Send me old family photos if you have them (300dpi scans best).

This website is the result of periodic research since 1990.  I was helped by  innumerable people over the years including relatives and other family  historians.  I was fortunate to be able to travel during that time period to  most places in the U.S. and Canada where our ancestors lived. Cousins and  researchers in England and Scotland  provided invaluable assistance for some of  our UK ancestors. The total effort gave me a much greater appreciation for  history and geography than the sometimes dry subjects taught in school.

My interest began when I found out that my mother's paternal grandparents had  all died before she was born, or shortly thereafter.  My experience with  grandparents was that they were good relatives to have, and felt that not  knowing them was unfortunate for her.  Finding both their and their parent's  obituaries and grave sites in the small town where they died 100 years ago was  enough to get me hooked.  My father knew some of his grandparents, and a family  genealogy done in about 1970 expanded on some of them.  But we have lots of  direct ancestors:  each generation the number doubles so that while you have  4  grandparents, in about 200 years you have 256 6th great grandparents.

I am fairly confident that those ancestors I have found back to about 1800 are  well documented.  Before that, especially in the U.S and Canada, documentation  is often a little sketchy.  Courthouses and their records burned, or were  destroyed by wars or floods or other disasters, or good records simply were not  kept.  In addition, large parts of the population was incredibly mobile even in  the earliest years of America.
 Regardless, enough records do exist to get several of my paternal lnes back to  Colonial times.

Note that sometimes I have estimated birth and death dates where they were not  absolutely known.  This might result in more people appearing to live 100 years  than would normally be expected.  If I found someone's first child was born in  1723, I might estimate that they were born about 1700 and died before 1800 if  proof wasn't available.  These estimates show as estimates on my personal  computer software, but tend to show as "exact" dates on this web site.  Please  take these guesses with a large grain of salt.  On the other hand, I would  appreciate notification of anything that is obviously wrong.  For example, if  you find someone who should obviously be dead (e.g. has children born in 1800s), but  shows as "living" please let me know.  I can reset a tag that will fix this.

For my childrens' many maternal Norwegian ancestors there is quite good data  including original church registers for births, marriages and deaths back to  the 1700s and before.  In addition there are large numbers of rural community  histories called "Bygdebok" that have been compiled for generations.  Since  farm people tended to stay in the same area for decades, even centuries, these  are a great boon in spite of being written in Norwegian.

As far as Norwegian names go I have tried to stick with forname and patronymic  and simply make a note of the "farm" name.  For example, a person named Jens  Olavssen has a son he names Lars.  Lars would be called "Lars Jenssen" (Lars,  Jen's son).  If he was born and grew up on Vigen farm, he would be called "Lars  Jensen (Vigen)", meaning "Lars, Jen's son from Vigen".  If he married a woman  who inherited Klive farm, his farm name would change to Klive (Lars Jenssen  (Klive)).  If 20 years later he purchased a different farm called Lid, his name  would change to Lars Jenssen (Lid).  This is simply too confusing for a family  history, and in the late 1800s became too confusing for the Norwegian  government so they "stabilized" naming conventions.  In the U.S. and Norway  there are currently many families whose "last" name is a patronymic (e.g.  Olafsen), and others whose last name is a farm name (e.g. Rokne).  It appears  that there may have been different forces at play in last names for people who  were town dwellers, such as merchants, but I haven't found a good explanation  yet.

Please make a note in my guest book to let me know you were here, and be sure  to let me know of any additional information or corrections you might have.