MY FAMILY HISTORY

My Family History

 

My daughter is the latest generation in a long line of very colourful people. Her ancestor’s origin range from a wide variety of places: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland, England, Scotland, Spain, The United States of America and Germany.

They have been farmers and artists, contemporaries of the Spanish Armada and the American Civil War, gas station attendants and trumpeters.

Let’s start with the Nilsson family, the ancestry on my grandmother’s side.

We have a very prolific lady in our family unit: the individual responsible for the Nilsson Family history research. My mother’s cousin Ulla-Britt Larsson is the daughter of my grandmother Anna’s sister Ruth. My father always used to say about her that she is the kind of person that keeps a family together. She made all kinds of things for our home, there were hundreds of little things about the house made by Ulla-Britt, most special was a little sown tapestry of a Christmas landscape. She kept on searching in old city hall and church archive books for the people that were married and baptized in the various communities. The Nilsson family is both down to earth and sky high full of admiration.

As Maria von Trapp sang in The Sound of Music: “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” You may recall that our first inclusion in this collection was the story The Praying Lark, which included references to the show. In our last article, it then only seems to end where we started. With a quote from the show.

 

 

Anna Julia Sofia Nilsson and her family

 

The Nilsson-family has a very renowned member. Somewhere in the past a woman emigrated from Spain to Scandinavia. We know that she was a contemporary of the Spanish Armada during the Renaissance or Baroque eras. All this leads up to my grandmother, who was the daughter of farmers in a little house called Friskamålen (pronounced Friskamohlen).

She was the fourth or fifth in line of nine children. Her father was Gustav Nilsson and her mother brought her into the world in a city called Åseda, the town of Sweden’s most delicious brand of cheese.

Anna Julia Sofia Nilsson was born on October 18^th in the year of 1900. Among her nine siblings were, among others, Oskar. He immigrated to America in the 19^th century and found a family there that still survives. Then there was Carl who was born in 1889. He would later found the first movie house named Saga in Sweden, where my mother often went to see her favourite movies.

Calle, as he was called, took the name Albien and remained the eccentric original throughout his life, but his contacts within the Swedish movie industry was extensive.

He knew the big Swedish film entrepreneur Sandrews personally and the movie actor Edward Persson came to visit him now and then. Calle’s son was Jan, who also was an amateur jazz musician.

Anna’s other favourite sibling was Olof, or Olle for short. Where Calle was eleven years her senior, Olle was eleven years her junior. Little brothers are fun, especially when you can teach them stuff. There was Ruth, who like Anna knew many songs and poems by heart and at times called my mother a gypsy. There was Hjalmar, who died in the Spanish Flu in the 1920’s and Agnes who died in childbirth. She left her son Lennart in the care of Anna, who grew up along side of my mother like a brother.

Anyway, at Friskamålen many children shared a dwelling and during the first year of school Anna walked three kilometres every day. Then, when Anna was eight years old, her Aunt Emily in Kalmar asked her if she wanted to live in the city and go to a high-quality girl’s school.

She said yes. Moving to Kalmar in 1908 was the beginning of 88 years in her chosen home town. She shared a house with her Uncle Thomas and Aunt Emily, who were rich relatives, and their stepson Herman. Herman enjoyed all the benefits and Anna was treated with a step-motherly haughtiness. Still, Aunt Emily asked her if she wanted to call them Mama and Papa. Anna said that she had parents already, promptly writing her folks that she would rather be at home with Mama’s home made garments than with newer silk and satin in town.

In 1910, she went home to a friend in order to hear a record being played on a gramophone, a so called phonograph. I remember hearing her tell me that she wondered where the man was who spoke inside the machine.

She learned German as a teenager in a Girl’s Pension in Wernigerode in 1912 and escaped out against regulations at night to meet boys.

In 1912, on the covers of the magazines she also read the news of the Titanic having sunk. In 1914, reports reached neutral Sweden about the start of the First World War. A few years later, a local inventor presented his new crystal radio receiver in the local school. It was a fantastic event, but unfortunately the radio didn’t work at the time and everybody was sent home again. All of these stories circulated my granny’s Bremergatan 11 apartment and she loved to tell everyone who listened everything about her industrious past and how she was the first woman in town to take a driver’s license. I think every single cab driver in town got to hear that story at least once.

My grandmother’s teachers in school are an interesting chapter. Syftan and Snyftan were a couple of ladies that taught close at hand. Syftan always used her thumb to assess right proportion measurements in drawing class. Att syfta, to assess, gave her this name. Snyftan would cry all the time. She would be moved by everything. Att snyfta, to whimper, gave her this name.

