Charlie's new Sweater!

I can't resist blogging my great niece and her sweater that I made her. (my mother had to help me finish though, because she was growing so fast! But I did most of it.)

Ingeborg Ludvigsen

This is Lysvoll, the hotel where our great grandmother worked. I superimposed her onto the picture. I made it faded out because it's from a bygone era. It looks better that way I think.

The house where our dad grew up in Stryn was in between the road and the river. In the summer the river had salmon in it, but no one was allowed to fish the salmon, because the fishing rights had been sold to rich tourists.

My grandfather was Peder Bergh. He told a story to my parents about when he was a little boy. Peder's mother, Ingeborg Ludvigsen Bergh was from Bergen, a big city on the west coast of Norway. She had once been to England and worked for Queen Victoria's lady-in-waiting. That's probably when she learned to speak English. She also accompanied this lady on a trip to Boston. When she returned to Norway she opened a little guest house. She also started an English school. She also had other jobs, one job was at a hotel for rich guests and tourists who came to fish in the river.

One of those who came to fish in the river was king Håkon, Norway's first king in modern history. Little Peder Bergh was out playing by the river, and somehow got a fishing hook caught in his poor bottom! King Håkon put Peder over his knee, and helped him get the nasty fishhook out of his bottom.

This is king Håkon, he came from Denmark's House of Glücksburg in 1905 with his wife and baby boy to be Norway's king after the union with Sweden was dissolved.

Family Ghost stories

In the distant past here in Norway the young girls would take the sheep and goats up to the mountains for the summer. There they would stay on the “sæter” all summer. A distant matriarch in our family, we think her name was Kanutta, she may have been my grandmother's great grandmother was out walking in the evening watching the cows, as hands were never to be idle, her hands were busy knitting as she walked. Under her arm she had a pail of sour cream. She met upon a beautiful lady dressed in blue who started to talk to her. As they were taking, our great grandmother offered her flatbread spread with sour cream. As she was preparing this she noticed that the blue lady had a bit of a tail sticking out below the hem of her dress. This was the mark of the Hulder. Our brave matriarch took her knitting needle and drew the mark of a cross in the sour cream on the flatbread she'd prepared for the stranger. But when the Hulder saw the cross, she vanished in the mist. Kanutta told this story and maintained it was true.
Onkel Amund Brænde, my grandmother's older brother was maybe no more than three years old when the family had bought a beautiful used sofa at an auction. Our great uncle came in from the living room to tell his mother, “lady hit me”, “lady hit me”. At this our venerable great-grandmother went into the living room to see what was going on. As he looked over at the couch, little great-uncle Amund said, “lady gone!”. The couch was instantly removed from the household!
Our great-grandmother, Ingeborg Brænde, nee Flote, didn't live to see her children grow up, she passed away of unknown causes in her late 40's. Our grandmother, Ingrid, who was 4 years old at the time of her mother's death, was raised by her sisters. She would tell stories later about them that had been unkind to her. One night when Ingrid was still very young she was in bed crying and afraid because of a storm outside. I remember her telling us that she “saw” her mother came to her and smiled at her. At this point Ingrid poked her sister, and said, “Svanhild, it's Mother!” When she looked back the apparition was gone. Even though none of her 6 siblings believed this story, Ingrid maintained it was true all her life.