A Picture from my Flickr Family History Collection

Oystein Nilsen Bratland and Kari Torkelsdatter Gauten Hegerland
Originally uploaded by wanda_weinberg

Here's a story about this picture which was taken in Norway in about 1877.

In 2001, my sister and I visited Norway to find the farms from which our family emigrated. My grandfather's family had left Roldal Norway when he was two years old, so that's one of the places we wanted to see. Now Roldal is a small town in the mountains in Norway, and the farms of his parents and grandparents were several miles outside of that small town, so you can begin to imagine how remote this place was.

My sister, who is the braver of the two of us, didn't hesitate to walk right up to these farms to introduce ourselves and explain why we were there. Most Norwegians speak English so this generally worked, but on one farm, the woman only spoke a rural dialect of Norwegian, so we really had no way of communicating with her. We did have a genealogy of the family with us though, so my sister opened it to the page which had a picture of her farm and pictures of two sets of our great-great-grandparents who had lived in Roldal. The woman looked very surprised and pulled us into her house where she showed us the originals on her wall!

The picture in the genealogy was just a photocopy of the original, so it wasn't a very good quality. Earlier this year, I decided to contact the author of this genealogy to see if I could get copies of this and other pictures. I had never met this second cousin, but she's been very kind and has sent scanned copies of several wonderful nineteenth century photos.

By the way, I used the "Blog This" option to send this picture to Flickr.