The People of Grytnes
by Daniel Borgström
danielfortyone (at)gmail.com
GRYTNES was the farm in Norway our family came from and named itself after. My mother believed that our ancestors had lived there for countless generations, going back to Viking times and even before that. It was located in the vicinity of Trondhjem, but that's all she could tell me, since she was born in America and had never been back to the old country.
Much of her information had come from an old letter written by a distant cousin to my grandfather, but that letter had been misplaced. My mother knew it had to be somewhere in the house, because she never threw anything away, and one day, in an old desk drawer, she found it.
The letter was written in Norwegian, and dated November 15, 1953. I could understand most of it, since Mother used to read me stories in Norwegian. The major difficulty was deciphering the handwriting, done in an ornate old-world style.
"Kjære Sigurd Grytnes, Tak for brevet som jeg mottog . . ." it began. "Dear Sigurd Grytness, Thank you for the letter I received some days ago."
My grandfather had never met the writer, but had seen his name, Havtor Grytnes, in a Norwegian language newspaper, and had been struck by the coincidence that it was also the name of his own twin brother. Since first names tend to be repeated within families, my grandfather wondered if the man might be a relative, which was why he had written to him.
In his response, Havtor Grytnes explained to my grandfather: "I began right away to look up who you were, and I found out that you are indeed a relative. We have a family register that goes back about 250 years." Havtor included a list of some two dozen relatives they shared in common, including aunts and uncles who'd immigrated to America in the 1800's. It gave years of birth, marriage, and when they sailed for America. My mother had personally known a number of these people, and fleshed out the bare-bones data with anecdotes and personal memories.
Thus I began a family history. It's been a lengthy project at which I've spent some decades, finding bits of information in all sorts of places--old letters, church records, and, more recently, information I've retrieved online.
Of the Grytnes farm in Norway, Cousin Havtor wrote that it was at Øksendal. Was that a village I could find on the map? The letter also mentioned the towns of Sunndalsøra and Kristiansund. I got a map of Norway, and easily found all three. Library reference books gave a few population statistics.
At the time the letter was written Øksendal was a village of about 500 people, deep in the upper reaches of Sunndals Fjord, enclosed by snow-clad mountains. One must travel down-fjord some 60 kilometers to reach the open sea. And as my mother believed, it is in the vicinity of Trondhjem, about 130 kilometers away as the crow flies.
Cousin Havtor asked Grandpa if he had ever seen Grytnes. An interesting question. It's very possible that he hadn't. According to Norwegian custom, a farm went to the eldest son, and Grandpa's father, Anders, was the second son, so he had to leave the farm. That would have been around 1850. Anders was sent to school, became a teacher and later a parish priest in the Lofoten Islands, which are above the Arctic Circle, about 400 miles north of Øksendal. Lofoten is where my grandfather, Anders' son, grew up.
So did Grandpa ever visit the Grytnes farm in Øksendal? Did his father ever bring the family back to the old home to visit their grandfather? Maybe, but probably not. Grandpa was born in 1868; travel was difficult and expensive in the 19th century.
I remember my Grandfather well, but by the time I began work on this family history project, he'd been gone for several decades. Most likely Cousin Havtor as well.
Additional information came from other sources, some of it very old. One day I was reading the "Saga of Gisli the Outlaw," a medieval Icelandic story which was probably written in the 13th century. It relates events which took place around the year 900 and briefly mentions the village of Øksendal. There's only a line or two about the village, just enough to indicate that the place was inhabited back in Viking times. The settlement may have been ancient even then, in which case the people who lived there would be among our ancestors.
More recently, satellite photos have come online, and in these we can see the upper reaches of Sunndals Fjord as it looks like from space. Near the upper end is an inlet; that's where Øksendal is located.
The Grytnes farm had milk cows and a whole mountainside for sheep, as well as quite a lot of timber, according to another distant cousin, Bersvend Grytnes, who was born at Øksendal in 1902. He was interviewed for an oral history project in 1982, and a summary of the interview is now available online. In this interview, Bersvend said he attended school till he was 15, then worked for his father. In the winter they logged. He also fished for salmon, setting traps along the shore of the fjord. At other times he hunted for grouse and ptarmigan, which he sold in the market. But when his father died and his older brother took over the farm, he was out of a job. Seeing no future there, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1922.
