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Paper short abstract:

Great grandmother kept the diaries, creating the ethnography. I am the second ethnographer, employing empathy to translate her proficiencies, how strive for position balanced against personal wishes. In this, interest in the everyday conditions of the past has to be weighed against family privacy.

Paper long abstract:

Empathy is a way to get closer to experience of the Other – to be balanced by ethical considerations. Great grandmother Clara made the ethnography as the first subject. I am the second, filling in the family history.

By referring to auto-ethnography, I acknowledge the presence of myself analyzing personal experience – broadly humane to share with readers.

Drawing on the non-representational-research/methodologies is to justify my need to go beyond matters to suggest the interpretation while considering matters of ethics.

Born a soldier’s daughter, Clara rose to manager of an estate, married and inherited a fortune. Her first marriage did not turn her into a person of rank but her second did, to the son of a clergyman, together with that legacy. She wanted a nice, bourgeois home, I assume. When this was built in a modern railway village, furnished with well-to-do furniture and utensils from the manor house, photos were taken of the family at home. Here I see the social ambition she never mentions. I traced it by her care about the ritual visits for coffee-at-eleven and the social life of the village. The staged photos confirm her position. Clara herself being a professional housekeeper raised her daughter to become a bourgeois lady who could play the piano, embroider, arrange fine dining. None of them knew that they were heading for the new middle class, while she expressed her lived experience towards the backdrops of social groups, women’s agency, and the upcoming modernity in Sweden from 1890 onwards