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Hopkins
Norway Heritage Veteran
USA
3351 Posts |
 Posted - 26/02/2010 : 12:18:34
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I went back once to a small Lutheran church in the northern mid-west where several of my great and great-great grandparents had settled shortly after the Civil War. My trip had to be done on my summer vacation and took me a good two+ days driving to get there. I had sent letters and email to the church's pastor to make sure they had the old books and if I could be allowed to look at them. I was glad I'd done that because he had to get the church council's permission for the really really old books to be reviewed.
I was also glad that I'd practiced reading and using the Norwegian church records for the old books had been kept in Norwegian and on the same page formats that Norway was still using. A little American influence could be seen on the pages but they were in the Norwegian language -- luckily names and dates and clues about locations in Norway were what I was after. I took notes of everything I could that had to do with any known or suspected relative of mine and worried about trying to translate from Norwegian later. (If I could do it again I'd ask if they'd kindly allow me to bring a scanner.)
One great-grandfather was mentioned a good number of times (baptisms of 13 children + other church events) A notation of the Norway parish of his birth and confirmation appeared as "Javensnackers". When I got home again after my trip north I worked out and was able to definitely prove that he was from Jevnaker, Oppland, Norway.
While I was in that northern mid-west county where so many of my ancestors settled I also took the time to go to the small cemeteries that were not far from the church and small town. I gathered names of other relatives that were buried near each other and saw that sometimes the family took up an entire section of a cemetery. It was in one of those corn-field surrounded cemeteries where I learned that two 'elderly' great-great-grandmothers had also emigrated to the US and were buried next to my ancestors I had already known of.
One fun note - the church council rightly decided that they wouldn't trust a stranger alone with their most precious old record books and asked a current member of the congregation to sit in the pastor's study with me while I reviewed those pages. We introduced ourselves and began to chat a little while I carefully turned the fragile old pages, discovering that we were actually 3rd cousins and had common ancestors in the pages I was studying. |
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Is Albert Hendrickson = Halvor Ingebretsen
