Biography | Ernst Wehtje — Born in Svalov Parish While His Father Farmed Another Man's Land

People who meet the Wehtje name on a cement-company letterhead tend to start the story in Limhamn.

The file actually opens here, two kilometres north of today's Svalov centre, in a parish of rented farms.

Ernst Fredrik Wehtje was born on 11 January 1863 in Svalovs socken, Malmohus County.

Svenska man och kvinnor names the parents: the farmer Ernst Ludvig Hermann Wehtje, of a Holstein family, and Julie Sophie Dorothea Block.

The family history on Swedish Wikipedia is blunt about the household. They lived thinly.

They still paid for the son's law books.

Svalovsgarden in Norra Svalov had been leased from the 1840s by L.F.A. Wehtje of Schleswig-Holstein, then by his son Ernst Ludwig.

The younger Ernst was born on that rented ground, not in a house the family owned.

The church standing beside the road to Kagerod is not the church of his baptism.

The medieval parish church was pulled down in 1877. The yellow-brick successor was consecrated on 28 July 1878.

The old foundations remain marked on the former churchyard, now a memorial grove.

Pin this churchyard. The 1878 building is what a visitor finds.

The parish, not the later nave, is the origin.

Photo: unknown photographer, published in Albert Broome, Studentkamraterna 1880-1905 (Stockholm, 1905), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons