On a recent sunny afternoon I took some panoramic photos at some local cemeteries. Some are pretty quiet but thanks to everyone in the community they are all well-maintained. Click and drag in the windows to change your view, and go full-screen for the best experience.
[htmlembed name=”HighlandPanorama”]
Universitetet i Bergen posted this really helpful family relationship chart showing almost all conceivable relations, including in-laws and half-siblings. There’s no translation provided, but the point of the chart is that you won’t need it. Continue reading
A legion of FamilySearch.org volunteers have manually indexed the 1940 census line by line to come up with a searchable database of the census records. Though the entire country has not (as of today) been completely indexed, Minnesota and Iowa are complete and ready to search.
If you’d prefer to download images of the census (so you can see the actual form that was carried by the census-taker), I made a list of links to each county/district.
A once-thriving village nestled into the Bear Creek valley, Quandahl’s history followed the path of so many other small country towns in the mid 20th century, except for how it ended: On an early October morning in 1966, the entire village went up for auction. Continue reading
Nothing can match the experience of traveling to Norway to visit the towns and farms where your ancestors were born and from where they emigrated, but you can now get a 360-degree drive-by view of many of those places through Google Maps Street View. Recently, Google added Street View to all of Norway, so anything seen from the road is now available to you at home. The experience is enhanced for Google Earth users, who can create virtual tours and can “drive” along a road.
[htmlembed name=”streetview”] Continue reading
Brunt & Parman, a wholesale and retail pharmacy in Decorah, commissioned this panoramic photo around 1908. The pharmacy produced and sold postcards and other photographic products. Founded by Isaac W. Brunt and E. J. Parman in 1893, the pharmacy operated for almost 20 years until Brunt sold his interest to Parman in January 1911 and was appointed secretary of the American Drug and Press Association.
[htmlembed name=”DecorahPanorama1908″]
Reader Randy Freese asked about a lonely tombstone on a scenic bluff over North Bear Creek. The grave site provides a broad view over Bear Creek valley and the site of the former Bear Creek Woolen Mill, which was founded by the grave’s inhabitant John Munro. Continue reading
This Memorial Day, NorwegianRidge.com will honor the WWII service members from Hauge Lutheran Church; fortunately, it seems that all came home from the war. The list below has been transcribed from a framed poster in the basement of the church. The original list includes only the name and branch of service, but I have endeavored to fill in a little more information on each person by using church and military records (yet have been unable to identify a couple of them). Continue reading
On the night of Wednesday, June 6, 1906, a tornado ripped across Winneshiek and Houston counties, and extended its range of destruction into La Crosse and western Wisconsin. Two were killed near Caledonia. A spate of storms causing unprecedented damage occurred across the upper Midwest that week. Reprinted below is a report on local damage in Canoe and Highland townships.
The National Archives has released photographic images of all census forms collected in April 1940. Census records, by law, are released 72 years after collection, and the images are now available to download. FamilySearch.org has an indexing project that will make these searchable, but our area has not been indexed yet. Continue reading
Based upon his travels in America in June of 1838, Ole Rynning’s True Account of America (Sandfærdig Beretning om Amerika) gave practical information and courage to thousands of Norwegian peasants who were curious about their chances in another country. It was the first comprehensive account of its type, having been preceded by letters sent to Norway by the relatively few earlier emigrants; these letters would be circulated around the farm communities eager for news. Rynning presented his account not as a travelogue, but explicitly as a helpful question-and-answer dialog to address the fears of the prospective emigrant. He has been accused of being overly optimistic, to his own financial advantage. Yet the fact remains that this text was enormously important in inspiring some of those in the first wave of immigrants to Illinois and Wisconsin. Continue reading
Between Rocks and Hard Places by Ann Urness Gesme is a social history of the Norwegian farmers who made up the bulk of emigrants to America. Focusing on the Norwegian period of their lives makes this book uniquely informative and valuable, since there are already many good books about the American period. Ten out of twelve chapters concern aspects of life in Norway, such as the church, courting and marriage, education, and trading and markets. The remaining two chapters concern the circumstances that led to emigration and the founding of Norwegian communities in America. Continue reading
Information about naturalization, while not usually a treasure trove for a genealogist, can be helpful in confirming or discovering a few facts: the county where an ancestor lived (especially helpful during the years between censuses), their year of immigration, and their complete and accurate full name. (Federal immigration records after 1906 provide much more information, but the vast majority of Norwegian-Americans in the Norwegian Ridge area immigrated prior to this date.) Not all immigrants would seek naturalization – not having citizenship restricted only the right to vote – but as it would automatically be conferred upon a spouse and foreign-born children, it was sometimes sought to confer an advantage to the family in later years. Continue reading
The Decorah Genealogy Association has an excellent library of local resources, but I also have a pretty good library of books on subjects related to Norwegian genealogy, such as Norwegian local histories (bygdeboks), printed collections of church records, and historical surveys of Norwegians in America. I am more than happy to help you with your own genealogy inquiry by doing lookups in my collection. I’ve put up a list of my books, so take a look and let me know how I can help!
