Sick but literate: My deepest roots to date

So I´m not done waffling about my family and our past whereabouts just yet. There is loads left to write, but lucky for whoever stumbles on this blog my body just can´t take that amount of sitting in front of the computer.

On the day I rummaged through binbags, drawers and closets in the cat-infested house I came across a small wooden box behind a load of linnen in a sealed wardrobe. Thanks to that bundles of newspapers, furniture and boxes had barricaded the doors probably more than a decade ago, nothing smelled worse than had it lied in a sealed environment in any old house. I was looking through alot of things just then so I just opened the box absentmindedly and out fell a few loose sheets of paper. I noticed that the handwriting looked very old, like from those days when you got a smack over the fingers at shcool if you didn´t make the arches of the script connect properly, so I gathered the sheets and brought them down with me for further inspection back at our house at Hou.

My skill at deciffering old calligraphic texts is not helped by that if was in Danish, but when gran later had a read through some of them she noted the date 1890 (the oldest was 1880), and after a bit of thinking we figured out that most of the letters were written by my grans grandmother Frederikke Jespersen, later Frederikke Pedersen, who after she married Mads lived in a section of a rented house in Trenekaer, while he worked with laying down a new roof on Tranekaer castle. She mostly wrote to her mother at "Olgas" in Lohals, or her sister Caroline who never married and died before she turned 30 (how will I find out why? was she ill?). There is never any mention about Frederikkes father, the sailor, and we can then guess that he might have passed away already in the 1890´s.

The letters give a good picture of what everyday existence on the island was like. Life in Tranekaer didn´t seem too easy and Frederikke often thanks for the milk, cheese, eggs (which cost as much as 5 öre a piece!) and vegetables she gets sent from "Olga´s" abundant gardens. Some letters are replies from the sister Line, and she always asks about the children Olga (the one that later named the house), little Carl (my great grandfather) and baby Gugge (or Gustaf who later died in syfilis and was sent home from his gardening shool in a led casket, never to be mentioned among people again).

Frederikke´s handwriting is rather hard to make out, leaving alot of the letters for gran to ponder upon. I´m rather curious and excited to learn more of what they say, as this is the oldest signs of life of my faily yet