Nordic Blue

(A repost from four years ago.) This blog is primarily about Norwegian-American family history, so naturally, you might assume that I woul...

There is a very important lesson that any family historian, and indeed, any researcher, needs to learn, and that is to not trust any single...

Only one branch of my mother's Norwegian-American family arrived in the United States early enough to be involved in the Civil War.  Th...

In an earlier post, "In Defense of Character:  Writing With Caution," I wrote about the difficulties of trying to find more inform...

This photograph of a large neighborhood gathering was taken on Independence Day, 1916, at the Nels and Ellen Langseth farm in Sinclair T...

For months I've been meaning to get back to scanning a box of loose photographs given to me by a cousin who lives in New York, who had p...

When researching and writing my Johnson family history a few years back, I came across a conundrum:  how does one diverge all of the importa...

  Tin type photograph, ca. 1884/1885. Malla Vikesaa Larson (left), with possibly her sister, Karin (Vikesaa) (Larson) Pedersen.  Pro...

It was nine feet tall and six feet wide soft as a downey chick It was made from the feathers of forty eleven geese took a whole bolt of clot...

In my last post, I wrote about the Hans Thorsen Slaaen and Anne Thorsdatter Vaterland family that settled in Coon Valley, Wisconsin, after e...

In 1841, Gulbrand Gunderson Skaret and his family from Sigdal, in eastern Norway, became the first white settlers in Coon Valley, Wisconsin....