My mother and my grandmother had the same teachers in school and were taught the same things in the same way 30 years apart.

My grandmother would seem a rather decent woman and she was everything that and more. In school, however, she did, at times, behave like a rascal.

In learning how to bake, the teacher told her to turn the cookies on the baking tray around and heat them from the other side. My grandmother actually turned the whole thing upside down.

The renowned artist Victor Sjöström came to visit her chosen home of Framstad to confer with her illustrious stepfather. The actor peeked inside her room. Anna only pretended to sleep and heard Sjöström say: “Look at how sweetly she sleeps!” She told all her friends in school the next day that a famous actor was visiting her. The subsequent daybreak ensuing breakfast, ten friends of hers came to bring her to school. They all made sure to shake hands with the actor. Ah, sweet fame.

Anna and her girlfriends in school kept close contact for seventy or so years, meeting annually to commemorate their graduation of 1918. Their devotion to their scholastic friendship was even mentioned in the local press.

When the Great War ended she worked in a Fuel Commission to mend poverty. She was one the most sought after type writers, writing over a hundred signs per minute. One of her most favourite colleagues was “Besvärarn”, “the difficult one”, who was called so because he thought everything was so difficult. A street was even named after this man. In Älmhult one can find Besvärsgatan, a road that honours him.

The so called “original eccentrics” roamed about the counties and townships. Either they were professionals, like the odd barber with a comical turn of phrase at the ready, or homeless, like the apparently rich bum that collected bottles.

One of these “originals” was Kalle Lindahl. He used to walk about Kalmar with a wheelbarrow loaded with stuff and welcome everyone that was new to town. Once he asked my grandmother how much time it was. She answered that it was four o’clock and he answered: “Good, I’ll be home by three thirty!”

Anna studied how to play piano with Nanny Trädgård during these young years, which eventually would lead her to a position playing piano at her brother Carl Albien’s two establishments: his cinema and his restaurant.

Her brother owned the neighbourhood restaurant Byttan (named after its’ buttercup form, en smörbytta) in the city park. I gather that Anna got to play quite a bit of piano there, just like mother got to sing there later on. Byttan still exists. She remembered the Mary Pickford and Rudolf Valentino movies and how the old film cameras had to be monitored by hand. The camera operator spun the wheel of the camera slower when he was drunk and so Anna would have to play Strauss and Mozart slower in order to match the practical capabilities of the camera man. She had a violinist as a partner one day that apparently was nervous. His bow got caught in her hair.

What she also learned by heart were poems and songs. The French National Anthem, Lorelei by Heinrich Heine, Two Little Kittens One Stormy Night and a thousand Swedish poems all were her favourites. She knew them all by heart until the day she died at age 95. Witty was her rendition of It’s a long way to Tipperary: “... it’s a long way to Tipperary to the Swedish girl I know ... Farewell, Mister Square!”

Her Victorian values, brought to her by Aunt Emily simultaneously with all of this literature, stayed with her all her life. Her brother Carl owned the cinema next door, but the house named Framstad itself had been inherited from Thomas and Emily. As a young girl, Anna came in contact with quite a few famous personalities due to her Aunt’s prominent local status. They owned the Tourist Hotel in Kalmar and many a Swedish star stayed at the hotel while performing at the local theatre. My grandmother also worked in the hotel as a maid and this was a chance to meet the stars.

Ernst Rolf was the most famous singer of his day, kind of like the Dick Powell of Sweden. He had a concert in the local theatre one day. Ernst Rolf pointed at her when he sang:”My object of flirtation is here, but I don’t know of she’s near. Maybe it’s her, she’s there. She is blushing, how sweet.” (“Mitt svärmeri är alltså här, men jag vet inte vem hon är. Kanske hon det det är, hon som sitter där. Hon rodnar ju, det klär.”)

Her encounter with a phrenologist at her daytime job at the Tourist Hotel only supported her love of music. He analyzed her head and by that could calculate her talents. He told her that she had very good music veins.

Throughout her life, my grandmother had a great love of operetta. Her favourite operetta was, undoubtedly, Emmerich Kalman’s Die Czardasfürstin. She knew all the songs by heart.

She was also the first woman to take a driver’s license in her home town of Kalmar in 1923. It cost her 5 Swedish crowns and she needed a certificate from the police that prove that she was sober and appropriate. She had, however, forgotten to learn how to drive backwards, so that lesson was added afterwards.

