Above is one of the rare photos in Gerda's photo album that is marked with both place and date.
When I first started going through her photos, years ago, I still had difficulties identifying the place though. From the name Oakhill, in English, and knowing that she had lived in America, and had worked as travelling lady's maid, I assumed it must be somewhere in America. It turned out to be from much closer to home, though: This Oakhill is actually situated in Stockholm, Sweden. The English name goes way back to the early 19th century, when there was another building on the hill, serving as summer residence for a British diplomat, Sir Thomas Baker.
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| Oakhill, Stockholm, April 2013 Photo by Holger Ellgaard Wikimedia Commons See more photos from Oakhill at https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakhill |
The Oakhill we see here was built in 1910 as a palace for the Swedish Prince Wilhelm and his wife, the Russian princess Maria Pavlovna. It was designed by the architect Frederic Boberg and had 40 rooms. However, the royal couple got divorced already in 1914, and moved out of the palace. Since 1926 it has been been home to the Italian Embassy in Stockholm.
The Swedish Wikipedia article about Oakhill says that between 1914-1926, the palace stood empty for a while and then "in the mid 1920s" was rented out to Ira Nelson Morris. Looking up him, I found that he was "an American author and diplomat appointed the United States Minister to Sweden, serving from 1914 to 1923." - Which in my opinion makes it more likely that Oakhill was rented by Morris during (part of) that period rather than the "mid" 1920s.
Ira Nelson Morris was married to Constance Lily Rothschild, daughter of the wealthy American businessman Victor Henry Rothschild. The couple had two children, Constance Irene Morris and Ira Victor Morris, born 1903 in Chicago. The son became an author, and has his own Wikipedia article as well, confirming that he was raised abroad in Sweden.
[Why were people so keen on naming their offspring after themselves? It's so confusing!!]
Under the heading 'Personal Life' in the article about Ira Nelson Morris, there is also this note: "In 1921, while sailing to New York, on the Scandinavian-American liner United States, Morris saved the life of 19-year-old Ellen Neilson, of Brooklyn, in mid-ocean, when she was nearly washed overboard." (In honour of that, he later got a ship named after him - SS Ira Nelson Morris - in 1944, a couple of years after his death.)
Now, where does my great-aunt Gerda come into the picture?
Is she just out on a walk, posing for the camera with this impressive building as background?
No, the connection goes a bit deeper than that.
In the list of Gerda's work certificates that I received years ago from a relative (Bengt W, grandson of another of Gerda's sisters), the next one (after Lyon, France, 1919), is dated 20/5 1921, and "written on stationery from Oakhill, Djurgården [Stockholm], by someone with illegible signature, about to return to the United States".
Adding one thing to another, my conclusion is that after Gerda returned to Sweden in the autumn of 1919, her next employment (until 20 May 1921) was as lady's maid to Mrs Morris (born Constance Lily Rothschild) at Oakhill.
Wondering how best to connect the content of this post to this week's Sepia Saturday prompt, I extended my searches about Mrs Morris a bit further still, and guess what I found?
The perfect transition to this week's Sepia prompt:
