Genealogy Jottings

Since our return from our trip to Norway we have heard the same question asked: Did you look up your relatives? The short answer is “No”. Even though we might have been interested in doing so, we did not even try.

For many reasons, we do not know the names of any of our Norwegian cousins or where they might live:

• Our great-grandparents emigrated with their extended families. Any people who remained behind were their cousins, meaning that relatives alive today are quite remote to us, fourth cousins or so. The American and Norwegian families have not been in touch since our great-grandparents died in the early-to-mid twentieth century. We have no contact information for any relatives residing in Norway today.
• Our families left when Norway still used the patronymic system based on the given name of one’s father. No one had a surname that we can trace. That changed in Norway only about 1920, long after our families had left. We do not know what names the Norway families chose as surnames. They may not call themselves the same names chosen by those who emigrated—Hjelmstad and Walstad (chosen from farm names in Norway) or Bentsen (chosen from the patronymic of one immigrant’s grandfather).
• Although my husband/tech advisor could have distant relatives remaining in the same Ringsaker region where his family always lived, I do not know where to begin looking for mine. They lived in fishing villages on the numerous islands of Lofoten and Vesterålen. Today, the Norwegian government pays residents to leave these small, remote islands. Where would I look now for relatives?
• Our website displays our family tree back to the 1600’s on many Norwegian lines. No descendants living in Norway have ever contacted us.

That said, I must confess that several Norwegians we encountered on our trip asked us whether we planned to visit relatives. “They would want to meet you!” they said. When we explained we did not know of any relatives, they said that is no excuse.

One shopkeeper strongly advised us to visit the local record repository. He claimed they would identify and locate all our relatives for us within the hour. Really?

We did not try it because we had a tight schedule. Not wanting to miss out on seeing some of the sites on our itinerary, we opted to continue with our trip as planned. But if anyone else in the family visits Norway, it might be fun to try looking up the relatives. They would want to meet you!

I think I knew that church membership played an important role in the lives of our ancestors. As a product of the American system of a separated church and state, I just did not appreciate how extensive a role it played for these people. Recently, as I entered a lot of data derived from Church of Norway documents into my computer program, I came to realize how fully the Scandinavians in the 18^th and 19^th centuries entwined church life and everyday life.

They marked their rites of passage in Lutheran religious ceremonies—baptism, confirmation, marriage, and burial. The church carefully recorded these important occasions, and we can view the records today, hundreds of years later. In addition to facts about the event, the records also provide information on names of an ancestor’s parents and the places they lived. They even reveal the name of the father if a child was illegitimate.

Yet the church affected more than just the individual behavior reflected in the records. It was the reason for some modern reforms in Scandinavian society. For example, Norway in the 1700’s instituted a nationwide push for literacy. Why? So the people could pass the 700-question confirmation test. The pastor recorded their scores for posterity—not so good, good, or very good.

Why would a young Norwegian, or anyone, want to take and pass this difficult confirmation test? Because you could not get married in Norway unless you did. Every parish pastor asked for confirmation date and place before performing a marriage ceremony. That information, along with information pertinent to the marriage, is recorded on the nuptial record.

Even today, although most Norwegians claim they are not religious, the Church of Norway retains its official state status. It receives its financial support from the state. All clergy are state employees. The King of Norway is required to be Lutheran. The Church still has its role there, affecting the everyday lives of most Norwegians.

A couple of weeks ago I stated my intention to organize my computer bookmarks. Since then, I have worked on doing that. I maintain a “Genealogy Research” folder in my bookmark list, and it contains subfolders for various geographic locations.

This week I cleaned up my “Norway” folder. I find these sites helpful for finding and analyzing Norwegian records:

• The Digital Archives of Norway (http://arkivverket.no/eng/content/view/full/629)
• Norwegian words used in genealogical records (http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~norway/na17.html#F)
• Norwegian parish information with links to translations of parish record column headings (http://homepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~norway/na20.html
• A database covering volumes 1-17 of Oluf Rygh’s list of Norwegian Farm Names (http://www.dokpro.uio.no/rygh_ng/rygh_form.html)
• Common Norwegian occupations (https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Norway_Occupations)

The ability to analyze records from another time and place does not come easily. Keeping a list of sources and translation information in handy bookmarks can make the process much smoother. It takes time to create and organize your bookmarks, but it really does save time in the long run.

For my birthday recently, my son and daughter-in-law gave me a sølje, a type of jewelry pin worn with a traditional Norwegian costume, the bunad. They thought I should have one of these beautiful pieces of artwork prior to my trip to Norway this summer. This gift prompted me to do a little research on the bunad.

