Tombstone Tuesday -- Findagrave Memorial for Martin Christopherson

Findagrave.com is a wonderful site to find graves.  If you are lucky, someone has already added your ancestor to the site.  If not, you can add the memorial for your ancestor.  Findagrave is a site that depends on volunteers to provide information and pictures of gravestones.  Check out the memorial I put up yesterday for my great-great grandmother's brother, Martin Christopherson.  Click on the link below!

Memorial for Martin Christopherson

Tombstone Tuesday -- Tanum Kirke and Cemetery



Beautiful Tanum Kirke in Baerum, Norway.  Nearly 1000 years of ancestors were baptized,
confirmed, married, and buried here.



Happy Birthday, Bestemor!

Happy Birthday, Bestemor!  My grandmother, Gyda Kristiansen, circa 1933.

Wordless Wednesday -- a Grand-Uncle, Great-Great Grandmother, and a Great-Uncle

John Kristiansen (1904-1964), Randi Larsdatter (1836-1921), and Kristen Jonsen (1857-?).  Location: Baerum, Norway ca 1920.

Wordless Wednesday -- Olav Kristiansen

Olav Kristiansen from Baerum, Norway, was brother to my grandmother.  I love this picture!

Wordless Wednesday -- Kristiansen Siblings

The Kristiansen Siblings somewhere in Baerum, Norway -- Raghnild, Astrid, Gyda (my grandmother), Gunnar, and Oyvind.  I am not sure I have the latter two correct as there are other brothers not in the picture (and to me they look alike).  Dad -- please comment and let me know.

Wordless Wednesday -- Great Picture from around 1891



This is an awesome photo I found among my grand-aunt's photos, which were
given to me.  My great-grandfather, Kristian Olausen Jordbaerhaugen, is in the front row, in the middle.
I have no idea who the other men are, nor do I know the occasion.  I wish I had seen the picture
while my grand-aunt was still alive so I could have asked her -- oh well.



Wordless Wednesday -- Bestemor and Bestefar

My grandparents circa 1935, camping in Norway

Great-Grandfather Kristian Olausen Jordbaerhaugen

When I was in Norway this past summer, I was able to scan pictures from relatives.  Here is a pretty good one of my great-grandfather.

31/Jan/1878 - 11/Feb/1962
Picture taken in Baerum, Norway, probably at his home,
Sletta

Tombstone Tuesday

My son plants flowers at my grandparents' grave in Baerum, Norway (Bryn Church)
Gyda Kristiansen 1913 -2002
Thorolf Haugen 1914 - 1981

Wordless Wednesday

I love this picture! In the middle is my bestefar, Thorolf Haugen, and behind him is my tante Astrid (Kristiansen) on the left and her sister, my bestemor, Gyda Kristiansen Haugen. 

Bestemor and bestefar mean grandmother and grandfather in Norwegian.  

Wordless Wednesday

My great-grandfather, Kristian Olausen Jordbaerhaugen, plows the land in Baerum, Norway, circa 1933.

(Not so) Wordless Wednesday -- The Boys in the Forest

Click on picture for better viewing.

During WWII, Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany.  But that did not mean people were unwilling to fight the invasion.  Pictured are the Lommedalen "Boys in the Forest" also known as the "Freedom Fighters of 1945, Group 13313."  They would gather in the woods to practice military exercises and plan and carry out quiet sabotage missions against the Germans.  Among them were 8 family members pictured above: my grandmother's brothers John Bye, Trygve and Kjell Kristiansen; my grandmother's first cousins, Oddvar, Ragnar, and Ivar Jordbaerhaugen, and Hans Bakken; and my grandmother's nephew Roald Bye. 

Photo from the book, Lommedalen -- en bygd y bygda by Jacob Jacobsen.

A Mystery Solved

Greta of http://gretasreiseblogg.blogspot.com/ solved the mystery of the location in the picture of my grandmother and her sisters wearing their flour sack dresses (posted here).  Thank you, Greta!  The pictures were taken circa 1930, and I didn't know where.  Greta sent me a link to a site that featured old postcards from the fortress Fredriksten in Halden, Norway, and sure enough the Carl XII monument matched another picture I had with the three sisters standing in front of it.  Now I have another place to visit in Norway.  I do in fact have one set of gggg-grandparents from Halden, so why not?  In fact, as I recall, my gggg-grandfather was a soldier in the 3rd Musketeer company in Halden.  I need to go over my notes to check on the details regarding this, but I wonder if he would have been working at this fortress.  I should note that this ancestor is from my grandfather's line, but it is my grandmother in the picture.

I now know that this (above) is the Carl XII monument in Fredriksten, Halden, Norway

Astrid, Raghnild, and Gyda Kristiansen (my grandmother) wearing their flour sack dresses

I wonder if this gazebo is also located in Fredriksten. I'm thinking the photograph must be from the same day since the three sisters are wearing the same dresses, so it is likely.