Cattle and sheep raising, logging, fishing and some hunting must have been the basic activities at Grytnes and other Norwegian farms since ancient times. The eldest son inherited the farm; second, third and forth sons found something else to do; in the 19th and early 20th centuries some went into the professions and others went to America. But it was only after around 1850 that the option of going to America became available.
Cousin Havtor's letter mentions Nils, an ancestor born back in 1753 at Øien, another farm in Øksendal. Nils Øien seems to have been a 2nd or 3rd son, and therefore could not inherit the Øien farm. But there was a place for him at the Grytnes farm where the owner had a daughter but no sons. Nils came to Grytnes, married Brit, and became the ancestor of a whole lot of Grytnes people, including Halvor, Bersvend, and my grandfather Sigurd.
I fantasize Brit Grytnes as an eligible, sought-after woman on the fjord, and her engagement to Nils Øien a romance that the contemporary English novelist Jane Austin could have immortalized, had she known of them. Although it was the general custom in those times for marriages to be decided by parents, it is also true that even before the 18th century marriages were sometimes left to the option of the couple themselves. Of course, there was no Jane Austin in Øksendal, and the details went unrecorded.
Sadly, we don't have a single anecdote which might bring Brit and Nils to life as personalities who once lived and worked and loved and dreamed. There is something very tragic about the way entire lifetimes pass into oblivion, and that is why I am writing this history, to preserve the memories and traditions that we do have.
It's only as we get to the middle of the 19th century that we begin to have oral traditions and anecdotes which flesh out some of the names in the genealogy, starting with Grandpa's father Anders, teacher and later parish priest in the Lofoten Islands. Also, from the 1860's onward, we have photos of him and others which put faces on our more recent ancestors. My mother was able to identify for me most of the people in those old photos, and personally knew a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins who came to America in the latter 1800's.
Brit and Nils's grandson, Pastor Anders, was born in 1833. His son, my grandfather Sigurd, was born in 1868 and came to America in 1889, just in time to be in Seattle the year when Washington became a state. My mother Agnes was born in Iowa in 1899.
(to be continued)
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.
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.
danielfortyone (at)gmail.com
GRYTNES was the farm in Norway our family came from and named itself after. My mother believed that our ancestors had lived there for countless generations, going back to Viking times and even before that. It was located in the vicinity of Trondhjem, but that's all she could tell me, since she was born in America and had never been back to the old country.
Much of her information had come from an old letter written by a distant cousin to my grandfather, but that letter had been misplaced. My mother knew it had to be somewhere in the house, because she never threw anything away, and one day, in an old desk drawer, she found it.
The letter was written in Norwegian, and dated November 15, 1953. I could understand most of it, since Mother used to read me stories in Norwegian. The major difficulty was deciphering the handwriting, done in an ornate old-world style.
"Kjære Sigurd Grytnes, Tak for brevet som jeg mottog . . ." it began. "Dear Sigurd Grytness, Thank you for the letter I received some days ago."
My grandfather had never met the writer, but had seen his name, Havtor Grytnes, in a Norwegian language newspaper, and had been struck by the coincidence that it was also the name of his own twin brother. Since first names tend to be repeated within families, my grandfather wondered if the man might be a relative, which was why he had written to him.
In his response, Havtor Grytnes explained to my grandfather: "I began right away to look up who you were, and I found out that you are indeed a relative. We have a family register that goes back about 250 years." Havtor included a list of some two dozen relatives they shared in common, including aunts and uncles who'd immigrated to America in the 1800's. It gave years of birth, marriage, and when they sailed for America. My mother had personally known a number of these people, and fleshed out the bare-bones data with anecdotes and personal memories.
Thus I began a family history. It's been a lengthy project at which I've spent some decades, finding bits of information in all sorts of places--old letters, church records, and, more recently, information I've retrieved online.
Of the Grytnes farm in Norway, Cousin Havtor wrote that it was at Øksendal. Was that a village I could find on the map? The letter also mentioned the towns of Sunndalsøra and Kristiansund. I got a map of Norway, and easily found all three. Library reference books gave a few population statistics.
At the time the letter was written Øksendal was a village of about 500 people, deep in the upper reaches of Sunndals Fjord, enclosed by snow-clad mountains. One must travel down-fjord some 60 kilometers to reach the open sea. And as my mother believed, it is in the vicinity of Trondhjem, about 130 kilometers away as the crow flies.