Her first car was a Fafner, a vehicle with the gears on the outside. One man told his friends to be cautious when Anna drove around town. She was known for driving as fast as 40 km/h.

It might have been true. She did stop for the horses, though. One coachman even asked her if she was afraid of the horse.

Her husband Knut Kronzell was the son of a trumpeter that founded the Helsingborg Symphony. Their love affair started in 1925 and although Anna was already engaged with someone else, Knut Allan Kronzell, was the one she would marry. I performed on the same stage as my great-grandfather. While Adolf Kronzell was a strict man, my grandfather Knut was very gentle and funny and a man with a great sense of humour. He had a thousand witty jokes at the ready and was famous for having funny quotations for every situation. He got my grandmother to go out with him by jumping up on the sideboard of her car while she was driving.

Knut had a great voice, but joined the fleet and consequently became a marine commander.

He eventually founded a steel corporation. When it went bankrupt in the fifties, because of his partner’s mismanagement, Knut became supervisor for the local church.

My grandmother was an avid enemy of Hitler during the Second World War. It shocked her that she one night had a dream about him. It shocked even more, though, that Hitler was very nice in the dream.

Her hatred of fascism made her take on a child from Finland named Terrtu, driven out by Nazism.

Her enormous contribution to welfare organisations like the Sailor’s Help and The Welfare of the Blind also made her receive all the more help when her sight grew bad in her old age.

She raised two children, flew for the first time at the ripe old age of 85 and saw a world change from royalist horse power to electronic.

My grandmother was my best friend. She would pick me up after school and occasionally we would meet up at the local café. We had a nice sport we called Baloon-Tennis. A balloon was thrown back and forth in her living room between two badminton rackets. Our record was 869 throws. I was Björn Borg and she was Jimmy Connors.

She lived to be 95 and my times with her were among the best in my life. I will always remember the maid she kept using for her birthday parties. She was still serving drinks at her parties at 85. That was Anna Julia Sofia Kronzell. She was an aristocrat and a comedian.

My grandmother would also sneak into the kitchen during the night and have a cup of coffee in order to sleep. She would grab breakfast food directly from the package. She loved Pavarotti and we played cards games in her kitchen. When I studied in Sweden, the weekends were always paradise. I could visit her. When I worked as a tour guide, the lunch break was the best thing about my working day. I could ride home and have lunch with her.

My grandmother was a lady.

A real honest-to-God-lady.

 

 

The Eyre and Moulton Families

 

This brings us to my father’s family, which can be divided into two parts: the Eyres and the Moultons. The Moulton’s were Scotsmen and Englishmen that eventually came with the Mayflower to America. We have a famous Moulton in our ancestry: Betsy Ross. She sowed the first American Flag for George Washington.

One of our Moulton ancestors also remembered the beginning of Civil War 1861 and lived to tell my dad about it.

One funny story is worth telling. My great-grandfather was put in an old people’s home at age 96, but took the bus home. When he was asked why, he told his children that there were just old people there. He wanted to be amongst young people.

Herbert Lewis Moulton, my grandfather, spent years in the trenches of France during the First World War. He wrote letters home to America carrying his golden watch from 1912, a birthday present from his parents the year of the sinking of the Titanic. Big Herb, ended up as a salesman and married the daughter of an Irish girl named Nellie Brennan Eyre. Together, they settled down in Glen Ellyn, Illinois and had a son named Herbert Eyre Moulton, my father.

The Eyre Family are colourful people that still habitat the west coast of Ireland. They were an aristocrat family that founded the city of Eyreville near Galway, Ireland. The name had been given to them by William the Conqueror during an 11^th Century war, because this ancestor of mine had saved his life.

“Henceforth, thou shalt be called Eyre, for thou hath given me the air to breathe.”

The Eyre Family of Eyre Court had two castles to its’ name. They were festive individuals, one of whose later Barons, Giles Eyre, would eat slabs of beef direct off the animal on the barbecue. Another family member was responsible for burning down his own hotel. My father had a concert in that town in the sixties. He started the concert with an apology for his ancestor’s deeds. That broke the ice.

The two family palaces are now haunted ruins on the west coast.

The last baron to call himself that was, in fact, Giles Eyre, who was called Stale Eyre. He boarded up the windows in his house.

During the difficult potato plague in Ireland 1848, the family fled to America.

Here in America, Grandmother Eyre wrote a scrapbook in which she inscribed that the laughter of little girls was the finest sound in the entire world. Mother Nell was a colourful woman with a great sense of humour, who invited bagpipers and singers to the family house and loved good cooking just as much as she did Irish music.