Wordless Wednesday -- Three Sisters in Flour Sack Dresses

From left to right: Astrid, Raghnild, and Gyda Kristiansen (my grandmother).  This photo was taken circa 1930.  My grandmother's sister, Astrid, told me all three wore dresses made from white flour sacks!  They look pretty nice don't they?  I believe this was taken at Akershus Castle in Oslo, but I'm not positive.

Randi Larsdatter and Astrid Kristiansen

Click to enlarge

My great-great grandmother Randi Larsdatter Bye (1836-1921), born in Baerum, Norway, made this embroidery.  It hung on my grandmother's wall, and her sister, Astrid, used to love showing it to me when I visited.  On the right hand corner are the initials RLD for Randi Larsdatter. 1836 is her birth date, and 1869 is the year she made the embroidery. When my grandmother died, it passed on to her sister, and when Astrid died she left it to me. My Aunt Astrid was a sweet woman who loved to talk and had a bubbly personality. She had an apartment on the floor below my grandmother's house, and my brother and I loved to go down there and see her.

Both pictures are still-shots from pictures I recorded with a video-camera in 1996. Above is my gg-grandmother Randi Larsdatter and below is one of my Aunt Astrid.  She is seated, and the girl standing is my grandmother, Gyda. I don't know what happened to Astrid's albums after she died, but I hope to find them one day to do a proper scan.

Not So Wordless Wednesday -- Late!

It is late Wednesday evening, but I realized that I haven't posted in a while.  It has been a busy time, and I have also been working on cleaning up my tree.  This is actually quite time consuming!  I wish I knew better what I know now when I started my tree.  Anyway, I decided to go with FTM 2010 because of the ability to integrate with Ancestry.  So, I am now cleaning up my data so I can make some nice charts and other visually appealing documents of my genealogical research. 

In the meantime, I have made contact with my other great-uncle's family in Canada.  It is so exciting.  The funny thing is that by finding them in British Columbia we found new relatives who lived down the road from my grandmother in Norway.  My father and I had a chuckle about having to find relatives through Canada rather than his own family in Norway.  They are descendants of Margit Jordbaerhaugen, sister to my great-grandfather Kristian, and my great-uncles Kristen and Nels who both came to America.   

More soon!  And now for the Wordless Wednesday part:

Sletta, my grandmother's childhood home in Baerum, Norway

Snowed in Means a Lot Accomplished

Where I live snow usually doesn't stick.  When it does stick, it normally turns into sheets of ice that make it impossible to drive anywhere.  Should we actually get a blanket of snow, our area doesn't have enough plows to take care of it quickly.  All this means that just the news of possible snow leads to school closures and lines at the grocery store, which are very quickly depleted of bread and milk.  So when 5 inches or more of the white stuff coated the state on Friday, we were pretty much stuck at home for a few days.  But time confined at home means time to work on some genealogy research, and I had several tasks that hadn't been checked off my list yet.

The prior weekend, I had finally finished scanning my Italian grandfather's diary.  Vincenzo Dibennardo (1900-1982) wrote the diary during the school year 1915-1916, and it is about 100 pages long.  He was a beautiful writer at 15 already, with wonderful descriptive passages of a sometimes sad life in a religious boarding school.  His mother had died when he was a young boy, and in those days a father usually did not raise the child.  He was sent to the Salesian boarding school where his aunt was the Mother Superior, and this diary is an interesting peek into his life there.  However, it is a bit hard to read between the handwriting and the old-style Italian language -- even my mother has a hard time reading it.

 

Pages from my grandfather's diary written in 1915-1916

Now that the diary was scanned, I decided on snowed-in Saturday morning to start transcribing the diary word for word on my computer, and eventually to translate it into English -- after all, my descendants will probably not know Italian.  It will take me a long time to transcribe the whole diary, but I was pretty happy to have the first day finished by the time my son got out of bed.  And I only had a few words and areas I wasn't sure about underlined.  I sent the document to my mother, who later filled in those blank spots.  By Saturday afternoon, I finally had a day's accounting I could read with pleasure rather than strain, and it was fabulous.  I can't wait to transcribe the rest!  In that one day entry was the full name of my grandfather's stepmother and where she was from -- Vincenzina Tannelli from Sortino, Sicily.  I quickly went to Google and found it in the province of Syracuse, a small and pretty town with a great view of the volcano Etna in the distance.

Next on my list of things to accomplish was scanning the pictures from the albums that belonged to my Norwegian grandmother.  These were found and given to me by my uncle in Norway, and they were deteriorating enough that the sooner I scanned them in the better.  I believe I scanned over 200 photos.  Many of these were photos of my two young grandparents during the early 1930's, in love, before getting married.  I will have a separate post about these pictures soon.

