A Book Born from a Box of Photographs
Scenes from a Life Left Behind is published today
Scenes from a Life Left Behind: The World Your Norwegian Ancestors Left Behind is now available on Amazon.com in hardcover, paperback and Kindle.
The book grew out of many years of genealogical research. In fact, it is truly a book born from a box of photographs. Old photographs, parish records, census entries, and other records can tell us who people were and where they lived, but they rarely tell us much about what an ordinary day actually looked like. At some point I became interested in that gap.
What did a farm family actually do on a winter evening? What happened when someone left for America? What did a confirmation, a funeral, a fishing season in Lofoten, or a day of haymaking look like from the inside?
The book is a collection of fictional scenes set in rural Norway from the mid-1800s to the middle of the twentieth century. There is no single family connecting the chapters. Instead, each scene looks at a different part of ordinary life: work, family, religion, emigration, illness, death, celebrations, and the small decisions that shaped people’s lives.
The stories are fictional, but the settings and circumstances are grounded in historical and genealogical research. My aim was not to recreate one particular family, but to make the world found in old records a little easier to picture.
There is also a chapter about the Sámi summer migration to the coast. I approached that story from the perspective of the farming communities who encountered the migration rather than trying to speak for the Sámi themselves. I am not Sámi, and I wanted to keep that distinction clear.
Some of the scenes are based on situations that are well documented in Norwegian history. Others grew out of the kinds of events that turn up repeatedly in family research: a young woman far from home and pregnant, a fisherman returning from Lofoten, a woman waiting on a quay for someone returning from America after many years.
I am a psychiatric nurse, genealogist, photographer and blogger rather than a professional novelist. Writing the book was an experiment in bringing those interests together.
The intended audience is particularly Norwegian Americans who have spent time looking at the names and dates in their family tree and wondered what life was actually like for the people behind them. But you don’t need Norwegian ancestry to read it.
Scenes from a Life Left Behind is published by Eidhammer Heritage Press and is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
If you’ve ever found yourself looking at an old family photograph and wondering what happened before the picture was taken, or what happened afterwards, this book may give you a few possible answers.
Click here to go to Amazon.com
