The Search for Grandmother's Norwegian Home by Daniel B. Suits

According to the English newspaper The Guardian, when the British census of 1901 was put on line two years ago, so many people rushed to trace their ancestors that the website crashed. Sites overseas containing official records have also collapsed under the weight of efforts to locate ancestors. Maybe the eager researchers could profit from our experience.

Born Bessie Evans, the mother of my late wife, Adelaide, was a first generation Norwegian-American. Bessie’s mother, Anna Evans, nee Moe, had come to Minnesota from Norway in 1867. In her childhood and youth, Bessie, like many children of immigrant families, was embarrassed about her parents’ past.

. She strenuously resisted her mother’s effort to teach her Norwegian, and wept in frustration over language lessons. The inevitable result that when Bessie matured and wanted to trace her mother’s Norwegian origins, all she knew was that her mother had come from a farm named Moe with a church on it, located somewhere in the Gudbrandsdal, the long valley running up the middle of Norway.

Despite the difficulties and hoping for the best, Adelaide and I took Bessie to Norway to look for her mother’s old home. We landed in Oslo, and made our way to the national archives, where a friendly clerk smiled and shook his head. "If she emigrated in 1867," he said, "her name will be in the census of 1860. But to find it, I first need to know where she came from. Otherwise, it’s impossible. Look here -" He turned around and from the large book shelf behind him, pulled down a suede-bound 3-inch-thick volume about 3 feet tall and laid it on the counter. Hand written Old Norwegian script in fading reddish ink, it was one of many original volumes of the census of 1860. The impossibility of the task was apparent.

We decided to hire a car and drive up the Gudbrandsdal. At least Bessie would see the country her mother came from, and we could try to locate the farm somehow. Looking for clues to the Moe family, we stopped at every village cemetery and examined gravestones. This was useless. We found graves of people named Moe in every single cemetery we visited. The problem lay in the name "Moe." Traditionally, Norwegians were known by their given name and patronymic. That is, Evan, the son of Iver would be Evan Iverson; Iver’s daughter Anna would be Anna Iversdatter. To distinguish among Norwegians of the same patronymic, it became the custom to attach the name of their farm as a surname. In other words, Anna Moe was so named because she grew up on a farm named Moe.

There were so many people named Moe, because "moe" is the Norwegian word for "meadow." There were "meadow" farms in every little district, and living on them, hundreds of unrelated families all named Moe.

We drove the entire length of the Gudbrandsdal with no result, and finally frustrated, turned back toward Oslo. Approaching the little city of Lillehammer, we spotted an outdoor museum, consisting of ancient structures – houses, barns and outbuildings – that had been collected from all over Norway. If we cold’t find her ancestral farm, Bessie thought she could at least get an idea of what it might have looked like, so she wanted to go in.

It was late in the day, and the museum was just about to close, but when he saw Bessie, the helpful Norwegian curator offered to stay open so we could go through the exhibit. A pretty high school girl showed us around, and to make conversation and to practice her English, she asked the usual questions: Where did we come from?

Had we ever been in Norway before? How long had we been in Norway? And inevitably, what had we been doing during our stay? We explained we had been searching the Gudbrandsdal for a farm named Moe with a church on it.

"Why," she said, "I know where there’s a farm named Moe with a church on it!" And she described the location of the farm. Next day, armed with this new information, we went to the central church archives in the neighboring city of Hamar, where church records from all over Norway have been periodically collected for centuries. Given the location of the farm, the archivist quickly dug out the old church records. There was Anna Moe and her entire family – her parent’s marriage, Anna’s baptism and confirmation records, and even the record of the family leaving the parish in 1867.

Bessie was delighted, but she said she knew all along we would find her mother. And she never believed it was really a matter of pure chance.