Kvarboende vid vägs ände : Människors försörjning i det inre av södra Norrland under svensk efterkrigstid

Sammanfattning: In this dissertation the question of why people want to stay in the county-side has been analysed from an economic-historic perspective. The specific research question has been: Using which formal economic means of sustenance could those who remained in Ängersjö parish ensure their survival in the years 1950 to 1990? A number of different types of sources have been used, including income tax registers, data on migration, agricultural statistics, parish registers, interviews, and printed public statistics. The population of Ängersjö parish decreased through the entire period of investigation. In the early 1950s the population pyramid in Ängersjö resembled Sweden’s quite considerably. After this point, the tendencies towards depopulation grew stronger. By the early 1990s, the population had returned to the levels of the early 1800s, i.e. before the forest became valuable. This time, however, the proportion of older inhabitants was much larger. Most of the remaining households supported themselves through wage labour in the forestry sector, which essentially was a male preoccupation. At the margin, supplementary incomes, such as the renting of cottages and capital revenues, could add to household earnings, and contributions by women probably played an important part in that context. In addition, informal economic activities, such as berry-picking and the exchange of labour, could expand the means of support by a maximum of 20 percent. In spite of all these efforts, most of the remaining households earned less than an average Swedish industrial worker. The income differences could to some degree be compensated by lower housing and living costs, but many households probably enjoyed a lower material standard of living. Demonstrably, most of the remaining inhabitants of Ängersjö were willing to pay the economic price associated with the “feelings of freedom” or the upkeep of their ancestral home of which many inhabitants spoke.