Lydia, on her tiptoes, peeks over the crowd

This photo of the children of Robert Albin and Anna Karolina Abrahamsson again seems to confirm that, financially anyway, life was not too shabby for their family. None of my other three Scandinavian grandparents have any professional portraits of them as children. Lydia's future husband Rikard never posed for a picture until he came to America. Professional photographs were expensive. That's why we have those creepy post mortem photos from the Victorian era. That was the only remembrance of a child who died. I have been studying the pic, particularly my grandmother. There she is second from right, peeking out between her oldest and her youngest sister. Maybe on her tippy toes? I became hooked on the BBC show "Downton Abbey". The English countryside, the costumes...beautiful. It is a real insight into the lives of Western European women during the Victorian era. The era that Lydia was born into. There was really no other future for women but that of wife and mother. Not that Robert Albin didn't love all his children but, how valued was a female child in this society and in this time? Let alone one of seven daughters? Maybe Lydia is standing on her toes to be noticed. "Hey I'm back here, the short one with the choppy haircut and the buck teeth, look at me too, I'm here too." A ticket to America was a ticket to the unknown for sure but a ticket to something different or maybe a chance to be someone different.  

Just a thought,
-Ranae

                            

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