Genealogy on the Internet, Hallinglag

Genealogy on the Internet: A Personal Quest

(published in Hallingen, the newsletter of Hallinglag of America)

March 1997

A year ago, I'd never heard of Hallingdal. I knew the Helgesons were Norwegian (my father teased my mother—and her Swedish-born mother—that the Swedes were just Norwegian Indians). But I had no idea when the family came to America or where they came from. Today, I'm a member of the Hallinglag (organization for descendents of Hallingdal emigrants) and building my own Internet Web Page with genealogical information. A few weeks ago, I had a business meeting at which one of the participants was Norwegian; she looked at my business card and asked if the name was Norwegian. In the past, I'd typically respond, "Yes, but I don't know much about them." This time, I was thrilled to respond, "Yes, my family came from Ål parish in Hallingdal. They came on a sailing ship in 1850 and settled in Minnesota." She laughed when she told me that everyone she knew had American relatives, but her only ancestor to emigrate was lost at sea.

What made the big difference for me in tracing my family was the Internet. One day, I found two birth certificates I didn't know I had, tucked away in the back of an old address book. They belonged to my Swedish grandparents, born in the 1880s, one in Sweden and one a "Swede Finn" in Western Finland. I copied the information in an email message to my sister. That night she replied with what she'd been able to discover about the places on the Internet. Within days, we knew all about the woman's soccer team in Öxabäck parish in Sweden and wind-surfing near Munsala in Finland; within a week we each had email correspondents with women who said they'd help us search for information about our grandparents. Ulrika worked for the community of Mark in Sweden, and Stina, in Finland, was sure her grandmother had known our grandfather.

After a few weeks, I turned to the Helgesons about whom I knew much less than about my immigrant Swedish grandparents. All I knew was that Grandpa Helgeson had been born in Minnesota and I didn't even remember him talking about his parents. I had to get my daughter to look up in her baby book to find out where he was born. (I remembered having written it down years ago.) By then, I'd discovered the power of the Internet for genealogical research: I'd learned about the Mormon church and their records and had been able to download guidelines for genealogical searches in the countries and states I wanted to research. I'd discovered specialty sites like Nordic News on the Net and news groups like soc.genealogy.nordic where I got even more information. Through the web site of the Minnesota Historical Society, I found the names of historical and genealogical societies in Fillmore County where my grandfather was born. And on an ethnic origin map of Minnesota, I discovered that Fillmore County was full of Norwegians.

I also discovered the Social Security Death Index which has birth and death dates and last place of residence for millions of Americans who died between the early 1960s and the present, a database I could search from my own computer. I found state and county bulletin boards in the US—and in Europe as well—where you could leave messages about relatives you wanted to find. I even found a searchable database of the 1801 Norwegian census, though by then I knew about patronymics and doubted that looking for Helgesons would turn up any relatives. I left that source alone for awhile.

The letter to the Fillmore County Courthouse requesting my grandfather's birth certificate, from which I hoped to learn his parents' names, was the first of many letters I wrote to addresses I found searching on the World Wide Web. The birth certificate when it came was both enlightening and disappointing: disappointing because there wasn't very much information, enlightening because I found that my great grandparents' names were Halvor and Jane and that he had been born in Norway. But where?

The real breakthrough came from a reply to one of the undoubtedly naïve messages I left on a genealogy newsgroup. My correspondent was Zona Mathison of Moorhead, Minnesota, a genealogist specializing in Sogn og Fjordan who was willing to help. She used reference books of Norwegians in America, cemetery records, county histories and census records and soon had my family nailed down. Holge Halvorson (born in 1797 at Siire in Torpo) was the first Helgeson in the US. (Sometimes his name is written Holge and sometimes Helge.) He came with his family in 1850 from Baere farm, Ål parish in Hallingdal. His wife was Ingeborg Olsdotter (born in 1806 at Ruud farm) and with them came six children: Ole Helgeson, (born in 1829), Ingrid Holgesdotter (born in 1832), Haldis Holgesdotter (born in 1834), Anne Holgesdotter (born in 1838), Rangdi Holgesdotter (born in 1841), and Halvor Helgeson, (born in 1846). Over the next months Zona helped me track down more and more information about the family: that Holge died in Fillmore County in 1860, that Halvor served in the Civil War, that he married Gina Sophia Olson, and after the birth of three children, the family went by covered wagon to Anthony near Ada in Norman County.(Later Zona put me in contact with the John Wasylow, the Hallingdal genealogist, and he contributed to my knowledge as well, sending me a genealogical record of Sel farm, the home of Holge's wife Ingeborg.)

Ål parish in Hallingdal. That gave me a place name to search and I knew just how to do it. First to the MapQuest Web Site where I typed in Ål in Norway and got a map showing me where it was. Then I did a search and as with the Swedish places I'd looked for, found that people from Ål had Web Sites to visit. There was one site maintained by a young boy who said Ål was an out-of-the-way place with beautiful, valleys and extraordinary amounts of snow. He said the snow sequences at the beginning of the movie The Empire Strikes Back were filmed there. That was a lot of snow.

About that time, I made another startling discovery on the Internet. Thor Warburg in Norway was writing a book on immigrants to and emigrants from Ål parish. He'd put his database on his Web Site and encouraged people to search. Holge Halvorson was there! I learned that his father was Halvor Herbrandson Bjørøyen (born 1760), a peasant living at Siire. Thor helped me translate the Norwegian and also told me about the remote valley where Holge and his family had tried to make a go of farming right before they came to America. "I visited Baustedokken last year," he wrote, "Ridalen valley has now been deserted for 60 years and Baustedokken even longer. I found a small cornfield in the forest and three sites where the farmhouses once were. I found Baustedokken most beautiful and was impressed by the thought of how people made their living there, far from the rest of the population."

