Elin Gerda Lindell
Elin Gerda Lindell was a passenger on Titanic.
Early life[]
Elin Gerda Nilsdotter was born on August 25, 1881 in Rau's parish, Helsingborg, Malmöhus County, Sweden. Her parents were Nils Persson and Johanna Nilsson. She had 4 siblings, which were all brothers, 3 elder and 1 younger: They were Edvard, born in 1870, Anders Peter in 1872, Nils, born in 1875 and she was followed by Johan Albert in 1878.
On 25 January 1904 Gerda got engaged to Edvard Lindell. He was also from Helsingborg. They were married on the 25th of October 1905. After the wedding, Gerda's engagement and wedding rings were put together. Edvard had been employed as a foreman at the Ramlösa shoe factory for four years and saved money for an Atlantic trip. The trip was supposed to take them to Hartford, Connecticut where the couple would settle. They dreamed of a better life in America in 1912.
On their journey, the couple was accompanied by Alma Pålsson from Bjuv and her four small children. The Pålssons were on their way to the United States to be reunited with husband and father Nils, who lived in Chicago.
Titanic[]
At Southampton, on Wednesday the 10th of April, they embarked on the new ocean liner of the White Star Line: Titanic. They had a ticket for Third Class. On board, they also got to know two of the later well-known Swedish passengers: Carl Olof Jansson and August Wennerström.
Gerda wore the wedding ring the night the Titanic sank. Their beautiful romance ended in a tragic story, as the Titanic hit an iceberg on the night of April 14. She had enough damage beneath the water line to cause tons of waters to flow into the ship rapidly. Evacuation took place shortly after midnight on April 15, when Captain Smith had established that his vessel would founder, but both Gerda and Edvard perished in the disaster when the ship went down
Carl Olof Jansson and August Wennerström survived the disaster. They were therefore later able to tell about the horrific hours when the Titanic sank, including the sad fate of Edvard and Gerda Lindell. The two heroic men later told that Edvard had managed to get aboard Collapsible A, but Gerda was still in the water without a life jacket. Wennerström managed to swim to the lifeboat and tried to hold on to Gerda's hands while she held onto the railing of the lifeboat. After a while, he couldn't hold on to Gerda, who lost her strength and disappeared into the depths. The wedding ring slipped off her finger and ended up in the boat. Wennerström found it and gave it to Edvard.
Wennerström later shared the mysterious allegory that Edvard went completely gray in less than 30 minutes after he realized that his beloved Gerda was gone forever. Shocked and apathetic, he died moments later, losing his wife's wedding ring. The interesting thing is, a young Finnish Third Class passenger, Anna Sofia Sjöblom, had a similar story about a couple dieing with the husband’s hair turning completely white and dieing from the shock of losing his wife. Olga Lundin, another young woman in Third Class, from Sweden, had also spoken of witnessing this inexplainable occurance.
After her death[]
The ring that Elin Gerda Lindell wore on that fateful night, which was a combination of a wedding and engagement ring.
The survivors were later taken aboard the Carpathia to be shipped to New York, while the lifeboat drifted on the windy sea for nearly a month. On May 13, 1912, the lifeboat was found near the Bermudas by the Oceanic. They found Gerda Lindell's wedding ring on the bottom of the boat under three corpses. The ring ended up at the shipping company's office in New York to be forwarded to the Swedish consulate.
From there the ring was sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When the ring's identity was confirmed, it was sent to Gerda's closest relative, who was the father Nils Persson in Gantofta. On June 12, Nils signed it off at the police authority in Malmö. However, the bodies of Edvard and Gerda were never found.
The ring today[]
Ship historian Claes-Göran Wetterholm heard about the ring during his research on the Titanic. In the end, he learned that it was at Gunilla Genrup's in Södra Sandby (where I grew up, by the way /Webmaster) outside Lund, whose grandfather Nils Nilsson was Gerda's brother. Claes Göran says in an interview to Helsingbor's Dagblad from 2004:
"Everything is pure coincidence. For many years I had thought that the ring just had to be there. Now I finally got to see it. Everything matched - even the inscription. It was so exciting and amazing. - Imagine that this ring floated around in a boat for a month on a stormy sea - and that the boat was then found. And that the ring was still there.”
In later years, the ring has been shown at a number of exhibitions. In 1997 it was exhibited in Hamburg when there were 1.2 million visitors. It has since been featured in Titanic exhibitions in Zurich, Munich, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Gothenburg. Otherwise, it is kept in a safe deposit box in Stockholm and some say it is worth half a million kroner. Claes-Göran Wetterholm says:
"It is so special, so famous and so rewritten."