Knut Djupedal Show Segment

Knut Djupedal, Director – Norwegian Emigrant and Research Center Hamar, Norway

A: My name is Knut Djupedal. I’m the Director of the Norwegian Emigrant Museum and Research Center in Hamar, Norway. It’s Norway’s only museum devoted solely to the history of the Norwegians who emigrated to overseas destinations and to those who came back, and in time, perhaps to the emigration back into Norway.

Q: We have exhibits behind us depicting all kinds of things. What is the story that you tell people about emigration?

A: Well, there were nine hundred thousand Norwegians who emigrated between 1825 and 1960. There’s no other country in the world except Ireland that has such a large proportion of its population immigrating. It’s their story we’re telling. It’s a major part of Norwegian history. People, excuse me, both in Norway and other places aren’t really aware of how large a proportion of people emigrated but in 1910, the, we had a census in Norway which counted 2.2 million Norwegians in this country at that time. In 1910 there was a census in the United States and they counted the first and second generation, ethnic groups, in the US at that time and there were seven hundred thousand Norwegians in the US then. Counting first and second generation. Which means that in 1910, about one quarter of all the Norwegians on the planet were in the United States.

Today, as far as we know, based on emigration, excuse me, census figures, about, there are 4.3 million Norwegians and at least that many Norwegian descendant people around the world. So all, that’s the story we’re telling. That story there. The people who left.

Q: Why did the people leave? Are there different reasons?

A: Many different reasons. However, three major reasons. The one is economic. It’s a, it’s a tradition that people left because times were so poor in the old country. That’s not quite the case, it’s a truth with some modification. A moment of thought will illustrate it. It costs money to cross the Atlantic. Poor people didn’t have the money to cross the Atlantic and, of course, rich people didn’t have to. It’s the people in between. What is called the lower middle class who are living reasonably well, but are kind of living on the margin. So they look ahead and something happens. There’s a downturn in the economy, the fishing goes bad, the, there’s a hard winter and so they’re risking, they look ahead and they see the times are getting bad and they may not survive. They’re doing OK now, but the year, next year, the year after, things might get hard and then they hear about America, free land and all this place they can go and get as much land as they want, letters come back from others who have went, gone before and photographs after time, come back. And so they leave, but it’s basically economic. They’re leaving to better themselves economically.

The second reason is pure adventure. We see today all these old pictures of old Emigrants, you know, the old pictures, the brown pictures we look at and we think, you know, this is like a century ago. Well yes, it was, however, the people who left a century ago were 18 years old at that time and they had the same ideas and thoughts and feelings that any 18 year old has had. "I want to go out and see the world. I want to make some money. I want to have a good time before I settle down." and in some cases, "I want to get an education. I just want to go out and enjoy myself." and as one woman said to me, in Portland, Oregon, I interviewed her. She said, "Knut, you have to remember, I was 18 when I came to this country. I’ve been here for 60 years." And I remember what I was like when I was 18 and that’s straight forward adventure.

The third reason is just to get an education. To learn something. They often express it in interviews as, "I would like to, I wanted to learn a language." But, in fact, that’s the whole idea of getting an education because at the same time they said, "I couldn’t get an education in Norway. I didn’t have the money so I left." So it’s economic, it’s straight forward adventure, it’s to get an education. It’s the priorities of youth. You know their families. They’re the families of young families. People in their 20’s, perhaps their older 30’s, their children are not, oh in many cases they were babies but most often they’ve got a year or two, three, or on up. These are the people who left which made the Norwegian government, in time, and other, say that it was the best people who left because it’s the people with drive, initiative, young people with young children and the people left behind are the poor and the rich who can’t together make a society, you have to have that middle. It was the middle that was leaving.

Q: What kind of advertisement drew them over there or information? How, you know, besides the personal letters or maybe photographs, what initially drew them? You had some posters over here or...

