Beginning to find a Norwegian Ancestor
Norwegian Words
Married=Viede, Gifte
Dead or death=Død, Døde
Buried=Begravet
So where does one start when trying to find their Norwegian ancestors?
On Familysearch.org there is a wonderful article about Beginning Norwegian Research that does an awesome job explaining the basics. I’m going to be focusing on Norway in my blog posts first because that’s where my family comes from. However, most of these research tips can be used for any of the Scandinavian countries. The details are different for each country, but not the basic research tips. In America, the research is the same whether your family comes from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, or Finland.
The article talks about beginning with what you know. Ask living relatives for more information about your ancestor. Organize the information you have and search for more information among the photos, letters, Bibles, and newspaper articles in your collection.
For example: my ancestor is Johanna Krogh and what I gathered from my family was that she was my grandmother’s mother, she came from Norway, she lived in Nebraska, she was married to John Webb, and she was born around 1894.
So let’s do a mini class on how to find out more about my ancestor, Johanna, and eventually research the Norwegian records for her.
First, like the article said, I would research the American records and find out all that I could about her life in America. That way one of those documents might mention her parents or siblings or a place name where she was from in Norway.
Second, since census records in America are valuable for creating the family dynamics, I usually start there. I want to know who was in her family. I would go to Ancestry.com or Familysearch.org and search the census records. Now I’m assuming you already know how to get an Ancestry.com or a Familysearch.org account. If not, then please comment below and I can help you with that or they have great tutorials that walk you through on their websites.
This is what I would find…
This is the 1930 Federal Census of Beaver Township, Boone County, Nebraska. Here we see Jake Hirsch is the head of the household and he’s 48 years old. Then Johanna Hirsch his wife and she’s 36 years old. Then we have Elmer who is a son to Jake and Iola who is a daughter to Jake. Then we have Kenneth Webb who is a stepson to Jake and Gertrude Webb who is a stepdaughter to Jake. That’s what the family looked like in 1930 in Nebraska.
At first glance, this doesn’t look like the right Johanna because she has a different last name and married to another person. However, I noticed my grandmother’s name Gertrude Webb and that she was living with the family as a stepdaughter. So did Johanna have a second husband? To answer that question, I went back to my relatives and asked them if she had married twice. My uncle said yes. Her first husband, John Webb, died and she had remarried to a Jacob Hirsch. After scolding my uncle in my head about how that information would have been nice to have in the first place, I went back to the census record to find more clues.
When searching censuses, you want to match as much information you can to the information you already know. In that way, you can know that you have the right ancestor. So here’s the info that matched. Johanna was 36 in 1930, which puts her birth year around 1894. She’s living in Nebraska. She has a daughter named Gertrude. All of this matched the information I already had. Therefore, this is the correct Johanna.
The rest of the census was even more enlightening.
Now you can’t tell from this snapshot, but these are columns for Johanna’s birthplace and her parent’s birthplaces. The first column is for the birthplace of the person listed in that line. The second column is for the father’s birthplace and the third column is for the mother’s birthplace.
Johanna is the second line in the group. We see she was born in Norway. Her father and mother were both born in Norway. The next column is language spoken, which she spoke Norwegian. The two far right columns deal with immigration. The first column states when they immigrated to America. The next column states at what stage are they in the citizenship process. The “Na” in that lines stands for naturalized, which means by 1930 she had become a citizen of the United States.
The new information we now have about Johanna is that she was born in Norway as was her parents, she immigrated around 1913, and she is a U.S. citizen by 1930. This opens up new avenues to look for documents.
The next step could be to look for further census records since she was here in America for the 1920 census and possibly for the 1940 census. On the other hand, we can look for her immigration records around 1913 through Ellis Island or other ports. But that step will have to wait for another post…
Happy hunting
Tiffany