While Mom and Dad did a lot of research back when we were in Minnesota, there’s nothing like getting information from the horse’s mouth. Or a Norwegian’s mouth, for that matter. It was time to talk to Bertha and dip our toes into some family history of Norway from just a couple hundred years ago. I’m sure you’ve all done it before, but it’s a first for me. Today, we got to see what kind of info Mom and I could dig up.
It was bright and early, but at least it was bright. Today wasn’t as gloomy and gray as before, which may have been Nature’s way to compensate us for the time we were going to spend hanging out with the dead. Or maybe God likes good weather on His day off. Whatever the reason, it made the drive to Sannidal more pleasant.
By leaving as early as we did, we got to the church before 10:00 and decided to wander around the graveyard to search for names that might have been related to me (this is Dad’s side of the family that we’re searching for). We couldn’t find anything there, but we eventually found Bertha outside the church to talk to her for a while.
She was a little bit confused because I told her my name was “Shawn Bakken”, but when we started talking, she checked to see if it was us by holding up her phone. The caller ID said “Juane Bakken.” Hey, she’s the one who bought it at the store… But once we got the names clarified, it was down to business.
This netbook has just about everything on it—reservations, journal entries, maps to find the bodies… and it also had a picture of Pauline’s birth record (my great-great-grandmother) from the church. We thought maybe Bertha could use her name, the names of her parents or anything else to find more information. She didn’t know anything on the spot, of course, but she offered to do some research and suggested we call her on Tuesday. (Given our previous trouble on the phone, I later asked for her e-mail address so I could send her a message and she could write back to us with any results.)
In the meantime, she said we could look around the church if we wanted. The outside looked a little aged, but was probably renovated at some point, given that it’s been around since 1771. There was a wall that had pictures of all the pastors who’d worked at the church in the past—there were a lot of pictures. Then when I was walking up and down the aisle to see more of the church, I thought about how my great-great-grandmother had walked this same path every time she came to church.
But as I walked up and down the aisle, I was looking around and the inside… in all honesty, it looked a little like a playhouse. Churches in the U.S. are usually designed with a lot of dark, rich brown wood inside that creates a sense of seriousness—getting in touch with God is a big deal. Inside of Sannidal’s church, the pews were painted with a combination of white, light blue and green.
That’s not to say that it wasn’t a church: it had a full-scale organ on the second level and there was a giant painting of Jesus on the cross on the back wall that said in Norwegian (we think), “He died to save us.” But aside from that painting, it seemed like a non-denominational church. When I thought back on it, I couldn’t remember seeing any other religious icons or symbols. I don’t know if any “non-denominational” churches existed 240 years ago, but it’s an interesting thought.
We took another look through the gravestones, but didn’t find any with the name “Helle” (Pauline’s father) or Olson (her husband). We took a few pictures of “Moe” gravestones, since that surname is a branch of our family tree. Whether the Sannidal Moes are related to me, we don’t know, but we took the pictures anyway.
From there, we moved on to the Strand Farm. If I’ve got the details straight, Pauline’s father was named Paul Pederson Helle because he worked in the “Helle” portion of the Strand Farm. It’s currently a small village of its own, but we wanted to at least check out the Strand House on the Strand Farm and see if we could say “Hi” to a Strand, take some Strand Pictures, etc.
We found the address for the Strand Farm, but upon ringing the doorbell and knocking on the door, no one answered. We settled for pictures of the house (we knew it was the Strand House because it had a Strand Doorknocker on the Strand Front Door), then got back into the car and left.
As we drove back to the main road, we saw someone biking toward us with a German Shepherd on a leash. He was giving us a curious look, which was understandable given that we were a strange car pulling out of a one-way street. (I guess I wasn’t paying attention earlier, but apparently, we crossed paths on our way in as well, so the fact that we were just leaving when he got back…) Mom slowed down, rolled down the window and we started talking.
It turned out he was the reason no one answered at the Strand House: he was Mr. Strand. (He wasn’t the official owner of the farm anymore—he’d recently passed the property down to his daughter.) He started telling us about the Helle portion of the farm, the location of the saw mill where Paul Pedersen Helle was the foreman and offered to search for more information in the future (he’s currently on vacation). His friend is writing a book about the history of that area and Mr. Strand has a lot of the rough notes for the book and might be able to find something for us.
From there, we followed his directions through Helle toward the saw mill, which closed in the 1920’s and was replaced by a chain-building factory for WWII. It was on a river, so the chain factory could use the same source of hydroelectric power to run things. We took a few more pictures, but instead of backtracking to the roads on the map, we pressed forward into unknown territory.
And it remained unknown for a very long time. We had a lot of spare time before getting to the hotel and we were pretty sure we were heading in the right general direction toward a highway, but that was it. There were a few areas with a lot of traffic—usually the areas with a beach and/or docks for boats—but the roads remained curvy and never stretched beyond two lanes wide (and sometimes squeezed close enough that Mom stopped the car to make sure she wouldn’t get sideswiped).
It was out of the way enough that we even passed a fenced-off field with oxen in it, so we pulled out the camera again. It was just standing in the shade and munching on grass, not once giving me an accusatory look for eating one of its brethren. I appreciated that.
I was trying to catch up on your travelogue and was reminded of my own trip to Norway over a decade ago now. I don’t know if you made it up to Trondheim, but the Staatsarkivet (State Archives) is quite useful for tracing your genealogy. My family had to hire a professional, since we couldn’t speak or read Norwegian, but he got us back to the early 17th century thanks to tax and criminal records stored there.
By the way, if you have an ancestor named Risvold, it’s highly likely we’re only semi-distant cousins.