I turned to the Viking magazine, a publication of the Sons of Norway organization. They ran a feature article on the bunad in the May, 2013 issue. According to this article, the bunad is worn on festive occasions and consists of a complete outfit. Each region, valley, or town has its own style, and there are over 450 types of bunads in Norway. Not everyone owns one because they are very expensive and are worn only once or twice a year.

To identify the style of bunad my family should wear, I needed to identify my specific ancestral area. So, what exactly is my ancestral area? I thought it was the Bø municipality of Nordland. Then my husband/tech adviser spent his lunch hours in April and May searching the online Norwegian archives to verify this. He found that my family lived in fishing villages all over Nordland–Vesterålen, Lofoten, and Helgeland. Before that (prior to the Napoleonic Wars) they lived in Bergen.

To represent all these areas, I would need a chest full of pins. I have no idea which bunad I should wear.

I probably should not wear one at all. Besides, when would I wear it?  In Colorado we do not celebrate Norwegian holidays. I guess I could wear one to weddings, but that would be rather impractical here. A bunad is quite warm, and most weddings occur during the summer. I think I will stick with the jewelry and wear the gift I received.

I am eager to look for other examples of these pins in Norway. Maybe I can find some in the Ringsaker District of Hedmark where my husband’s family lived for hundreds of years. Pins from that locality would be nice gifts for my granddaughters. And maybe I can get a picture of THEIR bunad.

The High-Definition Genealogist, Thomas MacEntee, presented a one-day seminar at the Denver Public Library over the weekend. I enjoyed his talks and came home with some good ideas to pursue:

• Work to become less isolated by pursuing more genealogy networking opportunities. I plan to check out a site he suggested called GenealogyWise at http://www.genealogywise.com. I am not a Facebook user, and Thomas says this could be a better alternative for a genealogist,
• Clean up my bookmarks and add some useful ones like Cyndi’s List of Birthdate Calendars & Calculators at http://cyndislist.com/births.htm#Birthdate and Wolfram-Alpha at http://www.wolframalpha.com for historical money and weather,
• Renew my efforts to track my research electronically. I am guilty of maintaining paper research logs that date back over thirty years. I need set up some spreadsheets and to make better use of the task feature in The Master Genealogist software,
• Decide whether and when to share my information on compiled trees at WikiTree (http://www.wikitree.com) or Family Search, and
• Document my goals and results. I like doing the research, but I tend to be lazy about writing up my results. I prepare and distribute a character sketch for one ancestor every Christmas, but I could do more. My husband/tech advisor has some good ideas for writing topics.

As always when I attend a seminar, I find the speaker’s enthusiasm infectious. I want to do all five of these things today! Of course I cannot do that because I am elbow-deep in preparing for a genealogy trip to Norway. So how long can I maintain this energy? We will know in July when I get back.

Memorial Day weekend approaches. Not much goes on in Colorado to mark this solemn day. Instead, people use it to kick off the summer season with camping and backyard barbecues.

We prefer to spend the day remembering fallen soldiers and all those who have sacrificed to serve in our country’s military. My family came to the New World in the Great Migration of the 1630’s so we have had ample opportunity to serve in our nation’s wars. In my genealogical research I have identified these from my direct line:

• Revolutionary War: Gershom Hall of Massachusetts, John Day and Robert Kirkham of Virginia
• War of 1812: Benjamin E. Dunbar of Massachusetts
• Creek War: John Carter of Tennessee
• Civil War: Samuel H. Reed of Illinois and Thomas Sherman of Kentucky
• World War II: my Dad
• War on Terror in Afghanistan: my son—a West Point graduate and Bronze Star recipient

I am thankful that none of these brave men suffered injury or loss of life in these wars. We have collateral relatives who did, including Anderson Sherman who suffered from unspecified injuries during the Civil War. Thomas Aaron Reed was gassed in the trenches of World War I. Harold Reed never recovered from the shell shock sustained in the Korean War.

This weekend my Dad and I will visit the grave of another brave veteran, his late brother Staff Sergeant Robert Lloyd Reed, buried at Ft. Logan National Cemetery in Denver. Uncle Bob served in the Army Air Corps in World War II and later in the Air Force in Korea and Vietnam.

My daughter-in-law, an Army veteran herself, wants her children to know and appreciate why we commemorate Memorial Day. Maybe they will come along with us. Whether they do or not, I am glad that my grandchildren will understand that the day stands for more than the first day of summer vacation.

How can you do genealogy when you have only short snatches of time available? I found myself in this situation this week. We had workmen at our house installing insulation in the attic. Because my husband/tech advisor stayed home for this fun event, we ended up working on various other home improvement projects together as the men sweated in the attic. I spent my scarce genealogy time working on small tasks and loose ends.