A: Yes. A lot of people went, this is throughout Europe. It’s not just Norway, it’s all over Europe. A lot of people go to America as a, sort of, pioneer and then an American company, a land company or a railroad company and in the 1870’s and 80’s particularly the railroad companies, would get an agent, an Emigrant, to go back to their country, of course the Emigrant loved it. He got a free ticket back to his own country, but they then had to bring with them a group back to America. That was the deal. And so you have people, you have the companies, American companies, land companies and railroad companies advertising in Europe, in the European languages, "Come to America. Settle on our land." Our land, mind you. Or they might advertise, "Free land." But travel by our railroad to the free land. Shipping companies would advertise. Cunard, all these different shipping companies would advertise all over Europe, not just in Norway. And, in fact, you could buy a ticket from them right here where we’re at, close to where we’re at. You could buy a ticket from here to any railroad station in the United States. Pay the ticket here in advance and take off and they took off pieces of the ticket as you traveled. But the major thing that really made the emigration is that these advertising brochures were backed up by letters and in time photographs from relatives. You might see an advertisement but people then, as now, would look at an advertisement and say, "Well that guy is exaggerating." But when you got a letter from your brother or your good friend, your neighbor got a letter from his brother saying to "Come over. It’s wonderful. This is the way it is." you know, and then you compared what was in the letter from someone you knew, with the advertising from the company. Then you left. It’s the personal thing. It’s always the personal thing that drove it. Someone you knew wrote or sent a picture. And some of the pictures quite literally could say much more than a thousand words when you had a picture of someone out in a wheat field, you know, and you couldn’t see the end of the wheat field. This is your brother standing there. That would make you, you look around here. This is a good part of Norway but there’s still a lot of rock here and then you see someone with a wheat field that stretches out to the horizon. That’s a powerful argument. Very powerful argument.

Q: There’s a painting on the wall about the departure of a group leaving on a ship that you say is similar to the Mayflower. Could you tell us that story?

A: Yes. It’s the first organized emigration. We do know for a fact that there were Norwegians, quite apart from the Vikings, there were Norwegians in what is now the United States, long before 1825. In fact, one of the mothers, four mothers of the Rockafellow family was from Norway. Came over in 1630. However, in 1825, a group of Quakers from western Norway decided that they wanted to leave Norway and settle in the United States and they then bought a ship called it Estalushone (sp?), a small, small vessel. They sent ahead two men, one of them was Clayne Pierson (sp?) who, in Norwegian history is called the Pathfinder or the Pioneer because he traveled over much of the eastern United States trying to find places for Norwegians to settle. Ended up dying in Texas by the way and they organized an emigration as opposed to someone going over on the off chance of a sailor going ashore, this was an organized emigration with a group of people leaving Norway for religious reasons, settling in the United States in one particular spot, and in that sense, that’s why we call it the Norwegian Mayflower because it’s the same sort of idea. A group of descenders leaving, settling in a new country. They settled in upstate New York. It wasn’t a very good area and most of them ended up later in Illinois. Clayne Pierson (sp?) brought them out there as well and they have descendants all over the United States. An interesting thing about it was there were 52 that left Norway, 53 arrived. There was a birth on the way and about a third of them were under the age of 18 so it was a very young emigration. Very young. And when they arrived in the United States they were arrested because the ship was too small to cross the Atlantic according to American law. They got out of that by being pardoned by the American President at that time. John Quincy Adams.

Q: Once they got there were the streets paved with gold? Did they do well? Are the stories all so great that, you know, the letters coming back just encouraged more and more people to rush over?

A: Well, I’ve interviewed a lot of people. Part of my job has been to interview people about their experience as Emigrants and what they told me is that, in interviews, is that we heard the songs, we heard the stories about the streets being paved with gold and all that and there is a famous song saying that, "We walked on the street in America and you stumble on a piece of gold and break your nose on a diamond." They, they know these stories but they said that they knew it was an exaggeration but even so, there were so many of the stories they say, it was so calm. And people did come back with money and they did write and say it’s better. So even though they knew that the advertising might be, and the song is an exaggeration, they knew also that there was an element of truth in it. But the general feeling was, as one of my, my mother’s uncle wrote back to Norway in 1925. He wrote, "Well I’ve started on my first million, but I think it’ll be a long time till I start on the next one."

