Interpreting ten daybooks 1890–1914, by the wife and mother Clara Lundeberg, I follow her daughter Sigrid (1877–1913) from the age of twelve. Although the notes are brief, the life of the family can be traced, the household work, tasks, every visit, travel, and entertainment. The family tradition with photo albums will provide the context of the daybooks. Clara’s granddaughter was my mother-in-law. Inspired by the phenomenological approach, I combine the primary source research with autoethnography (self-reflection) to acknowledge the presence of myself, the author, analyzing the daybook of personal experience and emotions, reflexivity, empathy – broadly human experiences.

To reach beneath the mere facts recorded in daybooks and interviews I read between the lines for mood, feeling, emotion, senses. As Sigrid passed away in 1913, leaving three young children, she became a void of the family memory, a present actor in silence, to use the terminology of Bruno Latour and ANT.  From an ANT perspective, the lost mother, the artefacts of the old home, the daybooks, may be considered actants

The affective turn opened for the research of sense and emotion to include emphasis on bodies and materiality, the study of practices, and historical phenomenology. I draw on materiality and narrativity for this case study of body, affect, emotion, sensorial experience, mood, and manual work. 

Clara, herself was a soldier’s daughter, and the handmaid who became a wealthy housewife, and brought up her daughter to be a bourgeois lady, not knowing that they were heading for the middle-class of the 20th century.