
No photograph available, this is an AI generated portrait *
Alexander Kutvonen's first wife, Sofia Nilsson, remains a somewhat mysterious person. All we really know for sure about her is the date of her marriage to Alexander (1890) and the date of her death (1902). She is said to have been Swedish. What complicates matters is that Sofia Nilsson has always been a very common name in Sweden. Some sources give her year of birth as 1855 and her place of birth as Malmö. Unfortunately, we were unable to find any unmarried or widowed Sofia born in Malmö 1855 and alive 1880 in the Swedish registers. In the 1880 Swedish census, there were 472 women named Sofia Nilsson. Of them, 130 were unmarried and of suitable age to be potential mothers of Maria Josefina and Ellen Sofia. Of these 130, 21 had Sofia as their only name. If we assume that Alexander already met his future wife when he was an apprentice in Konstantin Aladin's shop, then the meeting could have taken place on a business trip to Sweden, most likely to Stockholm. Of the 21 Sofias, only five lived in Stockholm during the year 1880 census. And of these five, two were born in 1855. These two were born in Ignaberga in the Kristianstad region and in Frykerud in Värmland, not in Malmö. The Sofia from Värmland was still living in Stockholm in 1890, but the Sofia from Ignaberga has vanished completely from the records. She must either be dead or have left the country. Alexander's Sofia could be her — or someone else, we don't know.
* This is an AI generated view how Sofia Nilsson might have looked based on the portraits of her daughters Ellen Sofia and Maria Josefina.