Q: A lot of the information that you have here in the museum was passed on to you, is that correct? Started to be accumulated for a celebration back in 1917 was it?

A: 1914. It was the centennial of the Norwegian Constitution and a group called the Norseman’s Federation organized an exhibition about Emigrants, Norwegians overseas and, in that connection, the, the idea was thrown out that this should become a permanent collection and that, in a museum about the Norwegians overseas, Norwegian Emigrants. That’s still the basis of our collection although it’s, our collection has grown quite a bit since then. Today, most of our work, besides being a museum and that people can visit us, most of our work has to do with research, people coming here to use our sources for research purposes. We have, among other things, a ......scholar coming after Christmas or genealogy, people looking for their roots and we try to help them in that line. Our photo collection is used quite a bit, more and more, as a matter of fact, by Norwegian publishers who have something to do with emigration. They’ll call us and say, "We need a photograph of this, that, and so on." We’ll say, "Well, here’s a selection." So a lot of our photographs are now showing up in books published here in Norway and this particular painting here is a well known painting. That’s, well, you can see it there on the book behind me. The same sort of thing. So that’s really our services nowadays. But the basis is that exhibition in 1914. That’s where it all started.

Q: And from that you’re looking forward to having exhibitions here on a permanent basis.

A: Yes. We have a permanent exhibition in the basement. The big room in the perimeter is showing the history of the Norwegian Emigration overseas. This one that’s up right now, behind me, is a, the traveling exhibition that we have up for the time being. It’ll be replaced with other exhibitions, traveling exhibitions. In so far as we can, having something to do with the theme emigration. There’s a project that Darryl Henning of Vesterheim and I are working on concerning Norwegian American identity in the 1990’s. That will be an exhibition that will open here in 1999 and that will be in this room.

We also use this for seminars. When you have a large group, we’ll have it in this room. The luxury room.

Q: Now you have several buildings that you’ve brought back from the United States. Can you tell us why? Why would you do that? Why would you bring back buildings from the United States?

A: Well, the original idea was actually connected with the Folk Museum. The Folk Museum on Oslo has a, what we call a Norwegian atune. It’s a set of buildings. The farm building, the main farm building, the barns, the outhouses like the house where you, the big house, the brewery, all of this, all of these buildings together are called a tune in Norwegian. The farmstead if you will. Every part of, every district in Norway has a different style of farmstead. You can, if you know what you’re looking for you can go from district to district and from house to house and say this is from that district, this is from that district and so on. They collected this at the Folk Museum so they wanted a tune from America. That’s the basis of what we have here. The houses that the Norwegians built in America.

From our point of view here at the museum, now it’s been moved to this museum from the Folk Museum, moved up here, established here, what we want is a large, permanent, outdoor exhibition to demonstrate to Norwegians how their cousins lived in America, in a particular place and time which is the American midwest, say around 1880 to 1910. The idea being that this is the traditional picture of Norwegian emigration. It’s one that every Norwegian knows and so we’re showing them the Norwegian population what their American cousins experienced in America.

The buildings are used as a large outdoor exhibition demonstrating how the Norwegians lived in America. We have artifacts from the midwest in them and we use that then as the beginning for the exhibition about Norwegians in other places like Brooklyn, the far west in Seattle, and in other places, parts of the world like Australia, South Africa, China. We’ll probably even have an exhibition, in time, about Norwegian’s who emigrated to Russia because during the 1920’s and 30’s Russia, for some people, was the new America. Before one was really aware of what the regime was like and so there were Norwegians who emigrated to Russia and they’re descendants now as the Soviet empire is falling apart, their descendants are coming back to Norway looking for relatives just like any American does.

Q: Well in addition to preserving and disseminating information, do you also offer services to those who are seeking more information about their family right? The genealogical. Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of things people can look for here once they’ve done their research on the other side of the ocean perhaps.