With the name of Holge Halvorson's father and a few farm names mentioned by Warberg, I was ready to tackle the 1801 Norwegian census, the first Norwegian census which listed everyone, including peasants like my ancestors. The census can be viewed in either Norwegianor English, though with a dictionary, I could read the Norwegian and get more clearly defined categories. And, after a few false starts, I got the hang of it and began to find relatives. (You have to search on parish and farm names and then first names. What we call a surname, like Helgeson, is pretty useless because it doesn't persist from one generation to the next.) Holge Halvorson was there, a child of four. He had a brother, Ole, who was two in 1801, though I've no idea what happened to him. I also found Holge's wife, Ingeborg, and her family in the census. An eerie feeling: a computer search from Texas to Bergen, Norway in 1997 finds evidence of a relative born in 1797!

Another breakthrough came when a Canadian correspondent on the Internet suggested I inquire of the Vesterheim Library in Madison, Wisconsin and gave me an email address for its director, Blaine Hedberg. From him I got one piece of information I'd been looking for diligently with no luck so far: Holge and his family had come on the sailing ship Drafna from Drammen, Norway and arrived in New York on 31 July, 1850. And perhaps most amazing of all, a child was born to them on the passage: Ingeborg—named for her mother—on 9 July. (Later, an Internet correspondent volunteered to look up the passenger list in the National Archives in Washington and sent me a Xerox of the hand-written list, with Holge Baere and his family listed first in steerage. There were actually three babies born on that voyage!)

The family went first to Rock County, Wisconsin. Both Ingeborg and her child died there and were buried in the Luther Valley Cemetery that September. Perhaps the child died on the journey, but it's likely Ingeborg died in one of the cholera epidemics then prevalent in the Wisconsin settlements. My sister, who went to Beloit College, thought she must have driven by that cemetery time and again with never a clue of family buried there.

Holge and his children went onto Allamakee County, Iowa, and, in 1856, to Fillmore County, Minnesota. By that time, I'd read Theodore Blegen's Norwegian Migration to America, 1825-1860 (a reprint of a 1931 book I learned about and ordered on the Internet) and realized that Holge and his family took a tried and true immigrant route. The Rock Creek settlement in Wisconsin was, in 1850, one of the established Norwegian colonies, and while land near there was nearly all settled, new immigrants often spent their first winter in America there. Fellow Norwegians helped them get work and support themselves until they were ready to continue west. The settlement Holge went to in Iowa was called Paint Creek, where westward movement led many Norwegians from the Wisconsin colonies between 1849 and 1860.

Another burst of information came as a result of my contact with Blaine Hedberg of the Vesterheim Library. He mentioned that his information about my relatives centered on Ole Helgeson—Holge's oldest son—and came from a Jim Larson in California. I wrote to Jim, who's been doing genealogical research since high school and he shared his database with me. My genealogy software tells me that Jim—descended from Ole Helgeson—is my third cousin once removed. Since he had once paid a genealogist in Norway to do more research, that took the family line back to the 1500s. In addition, it provided a complete line of Ole's descendents. If my task is to complete Halvor's line of descent, I still have a long way to go.

Somewhere along the way, I purchased genealogy software—Family TreeMaker from Broderbund—and began my own database. As I write this, I have the database up so I can check on names and dates; I can't imagine keeping track without it. I'm filling in the spaces bit by bit, but there are still a lot of questions.

What happened to Holge's daughters? Thor Warberg says that Ingrid married a Sevat Sevatson in America and died in 1874. She had a child named Ågot. Since Ingrid was 18 whenshe arrived in America, shemay havemarriedin Wisconsin or Iowa. JimLarson's aunt, who kept a family history, says that Haldis died in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1863, that Rangdi lived until 1935, but says nothing at all about Anne. It's so much harder to trace women!
I still know relatively little about my great grandfather Halvor's children:
Halvor Helgeson's wife has lots of names in the records: Jane, Gina, Gena, Sophia, G. S. It seems fairly clear that her name was Gena Sophia Olson, but I suspect the Gena is an Americanization of a Norwegian name like Guri. The records are also inconsistent about her birthplace, different official records saying that she was born in Norway and in Wisconsin. Which is right? Where specifically? Her father was Peter Olson and her mother's name was Aaget; they were both born in Norway, but I don't know where. (They were born in 1825 and 1828—too late for the 1801 census!) By the time Halvor and Sophia moved to Norman County, her father was dead and her mother and siblings also immigrated west. Peter P Olson, her youngest brother, owned a general store in Anthony Township until 1945.
I haven't even considered yet all those questions about the Norwegian ancestors. Like what happened to Holge's brother, Ole? If Holge's siblings stayed in Norway, there may be distant relatives there.? What about Ingeborg's siblings?

Halvor's Sophia died, evidently unexpectedly, in 1894, eleven days after the birth of Gerhard; Halvor moved into Ada with the children in 1904. When he died in 1920 in Crookston, he had been living with daughter Alta and her husband. Jim Larson recently discovered Halvor's Civil War pension record with additional information about the family, but the thirst for information about people who are just now coming alive for me is boundless.