THEIR HOME IN AMERICA Kristoffer Ulleland and Marianne Fitje grew up on neighboring farms in Naustdal.  Norway. They married there in 1888. Norway’s economy was hit hard by a  “depression” in the 1880s and early 1890s.   [ 1  ]   It was not easy to make a living so  Kristoffer and Marianne began to think about going to America. Kristoffer’s  brother, Olai, had emigrated to the Seattle area a few years earlier. He wrote  letters home telling of the availability of land and the abundance of work  available at good wages for those willing to work hard. On April 27, 1890, Kristoffer and Marianne said goodbye to their home and  traveled to Bergen, Norway. They spent a few days there visiting with Marianne’s  sister Helle. On May 3, they left Bergen for England. From England they traveled  by steamship, arriving in Halifax after 13 days on the Atlantic Ocean. They sailed  on down the St. Lawrence to Quebec then traveled ac...

Hafslo, Norway By G.Lanting - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org February 2018 we were all watching the Winter Olympics. Norway was collecting lots of gold medals. My husband and I had recently moved back to Washington state and I was homebound and feeling sad that I had no Norwegian relatives.  Logo from Clipartmax ESPN Screenshot I had relatives, but who? My grandma, Anna Otto Johnson, (1884-1972) and her family had moved from Norway when she was a young child. They settled in Minnesota near aunts and uncles who had arrived earlier in America. I knew that one aunt, Berte Ottesdatter Kjerringness, had married in Norway and stayed back in the old country. That contact had been lost years ago. Norway had a tradition of name changes when people moved to a new farm so how would I ever find a living person?  Otto Family, 1895 Bird Island, Minnesota  Photo courtesy Carol Larson Anna Otto is in front row We had an old family tree that showed Aunt Berte’s ma...

Iceland has almost everyone’s family tree in a database accessible for all the country’s approximately 335,000 citizens. Everyone is related and “there is even an Android app to show each Icelandic citizen his or her genealogy, in most cases back to 874 AD.”[1] Many people in Iceland are hobby genealogists. When my guide on a tour of Iceland in 2017 discovered my interest in genealogy, she proudly told me that her grandfather had traced their family’s ancestry to a King of Norway. That would not be unusual because Iceland was settled mostly by Norwegians who may have been seeking new land to farm.  A favorite question when meeting someone new is “Who are your people”? Since almost everyone is related it is common before dating someone new to check to see that you two are not too closely related. The fact that almost everyone is descended from just a few couples has also made Iceland a heaven for those studying genetic diseases. Additionally, the homogeneity of the population has...