A: Yeah. We, we offer different. We offer genealogical services really tailor made to what you’re looking for. The first thing we tell anyone is to find as much as you can in the place where you’re at. Don’t try to come to Norway and find a lot of stuff here unless you know ahead of time a lot from where you’re coming from as it were. Having found as much as you can in the United States, you can come to us. What we then do, as I said, is more, really tailor made to what you’re looking for. If you’d like us to do a genealogical search, we can do that. We will charge you a certain amount of money depending on what you’re asking us to look for and how much time it will take. Or, more commonly, what we do since most genealogists, most people looking for their roots like to do the work themselves, what we’ll say is, "Well, you can look there. Talk to those people, go to that spot." In effect, giving advice. And then we also function as a clearing house. If we can’t do it ourselves, we’ll say, "Well here’s a Genealogist over there. He or she can do it. They’re good. They’re honest. They’ll give you value for your money. And if you go through us, we’ll copy all the material that’s sent and there’ll be a permanent record of whatever it is applies to your family here at the Emigrant Museum. And we say, it will cost a little bit of money. You’ll have to pay for the Genealogist’s time again depending on how much time is involved and so on but, but you’ll get good results.

So we do actually three things. And occasionally we’ll do a search ourselves. We will help you do the search yourself or we will recommend someone who can do it for you.

Q: Now I’m not sure but is there a confusion, or can there be a confusion for people looking at a document say and understanding which is the name of a town or a city or a county of say, a birth record or something like that so that, you know, I tell you, "Look, I have this birth record and it says that my grandfather was born here." Is it like in Ireland where I would be so confused with the townships and, you know, the shires and everything else that I wouldn’t be able to be directed immediately to the area where I might find more information?

A: Well if you came to us we’d find it.

Q: OK.

A: Having said that, however.

Q: What if I don’t get here?

A: Having said that, the Norwegian Administrative System is relatively straightforward. Think of an American state. You have the state government, the county government, and the township government and in the townships you also have towns and cities. The Norwegian is the same thing. Think of the Norwegian, Norway, as a state with a national government equivalent to the American State Government. Norway is then divided into twenty counties and those counties have been more or less the same since, oh, the last three hundred years. The names have changed but the county borders have not changed that much. So we’re now in Hademark fylke, the modern word is fylke which means county. But 100 years ago the word was Amt. But it’s the same place. Same district.

Then we have the townships. We’re now in Stunga township. The entire country is divided into townships and it’s been that way for three hundred years at least. The township names have changed. They have been put together, they’ve been split up and so on, but, if you know a little bit about Norwegian history and if you can, or you can find someone like us that does, then we can find almost exactly which township you are from. But you have to know a little bit for us to work with. I mean, you come to us and say, "I think he came from western Norway." then we have a serious problem.

However, going from there down to the farms, things changed. Then it becomes real difficult. Or it can become real difficult because most people in America work off a name like Veke or Berg. Well Berg means mountain in Norwegian. Veke means a bay and this country has a lot of mountains and bays. So which veke are we talking about. And also keep in mind that Norway is a large country. People aren’t really aware that Norway, if it were placed on a map of the United States, would stretch from New Orleans to Buffalo, New York. So this is not a small country. Scandanavia as a whole would stretch from the Rockies to the Mississippi and from Canada to Texas. So this is, this is a reasonably large piece of Europe that you’re talking about and there are, as I said, there are a lot of places called veke in Norway. So you have to give us a bit more to work with.

Q: Is it possible to check back through records? I mean, through property ownership or tithing books? I mean, do you have that sort of thing available?

A: Yes. Yes. If we don’t have them here, we will turn you over to the state archives or tell you which state archives in the country to go to. There are six or seven offices. Or the National Archives in Oslo. That’s part of our service. That’s why I say if you can give us something to work with, we can, we can spot it pretty closely. Or give you a reasonable estimate of where you should go to get more information.

