Petronella’s Picture Album

I’ve always been impressed with my great grandmother, Petronella (Magnusson) Peterson. If you want to talk about being “Big Girl”, Petronella was that and then some. Before we look at her photo album, I’ll give you a little background information.

In May of 1887, my grandmother Hilma’s father, Johannes Peterson, left his farm in Torskinge, Jonkopping, (the photo is from a cousin in Sweden) for the United States. In Hilma’s memoirs she wrote that her father had a fiancé in Sweden, but she couldn’t decide if she wanted to come to America or not. After five years in the U.S., Johannes wrote to a friend and offered to pay the way of anyone who would be willing to come and marry him. Petronella was from the same parish in Torskinge, and while they shared mutual friends, they really didn’t know each other that well. In 1891 she boarded a ship all by herself to come to a new country and to marry her husband-to-be.

On Ancestry.com you can sometimes find your ancestors on passenger lists from the ships they traveled on. Here you can see that Petronella is on line 73. Her last name was listed as Magnusdotter, not Magnusson, because she was, after all, Magnus’s daughter, not his son.

The list a little closer up. She was thirty-one years old and on her way to Fosston, Minnesota, where she had never been before, to start a new life with a man with whom she was only slightly acquainted. Talk about an element of risk!

Johannes’s farm in Minnesota was not far from the town of Lengby, in Columbia Township. Above is a screenshot from Ancestry showing the layout of the farms and who owned them. I added a yellow circle and arrow to mark his property. You’ll notice this was from 1902, the year my grandma Hilma was born. On the right, I’m pretty sure I found the general area of the Peterson farm on Google Maps, based on the railroad tracks and the southern border of the township.

I don’t know what all Petronella brought with her to the U.S., but her photo album may be the only thing that has survived all these years. As a teenager, I loved to look through album, which by that time had been handed down to my mom.

The main problem with this album was that so few (read: almost none) of the photos had names to go with them. Still, that didn’t take away from the thrill of studying the old photos and wondering who the people were. Did any of them look like me? Were some of them friends and not relatives? How would we ever know?

I don’t know who did this or when, but it was most likely one of Petronella’s grandchildren. Could it have been my mom and Aunt June, or some of their cousins, like Inez and Lester?

An undated photo of Inez and Lester. My mom always told me that they had cut their own hair prior to this being taken. If they’d cut their own hair, they’d probably color in their grandmother’s picture album, right? But then June and Joan probably had more access to it since it was passed down to their mother, Hilma. I just know that if I were the mom of whoever it was, I would have thrown a fit!

I have always thought these were “cabinet cards”, but with a bit of research I learned that they were actually called “cartes de visite”. According to the Nantucket Historical Association, the carte de visite was invented in 1854, and enjoyed its greatest popularity from 1860 to 1866. They measure about 4 by 2.5 inches and were popular because they were sturdy and inexpensive to have made. Their small size made them great for keeping in albums like Petronella’s, and their cardboard backings made them easy to mail or trade with friends.

Cabinet cards like this one, while still mounted on sturdy cardboard, made their appearance around 1866. They were large enough to be seen across a room when displayed on a shelf or in a cabinet, which is probably where they got the name. This one was in Petronella’s album but had no name on it.

My grandma Hilma had written names on the back of a few of the photos. This one is “Johanna the Dressmaker”. I haven’t found a Johanna in Petronella’s family on Ancestry, so I still don’t know if she was a relative or a friend. I’ve always wondered if she made the dress she is wearing in the picture.

I do know that this is Sven Johan Peterson, who married Stina Casja, the only sibling of Johannes Peterson who didn’t come to the U.S. My Peterson relatives in Sweden, of whom I have only met one, are descended from Sven and Stina. Both Stina’s and Sven’s fathers’ names were Peter, so that’s why Stina didn’t have to change her last name when she got married.

This is Petronella’s sister, Marie. (Her birth records have her listed as Maria.) That’s my 8th grade handwriting in pink below my grandmother’s. I was on a roll at that time about making sure the family photos had accurate names on them.

I don’t know who these people are. Could the babies be the same as the little boys with the sailor suits? Back then baby and toddler boys often wore dresses, so they could be. I’ve done a bit of research on that, and there are varying reasons for why this was done.

I put these two together to see if I could tell whether they were two different people or two photos of the same person. They look pretty similar. Twins?

Here we see Petronella’s older brother. At the bottom corner I had guessed it was Johan, but now I realize she had another older brother named August. So, does this man look like a Johan or an August to you?

This is an unknown man, along with the back of the photo. Does he look like Johan/August? I’m thinking maybe research into the different photography studios of the time might yield some information about these people. But I don’t even know how I would go about something like that. In Agatha Christie’s “Postern of Fate”, Tuppence visited a photography studio to find a picture of Mary Jordan (who “did not die naturally”). But then again, she lived in the same town. Plus it was fiction.

Unknown man and woman.

Another group of unknown people. The lady in the black dress looks pretty Swedish to me, but then they all were. I really like the other lady’s dress. Could Johanna have made it, I wonder?

I call this one “Young Boy and Baby”.

This is J.P. Svensson.

I only know this because his name is written on the back of the photo, in very pretty handwriting. Other than that, no clue as to who he was.

Algot Svensson must have been related to J.P. Svensson. It looks like the same handwriting on the backs of both photos. Based on their apparent ages in the pictures, I’m going to guess that Algot was J.P’s son. But then who knows if they were both taken in the same year? And how is my family related to them, if at all?

I’m not sure exactly what the first name says (John? Jonah?) but it seems like the last name is Martin. Unless it’s “Somebody-Martin” with a last name that’s not written there. Quite a few others went by two names, like Sven Johan.

At first I hadn’t realized that this one had a name on the back. It’s in pencil, along the top right edge. The name is Nordlund, which I find very interesting because a couple of Petronella’s brothers went by the last name of Nordlund. One of them was her youngest brother, Enoch, who settled in Hartford, Connecticut, and was married to a Maria Johnson. Don’t get confused; the other Johnsons were in Ludington, Michigan, but she wasn’t one of them. A lot of people’s fathers were named Johan/John.

Since this says “Hartford, Conn.” on it, I can only assume it’s a picture of Maria. There was also a nephew named Albin Anderson, who lived with them in Hartford. He was the son of Petronella’s sister Inga, who married Johannes Anderson and never left Sweden. Albin died tragically at the age of 23, and my grandmother wrote that his mother never recovered from his death.

This is from the Hartford paper on August 18, 1915. The article describes three men who had fallen from multi-story buildings in separate incidents, one of whom was Albin Anderson.

This one is smaller than the rest of the “cartes de visite” in the album. I especially like the woman’s hairstyle. On the back you can see how you were able to order multiple copies (twenty-five cents a dozen) of any photo by sending it to Springfield, Ohio. Was she a relative, or was this just a card advertising the photo company?

This cabinet card was done by the Stanton Photo Novelty Company in Springfield. That’s Hilma in the white dress, next to Petronella. Johannes and Petronella must have ordered reprints or different sizes of the photo. We know they lived in Minnesota and would never have gone to Ohio to get their picture taken. This is why you can’t always go by the studio name to tell you where a photo was originally taken.

This is the only photo I have ever seen of Hilma as an adult with her mother. In her later years Petronella suffered from a debilitating form of arthritis, and Hilma, the youngest child and only one still at home, took care of her until her death in 1925.

I found this photo on unsplash/com. It makes me think of all the emigrants from Sweden or anywhere else, and the photos they may have brought with them. Although I don’t know who half of them are, I’m thankful to have my great grandmother’s album of faces from the Old Country.