Sara Holmsten

1713 - 1795

Sweden

Sara Holmsten was a farmer’s daughter from Åland, who as a little girl experienced the havoc wreaked by the Russians among the skerries of Sweden and had to survive by begging. She later supported herself as a maid and factory worker. After coming into contact with the Moravian Church at the age of forty, she worked for the leading members of the parish.

At the age of sixty-eight, she was admitted to Johannes’s poorhouse in Stockholm and at the age of seventy-two dictated and partly wrote her autobiography, which, in historical terms, is the most interesting of the biographies by Moravian Church members. She is pious, but in her account it is her hard life that is in the foreground.