I should, perhaps, mention one thing I think perhaps all genealogists working in Norway should be aware of is the difference between, when it comes to farms. In the United States you have farms and your land is divided into sections, quarter sections, and so on. The square mile and, no. In the United States land is divided in sections. So you can find someone’s property on a section and have this section number and all that sort of thing. And everything is divided by, into square miles. The whole country looks, when you do it that way, it looks like a big grid. In Norway, we also have a way of dividing land but it’s by what we call a Gard. G-A-R-D. And that translates directly as a farm. Now I mentioned that you have a, a township, OK, every township in the entire country is divided into farms. Every one of them. And every farm has a number. So you have township like this one, Stungin. This is Stungin township. You have farm number one, Stungin township farm number one, two, three, four, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred and ten, and so on. Every, every township in the entire country has that. So every time you go to a new township, you start with farm number one, two, three, and so on. Every time. All over the country. Even in the big cities. Oslo is divided this way. Then every farm is divided into something called Bruk. B-R-U-K. They too have a number, and it’s a slash number. So you have farm number one, slash, bruk number one, or two, or three. Now these farms, the first one, the gard, all have the same name. That’s, that’s where the problem comes in because if you say that you come from a farm that’s got the name, in my hometown for example, Hordevik, well Hordevik is a gard, it’s got a number. But it’s got, I think, twenty slashes behind it. All of these people from this place are named Hordevik but they live on different units of this farm and they might not be related to each other, but they all have the same name. So you have to find the farm number and then that slash, and then the number behind it. That tells you the location. And if you can get that, then you’re in business.

Q: Now do you have census records?

A: Yes.

Q: Those types of records are available?

A: Yes. We have some here and we can tell you again where to find them. Again, when I mentioned about the farm, and numbers and names and so on, census records are kept in that manner. So once, that’s why those are so important because they will give you the people living on that farm and that unit of the farm at any particular time.

Q: Now does this necessarily mean that they own the land or.....

A: No. They could be renting it.

Q: OK.

A: And even today in the cities, an apartment block will have one of these numbers. Farm number, slash, something else. And then it will be divided into units, smaller units, because of the apartments. Every piece of property in the entire country is divided this way.

And, that is the way you find people. Because people, one hundred years ago, changed the names. Until recently, Norwegians did not use last names. That’s an American thing that was given to them when they entered the United States. They used their first name and their Patronymic. So in my particular case I would be called Knut Larson. In so far as I had a last name, it would be the farm at which I lived. If I moved, my last name would change.

Q: To wherever your new location was.

A: If I married, my name would change to my wife’s name because that was the farm she lived at, if I moved to that farm. So you can have, as is the case in many families, my family included, and my family has absolutely nothing strange about in this manner, you would have people that are brothers and sisters that have all different names. Four or five different names because they’ve moved to different farms. So you can’t trust names in Norwegian genealogy. You have to look for the farm.

Q: That’s a good tip. Very good tip. Thank you. Besides offering them services here, you also have a web site.

A: Yes.

Q: What kinds of services are you offering to the web site? Or what can they find out?

A: Well on the web site they find out about the museum. We tell them our history, we tell them about our library because we are a research institution. Our right name is the Norwegian Emigrant Museum and Research Center. We tell them about our services, we tell them about the outdoor museum, just a general information. We set it up so that you can search through our web site either just to overview or your can go into specifics. We, as far as genealogy is concerned, we tell them about our services, we also have a return questionnaire you can fill out and, you know, punch a button that goes, comes back to us.

We have links to other sites. The Vesterheim Museum in the United States and the Genealogical Center in Madison, Wisconsin. And there’s other similar institutions in Europe. We are, by no means, the only such institution in Europe. There’s one in Ireland, there’s another in Germany, there’s one in Slovania. There’s one coming in Hungary, there’s one in San Morino, Luxembourg. I hear there’s a place in France. So there are lots of people doing this. We, yeah, that’s what we’re doing. That sort of thing. That’s what you can find at our web site. Detailed information about us, links to other places, and a beginning of a genealogical search.

Q: You consider yourself a gateway.

A: Yes.

Q: Can you tell us why?

