Terrible story found from Sweden in 1864 during source-a-thon

Question

While adding a source from the same page during Source-a-Thon I found this terribly sad story about Hanna Mattsdotter who died in Röddinge.

Röddinge kyrkoarkiv, Födelse- och dopböcker, SE/LLA/13322/C I/6 (1862-1895), bildid: 00136543_00135

https://sok.riksarkivet.se/bildvisning/00136543_00135

She died in 1864, two months after taking two tablespoons of sulphuric acid, then giving birth to a baby that she immediately murdered. And after that living in pain and agony until she died.

So very sad.

Answer 1

There are many sad stories that come up once you become a detective genealogist. I was wondering why one of my aunts husband was such a jerk, abusive and running away and leaving his family.  Turns out his father was murdered by his own father. The grandfather was jealous because his girlfriend was paying too much attention to his son,  so he took a gun and shot his own son in the head. The son died instantly. What a traumatic experience for my aunt's husband as he was just a boy at the time. The grandfather ended up in a mental hospital for the rest of his life.

Another sad story about my great grandmother, Catarina Andersdotter (Andersdotter-5822). She lost her father, mother and her only two siblings when she was only two years old. Her mother's sister took her in and raised her. I guess being only 2 years old she probably wasn't affected as much as an older child would have been. Undoubtedly she probably grew up not remembering her birth family but still a tragic situation.

I'd like to hear from others with similar stories as sometimes we get caught up with birth, marriage and death records of our ancestors and forget they were just people with the same problems we all go through. The personal stories are what really bring them to life.

Comments

The saddest story I've come across was my great-grandmother's sister. She was placed in a mental hospital and spent several months there. Eventually she was deemed fit to leave, but at that time you needed a family member to come get you out, I guess they wanted to make sure you wouldn't be living on the streets or something.

So she wrote to her husband, not knowing that he died in a car accident just weeks before. Nobody answered, nobody wanted to talk to a person with the stigma of being in a mental hospital. She lived for many years in the hospital, and it's not known if she ever learned why her husband didn't answer, or what happened to her kids (they were taken in by relatives).

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Oh, very sad stories indeed!

I don't have one that stands out I think but one of my relatives in the 1700s lost all of her 8 children but one before they were two years old.

Another couple of ancestors had 9 children, and only two grew up to become adults. The saddest part is that they didn't talk with the surviving children about their dead siblings, and also had to leave their deceased children behind in different graveyards as they moved on to new places.

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One of my gg aunts died, I'm told, from sepsis after falling through the trap door to the root cellar and suffering a broken leg - one of her sons had opened it up, then put a rug over the opening as a prank.  I can't imagine how that kid must have felt.

The saddest stories I've come across in sourcing profiles are the suicides.  I always wonder why.

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My grandfather's family in Kannus lost seven of their nine children in the 1860s from the epidemics that swept Finland after the famine. At that time the deaths in the parish outnumbered the births and most of the deaths were children under 10.