The final major thing I accomplished was to finish my Web site!  It isn't up yet, but it is ready.  It is a simple Web site regarding my Norwegian family tree -- the main branches of the tree, I should say.  The point of the Web site is to have relatives find me and contact me.  I will be going to Norway in the summer, and I hope to meet as many relatives as possible to share information, pictures, stories, and treasures.  I believe having a Web site they can go to before my arrival may whet their appetite to find out more... and share more.

I do have several more tasks to check off, but I think I got a pretty good start, despite the cabin fever.

Obituary Hunt

Since most of my ancestors are in Norway and Italy, I haven't really played around with searching obituaries.  I have one ggg-grandmother and her two sons who became members of the LDS church and emigrated from Norway to Utah, whereas her daughter, my gg-grandmother, remained Lutheran and stayed in Norway.  It has been really interesting to study my Utah branch, and I have learned a lot about my gg-uncle Martin Christophersen, who was quite prominent in the LDS church and in Salt Lake City.  But I have not found much information about my ggg-grandmother Ellen Hansdatter (buried in Salt Lake City under the name Ellen Christophersen) other than a cemetery and burial record. 

The other day I was reading one of my favorite blogs, http://herstoryan.blogspot.com/, and a post about finding an exciting obituary, and I immediately thought about my ggg-grandmother Ellen who died in 1899.  This is a few years before there are available death records in Utah, so finding an obituary was my only real hope for learning more information.  So I thought, "What the heck," and I googled the search term "Utah Newspaper Archives" and found the site http://digitalnewspapers.org/.  I then browsed by county, Salt Lake City, and put in the keyword name Ellen Christophersen.  The obituary literally took me a minute to find.

Unfortunately, the obituary doesn't say how she died, but it is still a very exciting find!  Once I had my first hit, I figured I should try to find the obituaries for Martin and Hans Christophersen.  In a matter of minutes I found one for Martin and a funeral announcement for Hans (not shown).  The obituary for Martin has a lot of interesting information, so read on...

Stay tuned for more finds.

Found Descendants of my Great Uncle Christen

A few posts ago I wrote regarding my search for two great uncles who had come to America (http://haugenhistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/tale-of-two-great-uncles.html).  UPDATE: I was able to find the descendants of one of them and have made contact.

This has been extremely exciting.  By tracing the deceased son of my great-uncle, I was able to find records with the name of his children, and long-story-short, Google is a powerful thing!  I found the children and emailed my way to finally receiving a response from two of Christen's grandchildren.  This led me to finding out that one of Christen's children was still alive!  She was born in 1917, and I have talked and emailed with her daughter as well.  This was wonderful because I was able to find out quite a bit about Christen and his life in North Dakota.  He was a homesteader in Fertile Divide who met a widow, Inga, and they had three children.  Christen was quite the musician, and he had played for the King's band in Norway.  He continued to play his trumpet in Grenora, ND.  I also found out how harsh life could be in ND in the winter as I was told he would have to ride his horses in bitterly cold winter weather, 20 miles both ways, to buy coal to keep the home warm.

Here is a synopsis of things I learned from Christen's daughter:

1. Her father said he skied a lot down the hill close to his home in Norway,  and he had to walk up the hill (makes sense since the Jordbaerhaugen farm is on a hill)
2. He played the trumpet in the King's Band in Norway (I mentioned this already)
3. He was a physical fitness advocate, and every night he would lead his children in exercises
4. He started a band in Grenora-played for barn dances, at the church, anywhere they would let him!
5. He had a beautiful singing voice and started the Haug quartet with his wife and two older children

6. They belonged to Bethany Lutheran Church

7. He liked to be called Chris

I was able to inform Christen's descendants regarding the location of Jordbaerhaugen, the farm that gave them the surname Haug.  Christen's daughter had never seen a picture of her grandparents (my great-great grandparents), so that was pretty awesome to share.  I also sent some pictures of my grandmother, her first cousin.  I am in the process of collecting some more information and things to send, and they are looking for more pictures to send me.  I am posting one picture I have received so far (see below).  Christen is on the far left with his three children.  I am also posting a picture of Christen's brother, Kristian Olausen Jordbaerhaugen -- my great-grandfather.

Far left, Christen Olausen Jordbaerhaugen (1881 - 1938) or Christen Olausen Haug, in North Dakota with his children.  Photo taken July 9, 1936.

My great-grandfather Kristian Olausen Jordbaerhaugen ( 1878 - 1962)

One of Christen's grandchildren sent me a link to help me locate Christen's grave.  He is incorrectly listed as "Christian" Haug, but his grave is still there, along with his wife, Inga, and a number of other relatives.  If you would like to find a grave, the site http://www.findagrave.com/index.html is pretty good!

Next on my to-do list is to track down the other brother, Nils.  I had traced him from Norway to Ellis Island to North Dakota where his brother Christen lived.  It looks like the family rumor that he went to Canada is true, and I am attempting to contact descendants in British Columbia.  I will let you know more once I know for sure this is the right family.