A: Well, this museum, most museums, in fact, all museums, scratch that. All museums have a role as, to tell a story. To tell the story of something. The International Council of Museums say that museums are supposed to collect, conserve, do research in, and disseminate knowledge of, and then it’s up to the particular institution what that subject is. Now all Norwegian museums say, "Come to us and we’ll tell you the story of some bit of Norwegian culture. Fisherman culture. Coastal culture." The entire country, in folk museum in Oslo, the Viking ship Museum, the Viking culture. The local museums at Hadmark or district museums like Marhagen and ellama and so on, all these, they come to us, we’ll give you a piece of Norwegian culture. Tell you a piece of a bit about Norway. What we say is that we’ll tell you also about a bit of Norwegian history and culture but this is the emigration piece. This is the history of nine hundred thousand Norwegians who left the country, why they left. The background for their leaving and in that sense, we’re kind of on the border of Norway and we say then, that we’re a gateway to people who are coming from the outside. As I said, there are about four, four point five million ethnic Norwegians around the world. They want to find out about their roots, about where they came from. They can come to us and we’re a gateway into the country. We’ll explain to you a bit about the history of the emigration, why people left, why you’re relatives left. If you want to, we’ll help you find your relatives as well as we can, and you use us as a gateway to the rest of the country. Norwegians who want to find out what happened to their relatives will use us as a gateway in leaving the country. "Where can I find information in the United States about Uncle John who disappeared in 1860?" Well, we’ll tell him or her where they might find that information. As an example, people ask us, "They left in 1850. He was a young man at that time." and we’ll say, "Well, if he was a young man and leaving in the late 1850’s maybe he was in the civil war. Look in the, talk to the American Defense Department. Come to our library and look at the records of the Norwegian Regiments who fought in the civil war. The 15th Wisconsinents, stuff like that. Maybe you’ll find him there." This sort of tips that Norwegians otherwise really wouldn’t know about. So that’s why I say we’re a gateway. If you’re a Norwegian looking for the history of the Norwegians who left, we’re the gateway out. If you’re an American or any other national looking for the history of your people before they left, we’re a gateway. And we’ll, we will pass you on to other museums, other organizations here in the country that can give you more detailed information about the place where you’re from.

I said that the Norwegian emigration, I said the Norwegian Emigrant Museum is a gateway. Come and use it. Come and use us as a gateway into the country. Let us help you find your relatives. Let us help you find out about Norway. If not your, your relatives in particular, about the history of this country where your family came from. This part of the world where, where, let us help you find the history of where your family came from. The people that you came from.

You can’t really trust last names in Norway. You should go with the first names. However, keep in mind that Norwegian has changed in the last 150 years. Several times. So that the spellings of names and places has changed as well. English has been pretty conservative in that aspect then American English in place names have not changed that much but in Norway they have changed quite a lot. We have, in some cases gone, the sound of F for example, can be spelled PH or it can be spelled with an F. Vik can be spelled with a W-I-K, or V-I-K. Then they brought in the other Norwegian language in E Norsk and they changed the written language. So, so there are so many different ways of spelling things. You have to keep this in mind when you’re working in Norwegian genealogy that the names change and then, of course, there’s the whole thing of going to America, change that again.

Q: One last thing about volunteers. I understand you want to include volunteers possibly as part of the museum and research center here. Is that right?

A: That’s right. We, we need volunteers. I mean, this museum needs volunteers, needs people to come and do work here. If there are Americans who would like to come here and work for a while, I’m sure we could work something out. Certainly we have enough to do.

Q: Could it be like an Elderhostel plan where they come for, you know, a month or so and......

A: We’ll see. That’s one of our ideas. We haven’t gotten a Hostel off the ground yet but, as you can see, there are buildings around this one that can be used as such a hostel and we’re working with the county who owns the buildings to, to see if we can’t arrange something like that. If that were the case, then we would, in fact, have a hostel for about 40 people. I would very much like that because then we could bring in a whole bus, you know, and just put people up here. Give them a course in Norwegian history. Send them off to the rest of Norway.

Q: That would be great. Thanks again.

A: Sure.