the parish meeting from Åmål 1666 onwards.
Margareta has seen that it was quite common for the parish to forbid individual poor people to move back to their home parish if they had lived elsewhere. The reason was that the parish did not want to be burdened by poverty alleviation expenses. She has also seen that proper investigations were made and that there was often an exchange of letters between parishes where they tried to convince each other to take responsibility for the person in question.
It happened that individual farmers were given the task of transporting the unwanted people out of the parish and then received a penny for it. But Margareta has also seen that some of the expelled people snuck home again.
The program is made of
Elisabeth Renström and Gunilla Nordlund
Speaker: Patrik Paulsson
[email protected]
Source: ICELAND NEWS