When my grandmother was young, her parents Alma and Olof Frid (which, yes, is where I got Vendela's surname from), had foster children at least occasionally.
One such child was a little girl whose mother had died (I don't know where the father was). The little girl was getting sicker, and at one point my grand-aunt was babysitting the child. She fell asleep, and when she woke up a woman dressed in white was leaning over the cradle. The woman picked up the child and walked away. My grand-aunt rushed over to the cradle. The child was dead.
Sometime later, my grand-aunt saw a photo of a young woman. She recognized the woman in the picture as the one she'd seen and asked who it was. That was the child's mother.
This is used in my story as something that Vendela's grandmother Elis tells her happened to her. The child in that story is a boy named Antonius, which is Olof Frid's middlename. As another touch of curiosa: Elis is named from my paternal grandfather's great-aunt. The farm that Vendela grew up on is located where my father grew up, though it looks differently. The Swedish novelist Emilie Flygare-Carlén spent some time at that farm, and the path out of it crosses a bridge that's existed since the middle ages.