Betty Bull was born in Växjö in July 1829. Her mother Lena (née Helena Christina) Östergren was originally from Växjö. However, her father, John Bull, was born in Gustavia on St. Barthélemy (then a Swedish colony) in 1807. John Bull's father and Betty's grandfather was a Swedish officer who worked for the colonial administration on the island.
His name was Baron Carl Gustaf Koskull. Upon returning to Småland, Carl Gustaf Koskull brought his son John with him. John's mother was a black woman whose name we do not know. Maybe her name was Betty?
The boy was about ten years old when he came to Engaholm Manor outside of Växjö. This is where he grew up and learned to be a painter. Baron Koskull appears to have cared for John and his family. When Betty, his first grandchild, was baptized, Baron Koskull attended as her godfather. However, he never formally acknowledged their family ties. Baron Koskull married in 1830 and had another son, Anders Magnus, who eventually stood to inherit his father's manor estate.
Little Betty spent her entire childhood in Växjö. Over time, she gained five younger siblings - two brothers and three sisters. Her mother Lena was a midwife and her father John a painter. John is also said to have worked as a butcher, a clerk at Kronoberg Farm Estate, and a caretaker at Växjö Hospital. When John died of tuberculosis, shortly after New Year 1847, Betty was only seventeen years old.
In the summer of 1847, Betty turned eighteen years old. That November, she married Salomon Bäckström, an elementary school teacher from Urshult. Salomon was a few years older than Betty, and our guess is that the two of them met while he was training to become a teacher at the seminary in Växjö. The newlywed couple moved to Grangärde in southern Dalecarlia, where Salomon had secured employment. They had ten children altogether. Unfortunately, two died as infants. Three sons and five daughters reached adulthood, and except for one daughter, they all left Sweden. Alma Helena Augusta (1855), number three in the sibling group, married a Fredrik Andersson from Ludvika. They stayed in Dalecarlia and had nine children.
All of Alma's siblings emigrated to the United States of America. Most of them married other Swedish-Americans, and nearly all died childless. The only exception was Betty's youngest daughter Edla Oskara Betty (1866), who married Petter Andersson Forsman and had six children.
Betty never left Grangärde in Dalecarlia, where she enjoyed a long life. She was not yet forty when Salomon died, and she became a widow. A few years later, Betty remarried the much older Hyttkärr Anders Persson, a tenant farmer from Kvarngärde. Betty's eldest daughter had already left Sweden at the time of their wedding, but she still had seven children living at home, ages three to eighteen. Her second marriage was childless, and after nineteen years, she was widowed once again.
Just like her mother, Betty Bull-Bäckström worked as a midwife. She must have come into very intimate contact with many women in the area, and many infants would have been welcomed into the world by her safe hands. Betty is also said to have managed Sunnansjö Hospital. She died at the age of 80 in Lågnäs in Grangärde in 1910.
Information about Betty Bull-Bäckström is from the church archives of Växjö, Aringsås and Grangärde, see Swedish National Archives' Digital Research Room