Long post about family history below.
My aunt on the dad's side has a habit of posting some family history now and then on her social media, and I knew things about her grandmother (so, my great paternal grandmother) that were just showing what kind of person she was in a unforgiving time around the turn of the last-last century.
Born in the 1870's she got kicked out my her mother when she was 5 and spent nary more than a couple of months in school and was illiterate - but she had her own family and at the age of 37 (which is fuck, close to my age and this would have been at the start of the 1910's) her husband died and she was left with four children. The youngest were not even ten years old. What we would call the social services today (the poorhouse) were going to take the children in for child auctioning (that was a thing, and it was done at the LOWEST bidding) - but this woman is on record to have said "but then I became so cross that I cussed them out and told them what I would do with them if they tried"... but in a much more rural Swedish fashion.
She also went out of her way to held young women that were pregnant, thrown out of their homes, or otherwise homeless.
One instance a widower asked her to take care of his daughter because his new wife demanded him to give the child away and she was given a stipend of half a Swedish krona a month for her troubles instead of auctioning the child away through the previously mentioned poorhouse. She stayed there until she became an adult and said about my paternal grandmother that "I could never have asked for a kinder mother".
It makes you think that not all was doom and gloom back then, but it sure was a terrible time for many, but I am glad people like her were around to make things a little bit more bearable.
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