Insect Collection at Vänersborg Museum

The insect collection at Vänersborg Museum includes insects from several collectors. The largest part of the collection comes from Gustaf Olof David von Hackwitz, lecturer in natural history at Högre allmänna läroverket in Vänersborg and curator of the Vänersborg Museum's natural history collections. His collection comes from several parts of the world and was collected between 1870 and 1914. Another part of the collection comes from the Vänersborg citizen Axel Wilhelm Eriksson (1846-1901), a well-known ornithologist and donor of the Vänersborg Museum's extensive collection of southwest African birds, a collection that also includes bird eggs, mammals, insects and ethnographica. Eriksson studied at Högre allmänna läroverket in Vänersborg from 1858 to 1862 and emigrated to southern Africa where, during the period 1869 to 1901, he ran an extensive trading business alongside zoological research. Most of the insects were collected by Eriksson and often have provenance and sometimes collection dates. The collection area is Namibia, Angola, South Africa and Botswana. Part of the collection was collected by the officer's son Gustaf Kylberg (1837-1917) from Såtenäs, Tun, Västergötland. He studied at Högre allmänna läroverket in Vänersborg during the 1840s and later worked as an office manager and architect in Göteborg. The insects come from Malacca, Malaysia. The date of collection is missing. Part of the collection was collected by the founder of the Vänersborg Museum, the merchant and philanthropist Adolf Andersohn (1820-1887). The provenance and date of collection are missing. Karl Gottfrid Schagerström (1863-1896), a student at Högre allmänna läroverket in Vänersborg 1873-1878, has donated a collection from the Belgian Congo where he served as a naval officer on the Congo River in the service of the Congo State during the years 1886-1896. The date of collection is missing. Knut Knutsson (1857-1930), from Sjöryd, Ås, Västergötland, student at Högre allmänna läroverket in Vänersborg 1867-1876, donated a collection from Cameroon and Sierra Leone. Knutsson worked as a businessman and acquired large areas of land in what is now Cameroon during the 1880s-90s and founded the trading house Waldau & Knutsson there. Knutsson also made collections for Svenska Sällskapet för Antropologi och Geografi. Knutsson has also donated a small collection of ethnographic items to the Vänersborg Museum. The collection date is missing. Lund Zoological Institute, a collection up to 1938. A small part was collected between 1996 and 1997 by biologist Torulf Greek, who was a project employee at Vänersborg Museum during the collection period. Both the provenance and collection date are included. It is also Torulf Greek who has identified all the insects in the collection.