Fredrika Bremer was born on 17 August 1801 at Tuorla Manor in Piikkiö Parish outside of Åbo, Sweden (now Turku, Finland). She was the second daughter of five and the second child of seven of Carl Fredrik Bremer (1770–1830) and Birgitta Charlotta Hollström (1777–1855). Her grandparents Jacob and Ulrika Fredrika Bremer had built up one of the largest business empires in Swedish Finland but, upon his mother's death in 1798, Carl liquidated their holdings. (A few years later, the Finnish theater of the Napoleonic Wars would see Finland annexed to Russia.) When Fredrika was three years old, the family moved to Stockholm. The next year, they purchased Årsta Castle, about distant from the capital. Fredrika passed the next two decades of her life summering there and at another nearby estate owned by her father, spending winter in the family's Stockholm apartment.