Seeking My Norwegian Roots

In 1977 when my daughter Lynne was 11 years old one of her school projects was to put together a very basic family tree consisting of parents, grandparents and if possible, great grandparents. I realized at this point that we didn’t have any  knowledge of our heritage. She now kids me about the “fake” names I gave her for that assignment.

Quite a few years later did I start in earnest to build a family tree that for all intents and purposes was lost with the passing of loved ones who perhaps would have supplied any interested family members stories that were passed on to them much like the verbal Indian lore or the ancient African tribe narratives. Sadly, these family tales are lost as each generation moves along with their own lives and forgets the rich heritage connected with now long forgotten relatives who will forever be a part of us both in mind and body. Perhaps those who do possess family information are yet to be found. The only resource at hand was the will to succeed in building a family tree that would be meaningful first to me and my immediate family and then to others of this blood line.

Perhaps the little research I’ve done will add some richness to our lives by peeking into the past. So, enough of what is lost, let us try to recover what we think can’t be found.

I must point out that no one in the family knew the Norwegian birthplace of either my grandfather or grandmother.

One of the few documents that was kept in the family was my dad’s 1897 baptismal record. His father’s name, Christian Cornelius Johnson, seemed to be straightforward but there was just a married surname for his mother, however her full maiden name was given on my father’s death certificate. Now the baptismal sponsor’s names posed a real impasse. Here was what I believed to be another Christian Cornelius Johnson, a Kristen Johnson and a Grete Johnson. I had absolutely no clue as to who these folks were. I did find a Christian Cornelius Johnson and his wife Grete but after much deliberation determined that these folks were not the ones on the baptismal record. The impasse was to be solved at a later date.

No death date was known for my grandfather as he died when my father was just a little boy. My first order of business was to establish a marriage date between him and my “Grandma Sagen”. We had always known her by that name as she remarried, about 1914, to a widower from Texas named Peter Sagen who also had four children. Fortunately, marriage records were on microfilm from the Milwaukee area, so after borrowing 8 films through The Family History Library I established the first hard evidence of this family marriage. This marriage record also gave the names of both the bride’s and the groom’s parents and the two witnesses, one of which turned out to be the brother of the groom (wow!, another link) and the other, which I still have not identified, a probable sister to the bride.

The Milwaukee county microfilm collection borrowed through the Family History Library is great. A death index film yielded the 1906 death of my grandfather, which was at the age of 37. It wasn’t until 2 years later while visiting the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI that I found his obituary in a weekly paper from Wauwatosa indicating the cause of death.

The next step in trying to establish family was looking at censuses. My first try was to look at the 1905 Wisconsin census index, again through the films supplied by the FHL, which did yield more than what I was looking for. I found three families of Johnson’s living close to each other along with a 79 year old Christian (father) living with my Dad’s family. This is a kind of discovery other people talk about. After viewing a number of Marriage Record films I established the relationship of the other two Johnson families. They turned out to be my grandfather's two brothers, Joseph and John Henry. The Johnson clan was growing.

In all written records it must be remembered that spelling errors take place for many reasons and with this in mind one has to prove which record is correct or what spelling should be used. Taking this into consideration I now knew who Kristen ( spelled Christian on the census record ) Johnson was on the baptismal record. It was in fact his grandfather.

It was about this time (1993) that I visited The Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland to view their vast supply of census films. I was able to determine that the Johnson’s did not emigrate as a family unit at the same time and that Joseph and John Henry were Americanization’s of Johan and Jan Henrik.

Visiting Milwaukee in the summer of 1993 reaped a lot of information on other family lines but the all-important area of birth and residence for the Johnson’s continued to elude me. The dry spell for the Johnson information would last until the following summer when another trip to Milwaukee would give me the one and only clue to where the Johnson’s came from.

I continued to view microfilms, especially passenger lists from some Norwegian ports, for the years I thought were the most promising gleaned from the U. S. census records I previously read. I knew this was a longshot but no other avenue was open to me. Not a mention of my elusive relatives. Frustration began to mount and I thought my Johnson adventure had run its course. Little did I know that my adventure was about to unfold.

During that frustrating “dry spell” I regrouped and decided to look at as many birth records in Milwaukee as it took until I found one where the parents had listed their own birth place. My first day in Milwaukee in 1994 at the Court House I found the key to unlocking the whole mystery of where the Johnson’s were hiding. My Aunt Stella’s birth record was the only one that yielded that information. There it was, “LISTER”, the birthplace of my grandfather. At that point I had the feeling that information was there for just me to find.