Cousin Havtor asked Grandpa if he had ever seen Grytnes. An interesting question. It's very possible that he hadn't. According to Norwegian custom, a farm went to the eldest son, and Grandpa's father, Anders, was the second son, so he had to leave the farm. That would have been around 1850. Anders was sent to school, became a teacher and later a parish priest in the Lofoten Islands, which are above the Arctic Circle, about 400 miles north of Øksendal. Lofoten is where my grandfather, Anders' son, grew up.
So did Grandpa ever visit the Grytnes farm in Øksendal? Did his father ever bring the family back to the old home to visit their grandfather? Maybe, but probably not. Grandpa was born in 1868; travel was difficult and expensive in the 19th century.
I remember my Grandfather well, but by the time I began work on this family history project, he'd been gone for several decades. Most likely Cousin Havtor as well.
Additional information came from other sources, some of it very old. One day I was reading the "Saga of Gisli the Outlaw," a medieval Icelandic story which was probably written in the 13th century. It relates events which took place around the year 900 and briefly mentions the village of Øksendal. There's only a line or two about the village, just enough to indicate that the place was inhabited back in Viking times. The settlement may have been ancient even then, in which case the people who lived there would be among our ancestors.
More recently, satellite photos have come online, and in these we can see the upper reaches of Sunndals Fjord as it looks like from space. Near the upper end is an inlet; that's where Øksendal is located.
The Grytnes farm had milk cows and a whole mountainside for sheep, as well as quite a lot of timber, according to another distant cousin, Bersvend Grytnes, who was born at Øksendal in 1902. He was interviewed for an oral history project in 1982, and a summary of the interview is now available online. In this interview, Bersvend said he attended school till he was 15, then worked for his father. In the winter they logged. He also fished for salmon, setting traps along the shore of the fjord. At other times he hunted for grouse and ptarmigan, which he sold in the market. But when his father died and his older brother took over the farm, he was out of a job. Seeing no future there, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1922.
Cattle and sheep raising, logging, fishing and some hunting must have been the basic activities at Grytnes and other Norwegian farms since ancient times. The eldest son inherited the farm; second, third and forth sons found something else to do; in the 19th and early 20th centuries some went into the professions and others went to America. But it was only after around 1850 that the option of going to America became available.
Cousin Havtor's letter mentions Nils, an ancestor born back in 1753 at Øien, another farm in Øksendal. Nils Øien seems to have been a 2nd or 3rd son, and therefore could not inherit the Øien farm. But there was a place for him at the Grytnes farm where the owner had a daughter but no sons. Nils came to Grytnes, married Brit, and became the ancestor of a whole lot of Grytnes people, including Halvor, Bersvend, and my grandfather Sigurd.
I fantasize Brit Grytnes as an eligible, sought-after woman on the fjord, and her engagement to Nils Øien a romance that the contemporary English novelist Jane Austin could have immortalized, had she known of them. Although it was the general custom in those times for marriages to be decided by parents, it is also true that even before the 18th century marriages were sometimes left to the option of the couple themselves. Of course, there was no Jane Austin in Øksendal, and the details went unrecorded.
Sadly, we don't have a single anecdote which might bring Brit and Nils to life as personalities who once lived and worked and loved and dreamed. There is something very tragic about the way entire lifetimes pass into oblivion, and that is why I am writing this history, to preserve the memories and traditions that we do have.
It's only as we get to the middle of the 19th century that we begin to have oral traditions and anecdotes which flesh out some of the names in the genealogy, starting with Grandpa's father Anders, teacher and later parish priest in the Lofoten Islands. Also, from the 1860's onward, we have photos of him and others which put faces on our more recent ancestors. My mother was able to identify for me most of the people in those old photos, and personally knew a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins who came to America in the latter 1800's.
Brit and Nils's grandson, Pastor Anders, was born in 1833. His son, my grandfather Sigurd, was born in 1868 and came to America in 1889, just in time to be in Seattle the year when Washington became a state. My mother Agnes was born in Iowa in 1899.
(to be continued)
.
.
.
.
.
.
Labels: Agnes Grytnes Borgström, Grytnæs, Grytnes, Grytness, Sigurd Grytnes
posted by Daniel at
12:03 PM
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