In their biography of the eminent negro actor, Ira Aldridge, Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock have collected a wealth of information about the life and career of a unique personality. Their research has unearthed a multitude of documents and facts, which makes this biography a most thorough study. As is natural in such a work, however, certain problems remained unsolved. For example, while details of the place and date of birth and of the parents of Ira Aldridge's first wife were eventually established beyond doubt, Marshall and Stock could not trace the origin of his second wife. I am happy to be able to supply the missing information.

According to the marriage certificate her name was Amanda Paulina von Brandt; she was the daughter of Oloff von Brandt, a baron of Sweden, and was born on March 2, 1834. Her daughter, Amanda Christina Elisabeth Aldridge, who was interviewed by the authors of the biography, apparently knew little about her mother's origins. She believed that Amanda Paulina had been left motherless at an early age, and that after her father's remarriage she had left home and joined an operatic group. She had studied with the same teacher as Jenny Lind, a Herr Berg, at the Royal Theater School in Stockholm. The daughter further believed that her parents had met somewhere on the Continent, probably in Germany—at any rate neither in Sweden nor in England.

Finding no trace of a Swedish aristocratic family called von Brandt, the biographers had to call off the search for any trace of her Swedish background.

Baron Oloff von Brandt was in fact a falsification; Amanda Paulina's father was plain Olof Brandt, a farrier-blacksmith of Västerås, a country town in Sweden. His only child, Amanda Paulina, was born on March 7, 1833. Amanda Paulina Aldridge's first daughter born in wedlock was christened Christina Elisabeth—the names of Amanda Brandt's mother—a most unusual combination of names in Sweden. This fact establishes the women's identity, despite the small discrepancy in Amanda Paulina's date of birth as stated in the marriage certificate.

A few years after the birth of Amanda Paulina, her mother died and her father died a few years later when she was eleven years old. In 1848 the orphan moved to Stockholm, and three years later she became involved in the greatest scandal that had ever hit the Swedish literary world.