• I finished up my album of cemetery marker photos. I created a decorative cover and added divider sheets between the surnames found in the album.
• On Monday night, after the workmen had gone home for the day, we attended the monthly Computer Interest Group (CIG) meeting. There we listened to a presentation on basic computer skills—operating systems, malware, creating files and folders. The speaker offered some helpful tricks and tips. We left early when a Microsoft Office tutorial began. I used to teach this stuff myself.
• This week I received word that my cousin has a new great-grandson. He has a very unusual name, Atom. Yes, Atom. I added him to my database.

Not a lot of progress, but sometimes other things demand attention. Next week? Well, as much as I would like to prioritize genealogy, I do have an inspection of this week’s work scheduled for next Thursday. There goes another morning. Perhaps I can find yet another small genealogy task for that day.

We have had a lot going on in our genealogy world over the past week:

• On Saturday, I attended the spring seminar put on by the Colorado chapter of the Palatines to America http://www.palam.org/colorado-palam-chapter.php. Kory Meyerink of ProGenealogists spoke on various topics. As always, they had a good turnout for this seminar. The gentleman sitting next to me traveled all the way from Tulsa, OK. I feel so privileged to live in a city where seminars of this high quality occur regularly.
• On Tuesday, the Germanic Genealogical Society of Colorado held its monthly meeting at the Denver Public Library. We heard a presentation by our own Joe Beine who runs the Online Searchable Death Indexes & Records website http://www.deathindexes.com/ and the German Roots website http://www.germanroots.com/. These are wonderful genealogical resources.
• All week long, my husband/tech advisor has doggedly used his lunch hours to search for my Norwegian roots. He has now learned that they lived all along the coastline of Nordland and Helgeland. But even more surprising, many of them lived in the Bergen area before that. No way can we visit every site during our trip to Norway next month. The poor man is now busy re-routing our driving trip to enable us to visit as many of these new areas as possible. Meanwhile, I have been entering his data into my software program as fast as I can.

Whew!

Here it is already May, and I am still not quite finished tagging and scanning all my cemetery photos. Will I ever get these posted to my website and to FindAGrave http://www.findagrave.com/? It seems like I have been working on this project forever, and I feel like I should be further along.

Now, I find myself needing to suspend the project for the next seven weeks while I prepare for my trip to Norway. This probably will be my only chance to travel in the area where my family lived, and I want to see every family-related site that I can. I hope to see the farms where they lived and to find their gravesites, if they still exist. That means I must know where those sites are.

All these people lived in Norway’s coastal Nordland district, north of the Arctic Circle. They were cod fishermen. My husband/tech advisor has valiantly used his lunch hour recently to chase down information on them. He has pursued nearly every line, some back to the 1600’s.

Next I must analyze the records my husband has located. I want to create lists of their farms and churches and plot them onto maps. Armed with these, we will rent a car to drive around Nordland and visit as many spots as we can.

I am beginning by sorting the genealogical documents into generations. My great-grandparents, Ole and Sofie (Siverstdatter) Bentsen, who immigrated to America but were born and married in Norway, are Generation A. Their parents, Karen Marie Johansdatter, Lorents Nicolai Möller Andersen Bentsen, Martha Karoline Dorthea Hansdatter, and Sivert Knudsen, are Generation B. I will work backwards in time through all the generations my husband has identified. I will add every location mentioned on a document to our travel map.

It looks like I have quite a bit of map plotting to do. My husband has noticed that these folks did not stay in the same place. Rather than occupying an ancestral home, they lived all over the islands in western Norway (Vesterålen and Lofoten). My maps will show many anticipated stops. To make the most of my trip to the area, I need to take preparation time away from my photo project.

Our patriarch “Grandpa” Al Hjelmstad (from North Dakota) met his wife Thecla Walz (from Minnesota) in the oil town of Casper, Wyoming. They had both just arrived there looking for temporary work after World War II. He planned to earn money to move on and start a business in the Pacific Northwest. She wanted to spend the summer after high school with her sister. They ended up marrying and staying in Casper to raise their family.

Today most of their descendants live along the Rocky Mountain corridor. Last weekend nearly all of us gathered at the home of a grandson in Pueblo, Colorado for an impromptu reunion. People came south from Casper and north from Las Alamos, New Mexico. One outlier even arrived from Ithaca, New York. We had 4 generations represented ranging in age from 2 months to 83 years. Of course meeting the 2-month-old little girl was the excuse for the get-together.

My daughter-in-law is learning photography so she took many pictures of this event, including some group photos. Now she wants a place to post them for all the clan to see.

Many (most!) of us are not Facebook users, so this could pose a problem. But my husband/tech advisor can solve this! He will use Photo Gallery software to create a family album online where we all can post and share photos. This will work well for the Hjelmstads who shy away from social networks.

As a genealogist, I love that we have another multi-generational photo to add to the collection. I just wish Grandpa were still with us to see how the family grows.