Now back in Sandusky, Ohio at the FHL I would test their resources and as usual if you look in the right places you will always succeed in reaching your goals. Before beginning this Norwegian quest I bought a twenty-five cent Norwegian “ Research Outline “ that is available at the main library in Salt Lake City, Utah. These “ Research Outlines “ are one of the most overlooked tools in your personal quest for those hidden ancestors. These outlines are available for almost every major country in the world and for every state in the union. You will do yourself a major disservice if you don’t add this tool to your repertoire. They explain just how to search the areas the pamphlet is written about. Reading them over and over will often offer another way of approaching your research. In the library’s microfiche area was a group of fiches that listed the area that I wished to search. This section, called The Family History Centers Collection, is another one of the most overlooked sections in the library. My first viewing of those fiche yielded the parish name “ LYSTER “. Thinking my Aunt Stella’s birth record contained one of those misspellings I began to search the Lyster parish church records and to my dismay could not find any trace of my ancestors.

So back to the microfiche collection for a much closer look. I then found a reference to “LISTA “ and “ LISTER “, which advised me to see “ VANSE “ parish, and this seemed to be the area that I should begin anew. For some unknown reason I borrowed the Kristiansand passenger list film for the year of my grandfather’s emigration, as that major port was only 50 miles away from the area called Lista. I searched the entire year of 1890 as that was the year listed on the U. S. census record. No luck. No luck for the year 1889. July 1, 1891. I stared in disbelief for almost five minutes at the name Kristen Johnsen, Grete Johnsen and Johan Johnsen from Vanse parish. I had found them!

Grete Johnsen (but look how Johnson is spelled) was not a mystery any longer. She was Kristen’s daughter and my Dad’s aunt.

According to the U. S. census Christian Cornelius and John Henry had emigrated a year or two earlier (I never did find their port of embarkation).

That 1994 summer visit to Milwaukee gave me another lead to family members. I had found the obituary of Harvey Johnson from 1980, son of Johan (now Americanized to Joseph) in the Milwaukee Journal. It listed his daughter, Ruth Meyer, living in Hudson. Ohio, practically in the neighborhood. I called for a telephone number but none was listed. A few months later I found several Meyers listed on a CD called Phondisc. They were shocked when I left a message on their answering machine in Florida. Several very informative letters were shot back and forth in a short time. They sent me a basic family tree that was researched by a distant relative (by marriage) which they could not make any sense of and actually part of it was incorrect. I finally found they key to it so it did make sense. They also passed on to me a letter that described the journey from Norway to New York in 1851 of some of the family members described in the above family tree. Some of them were blood relatives but not direct line family members.

One of the letters mentioned a Lizzie as part of the Johnson family. When this letter arrived I was in the process of reading my first Vanse parish church record trying to get the exact dates of birth for Kristen’s children. I found Elise as part of that family and that undoubtedly was the Lizzie they referred to.

The first birth I found was my grandfather’s in 1869. The name of the farm was given as Borhaug and is located on the southern coast of Norway. It is a small community consisting of six farms grouped together with the houses and barns forming the core and the farmland radiating out from them. It looks like any small village with farms on the outskirts. The six farms were and still are called Borhaug, Vatne, Brekne, Tjorve, Vagsvoll and Skollevoll.

That first Vanse parish church record contained so much information on births, baptisms, confirmations, vaccinations (yes, that’s right), marriages, deaths, entering and leaving the parish and other church business that it boggled my mind. You see, at this time and since about the 1690’s it was mandated by the state that the church was to record these type of vital statistics, increasing from very little information early on to quite a lot around 1900 just before vital statistics were recorded by the state. As a matter of point, in 1536 the Lutheran church was declared the state religion.

I think back now to reading that first church record from the 1860’s, how easy it was to pick out the name of the father and mother when a child was born or finding both the names of the fathers when a marriage took place. In the earlier years no matter how hard I tried to find a mothers name in a birth record it simply was not given. No parent’s names were given at a marriage and in the very early years there were just first names only of sponsors given at birth.

The Kristiansand passenger list gave me the first clue as to how the Johnson surname was evolving. This was the first generation where the surname was the same for father, sons and daughters but it was actually JANSEN in Norway and JOHNSEN on the passenger list and finally Americanized to JOHNSON after settling in America.

A little must be said about understanding surnames. Most surnames are called “ patronymic “ based on the father’s name, such as Christian Jansen (son of Jan) or Grete Jansdatter (daughter of Jan). In many cases a geographical name, typically a farm name in rural areas, was also added to the surname when describing an individual. Hence, each generation the surname changed. The wife retained her surname during the course of the marriage. Around 1850, it became the custom in the cities to take permanent surnames. By 1900 most of the country adopted this practice. In rural areas many Norwegians chose to use the name of their farm as their surname

It took me months to go through this first film and later on I constantly referred back to it for more information gleaned from other church records. It would be safe to say that I spent at least 15 months of researching the Johnson and collateral lines through just 4 films of church records dating back to about 1700. But what a rush it was. Imagine being the first of this Johnson line to bring to life and preserve in some manner the lives of those who gave us breath.

Think for a moment what must be faced when beginning to read documents that are this old, in a foreign language and in many cases, EXCUSE the handwriting. It sure keeps your mind sharp. The handwriting was the typical gothic style and the further back in time you went the more difficult it seemed to get.

