@DrJulieHardwick blog got me thinking about a case that still haunts me. Brita Olofsdotter was an unmarried maidservant in Stockholm when the body of a dead newborn was found in the water near where she lived in 1652. Police came around to ask her about it.

Brita knew nothing about it. But then she confessed to something else. Seven years previously, she had been working for a shoemaker outside the city and got pregnant. She had a little girl, Karin, and struggled to get work as an unmarried mother. So she went to Stockholm.

She couldn’t find work there either, so she decided that she needed to abandon her child. She took two-year-old Karin to a busy street near a windmill and left her there. The child wore a fur and a red cap.

Brita left her for poverty’s sake, she said. She never sought after the girl and didn’t mention it to anyone.
She got work carrying sand and leaves. When the police turned up her conscience was heavy and she confessed to abandoning her child. Brita was sentenced to death.

It was the red cap that got me, that Brita remembered what her daughter wore when she left her. She didn't have to confess, but it was weighing so heavily on her. I went outside and had a cry. #archiveemotion