Norwegian Emigration-Where do I go?

Hello everyone! How’s it going this week? Doing well or not so great? I hope all is well. I hope God is smiling on your efforts to track down your ancestors.

So, how many of you struggle to find immigration or emigration records for your ancestors? What do those two terms mean anyway? Immigration is coming into a country while emigration means leaving a country. Therefore, you will search for Norwegian emigration records and American immigration records. Let’s just talk about how to find Norwegian emigration records in this article. No need to confuse the audience today, right?

So you have an immigration year from an American census and you want to find the emigration record from Norway. How do you do it?

The way I would do it is this…Go to Norway Digital Archive, click on Advanced person search and you will see this…

In the bottom left corner you will see that I have already opened up the Emigration records tab. I would select all. Then I would type in my ancestor’s name in the middle column and just their birth year or immigration year. I would NOT put in too much information because it might not get you what you want so don’t fill out every line that you see here. Then click the search tab in the upper right corner.

You might see this…

We obviously don’t want to see this, however, this information is useful to know. This is where I would play with my search criteria to get another result. I would get rid of the birth year. I would put an asterisk after the first and last name leaving out some of the letters. This means that the name can start with the first two letters as shown, but can be any variation after that. For example, I put Jo* in the first name line. This means that the name has to start with the first two letters, then it can be anything after that such as John, Jon, Johann, Johannes, etc. That way I’m casting a wider net to see if I can find my ancestor. I would do this for the last name as well. This can take awhile, but be patient and you might get a hit.

Sometimes we know what city or port they left from because an American record will list it. Then we can do this…

I would click on emigration records and select all. Then click geography and in this case I clicked on Oslo then Oslo city because that was one of the major ports as well as a big city so that I can show you what you’re looking for.

Sometimes you will see very little information for your ancestor. The image below shows the ancestor’s birth year, residence, and date of emigration. In this case, this would be all that you would get because this record is not scanned so you would not get an original record.

Here is what an original record can look like. They are not all like this, but this is a good example of one. This record gives you much more information than the last one.

To learn more about Norwegian emigration, check out FamilySearchWiki for some amazing articles about this topic. In addition, check out some of my earlier articles talking about my own journey to discover my ancestor’s immigration records. I never did find an emigration record, but the article is still informative about how I did my journey.

So I hope this helps you at least get started in the right direction. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I would love to help. Don’t worry if you don’t find your ancestor’s emigration record. There are plenty of other records to find that will satisfy your desire to solve a mystery. So hang in there! Keep trying and know that you are not alone in this journey for your ancestors.

Good luck and happy hunting!

Tiffany