A beggar's child, a prisoner, a cunning woman
Sidsel Rolandsdatter
1786 – 1854
Sidsel was born to a travelling beggar in Thy and spent her life on the roads of Jutland, in its jails and on the edge of its villages. People paid her to lift curses. The court in Viborg called it fraud. Later writers called her the greatest witch in Jutland. She was my fourth great-grandmother.
udøvet mystiske kunster, bedragerier og kvaksalveri
practised mysterious arts, fraud and quackery
Her baptism was confirmed in Nors church in 1786, and the parish clerk wrote her down only as a beggar woman's child. Her father was a soldier who died in a jail cell in Aalborg. Her mother was said to have been born in Viborg Tugthus, the prison and workhouse that Sidsel herself would come to know well.
She belonged to the natmandsfolk, the people who lived outside the towns and did the work nobody else would do, emptying privies and carting away refuse. She married two night-soil men, had at least fifteen children by five men, and buried at least five of them as babies. She was sent to prison at least three times. In 1854, burned in a fire in the Storring poorhouse, she died in the hospital in Aarhus.
Read her story
- Her lifeFrom the beggar's child of Nors to the night-soil men's house in Aarhus and the poorhouse in Storring.
- The cunning womanA red cat, a buried mole skin, and the verdict that called it fraud.
- FamilyHer parents, her husbands, her fifteen children, and the line that runs down to my great-grandparents.
- TimelineEvery dated event, with its source.
- SourcesThe parish, prison and court records behind every page.