Cue the Trumpets

For the past several weeks I've been poring through Swedish church records from the 18th and 19th centuries. So it's exciting when something comes up that adds some real color to the picture. This posting is about just such a happy event that occurred last weekend.

I primarily make use of the website ancestry.com to store data, pictures, and other sources and to build the family tree. Ancestry has over 2 million subscribers around the world, and it's one of the major players in the market. One of its features is that unless you've specified that your family tree is “Private,” then anyone in that user-base can see the data you've entered. (Not to worry: unless given explicit permission to do so, all information about living people is hidden from other users.) They also have a “Hint” function, which will send you suggestions of other information available that you might find relevant. So it's this way that I've been able to find and make contact with other more distant members of the family who are also involved in researching their past. Finally, if you find that someone has a useful bit of information like a story or an image, then you can link that to your own tree. The original person, in turn, gets a notification that this has been done.

Last weekend I saw that the birth and death records I'd found for Alma Viktoria Larsson (my 2nd cousin 2x removed) had been saved by another user, Ken Olsen. I'd made brief contact with Ken earlier; he's a fourth cousin: we share 3rd great grandparents (that's 5 generations back) Per Barthelsson (1814-1858) and Kjerstin Persdotter (1814-1888). The person in question, Alma Viktoria, was the sister of Ken's grandmother, Signe Teresa Larsson. On an impulse I went to Ken's tree to see where he'd added the documents just to double-check that our records agreed. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was an image:

This turns out to be a newspaper clipping kept over the years by Signe. The caption is a bit hard to read. What I can make out is “Fröken Tora Larrson” and then only a couple of words below that. The word fröken in Swedish means a young lady, like Fräulein in German. Ken's caption to the image is “Alma Tora Larsson competed at the 1912 Summer Olympics finished 8th in the 10 meter diving platform.” This immediately set me to some Internet searching both to corroborate the information and to see what else I could find.

The Summer Olympic Games in 1912 were held in Stockholm. Some of the participants are well known to this day, at least to Americans of a certain age. Duke Kahanamoku was on the U.S. swimming team and won a gold medal in the 100 meter freestyle and a silver medal on the relay team.

Duke Kahanamoku receiving gold medal from King Gustav V.

Jim Thorpe won the gold medals for both the pentathlon and heptathlon. He completely dominated the competition: of the fifteen track and field events in these two competitions, he finished in first place in nine! At the conclusion of the Games, King Gustav V of Sweden congratulated him with the words, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” To which Thorpe replied, “Thanks, King.”

Jim Thorpe at the 1912 Olympic Games.

It turns out that the 1912 Olympics was the first time that there was a women's diving competition. As far as I can make out in this first competition the women were limited to what was called plain diving which consisted of a standing dive from both the 5m and 10m platforms, and then a running dive from both heights. No flips, twists, handstands: just jump in and land headfirst!

Tora Larsson did indeed compete in the Games as part of the Swedish team. Actually, the team was fairly large with 12 members. From the website of the Swedish Olympic Committee I was able to find pictures of ten of them, including one of Tora! The image is cropped pretty closely, so it's hard to get the full impression of what she looked like. (Note: the website did not have images of Ester Edström or Elsa Andersson.)

The diving competition was held in two stages, two preliminary rounds from each of which the top four contestants would advance to the final round. Tora did pretty well in the prelim, but, unfortunately finished eighth in the final. The gold medal was won by her teammate, Greta Johansson (pictured below), and the silver by another teammate, Lisa Regnell.

The first women's diving gold medalist, Greta Johansson (age 17) of Sweden.

I hope that you studied the team pictures carefully, because there's going to be a test. I was able to find a couple of videos of the Swedish women's diving team at the 1912 Olympics. One can be seen at the official Olympics website featuring Gerda Johansson: Click here. (Gerda is not the diver who won the gold, that was Greta. Gerda did not make it into the final round.) The video shows the two types of dives involved. But pause the video near the end when there's a picture of several divers. Can you identify them? (Hint: Gerda is second from the right.) Specifically, do you think that Tora's in the picture? I'm not sure, but just maybe.... Here's a screen grab from the end of the video. This image is not actually a video, although it looks like it. You'll need to go to the official Olympic site to see it (the link is just above):

Here's another video of the team: Click here. I'm pretty sure that Tora's not in this video, but, see if you can identify any of the others. Here's another screen shot:

I came across another web page from the Queen Mary University of London entitled “William Allan Stewart's memories of the Olympics 1912.” Originally I did a quick browse through the images that were posted and didn't find anything particularly interesting. But then I took a closer look at a photo on which is written “Swedish and English swimmers.” As you can tell from their uniforms only one is on the English team (unless, like football/soccer players, they exchange jerseys), and the other five are on the Swedish team. When I actually saw the picture (instead of the thumbnail), I immediately thought I recognized Tora on the far right. Take a look at the picture and let me know what you think!

Finally, I do have a positively identified picture. It comes from the official report of the 1912 games, a document that I can send you if you're interested. It has a full page picture of Tora in mid-dive! I think that's a fitting way to end this post. I never imagined that there was an Olympic athlete in the family. Thanks very much to Ken for sharing that gem!