From the early part of the 1300’s Norway was under the political influence of both Denmark and Sweden, flip flopping back and forth due to wars, political strength and alliances. On May 17, 1814, Norway declared its independence although did not become a sovereign nation until 1905. Through the centuries the Swedish and Danish languages slowly worked their way into the Norwegian written and oral language. Beginning shortly after their declaration of independence there arose a call from scholars and non-scholars alike to form a Norwegian national language reverting back to the natïve tongue spoken by the rural populace as well as the city dwellers. This process took well over a hundred years to accomplish. The reason for this explanation of the Norwegian language problem is explained so you won’t be surprised while reading church records and other documents to find what you may think are misspellings. A case in point is the spelling of the name Kristen sometimes spelled Christen. It just depends on the writers training. There are other variances but they will not be discussed here.

The westward wave of Norwegian emigrants began on July 4, 1825 when 45 brave souls and a crew of seven left the port of Stavanger aboard the 45-foot sloop “Restauration” arriving in New York on October 9th. From 1825 to 1900 more than 850,000 Norwegians left their homes and country to make a new life in the U. S. and Canada. The U. S. was to them “the land of milk and honey”.

On the lighter side there are those that want us to believe that the Norwegians left their homeland for one or all of the following reasons. One was the staple food called “lutefisk” which is dried cod that is soaked in lime for preservation. Among a long list describing lutefisk, these come to mind; inedible, a Yuletide atrocity, an indescribable nightmare, not adaptable to casual conversation, etc., etc.

Another reason was the Hardinger fiddle which when played drove people to near insanity. And to think the musician wielding this instrument was the main entertainment at all weddings.

The last reason given for exiting Norway was a delightful concoction called “gammelost” which is an aged cheese capable of walking by itself after a certain length of time. It is credited to winning a war since eaten by the winning forces just before battle and turning them into berserkers.

As you research back further in time the amount of information lessens and handwriting becomes more difficult to read. I became stumped in 1750 with trying to translate the father’s name in the church birth records.

 Now is the time to impart just how valuable the “Research Outlines” really are. Shortly after being stumped in 1750, I wrote, in English, to a Historical Society in Oslo, whose address is given in the research outline, and coordinates the efforts of most of the local historical societies in Norway. They wrote back quickly with the address of the historical society closest to the area I had requested. I wrote to this society giving a lot of the family history, and shortly received a very personal letter from the head of the society with a photograph of an aerial view of the area my ancestors called home. 

This photograph on the first page of my Homepage and related descriptions of the area were from her personal possessions that “I had in my secretary”. She also gave me the name of what turned out to be an 83 year old retired sea captain who lived all his life in the very area I was searching and described him as being the local historian. Of course I had to write to him giving him also much of my research. He was quite surprised that I had gotten so much information on my own. During the course of our correspondence he broke my 1750 church dilemma and supplied me with names back to 1550/1560, which I have since verified through other sources. In each case of correspondence I included 3 International coupons for help in return postage.

One important census record that is a pleasure to look at is the year of 1801. The University of Bergen has indexed by surname and also by first name the entire census in addition to having the entire census typewritten. It is available on microfiche for the parishes you are interested in through The Family History Libraries.

The Norwegian government many years ago wanted to find a way to preserve the rich heritage of the country and embarked on a venture to provide local histories of the family life style. These local histories are called “Bygdeboker” and give statistical information about the area and genealogical information about the people in the community. These wonderful people in Norway provided the names of the books to me and it became my objective to locate these books. After long deliberation I took a real longshot and tried through the inter-library loan system to borrow these reference books. To my amazement they arrived from The University of Minnesota within two weeks. Armed with my Norwegian–English dictionary I translated the narratives that were important to my ancestry. Oh, I didn’t tell you, it’s written in Norwegian.

Einar Haugen wrote the most comprehensive dictionary I found with more than 60,000 entries – ISBN 0-299-03874-2.

It was important to me to find a map of the area I was researching. The first rough copy came from a microfiche at the FHL but then I wanted one a little better that I copied while at the Cleveland Public Library. Maps are rated for definition by scale and this one was about 1:400,000. It gave most of the areas I was searching but still lacked the definition that I wanted. The one that I got had a scale of 1:50,000, which means that they show where houses, sheds, barns, windmills, churches and things of this size are. These are in fact called farm maps. Each large fold out map covers an area of 13 x17 miles and can be purchased from Travel Genie in Ames, Iowa 50010. The names of the farms haven’t changed in hundreds of years and are listed on these maps.

So, my quest down the paths of half of my Norwegian heritage comes pretty much to a close, although it never ends. There always remains filling in the loose ends. But a new adventure awaits. What shall it be? Perhaps the other half of my Norwegian adventure, or shall it be in Germany or Bohemia?

David L Johnson 

29 December 1995