Christmas Letters Home: A Genealogist’s Goldmine
Christmas letters are easy to overlook. They arrive with the rest of the holiday post, get read over coffee, then end up in a drawer, a box – or the recycling bin. Christmas letters and holiday newsletters can unlock family history clues.
For a genealogist, that’s a mistake.
Christmas letters home – whether handwritten julbrev from Norway, typed family newsletters from America, or emails printed out by older relatives – are a goldmine for genealogy and family history. They contain names, dates, addresses, relationship details and everyday stories that rarely appear in formal records. If someone in your family kept these letters you should have a look at them.
This article shows how to:
Recognise Christmas letters as valuable genealogy sources
Extract family history clues from each letter
Digitise and organise them for long-term use
Use them specifically in Norwegian and emigrant research
Handle privacy and etiquette along the way
What Are “Christmas Letters Home” in Genealogy?
When we talk about Christmas letters home in a genealogy context, we mean:
Handwritten julbrev sent between relatives
Typed or photocopied family Christmas newsletters
Long letters that arrived with the Christmas card
Emails that family members printed out and saved
Christmas letters from emigrants describing “home” or “the old country”
Typical features that matter for genealogy:
They are dated (roughly) – usually by year, sometimes by exact date.
They often mention major life events for that year: births, deaths, moves, marriages, jobs, illnesses, graduations.
They contain addresses and sometimes phone numbers and email addresses.
They list children and grandchildren by name, often with ages or school years.
They reference place names: towns, farms, parishes, countries.
From a family historian’s point of view, Christmas letters are annual mini-chronicles of a family network.
Why Christmas Letters Are a Goldmine for Family History
Many genealogists concentrate on parish registers, censuses and bygdebøker. Those are essential, but they don’t capture how a family moved and changed in the late 1900s and 2000s as well as Christmas letters do. You can learn about your ancestors through Christmas letters.
Here’s what makes Christmas letters such powerful genealogy sources:
1. They fill the gap between “historical” and “living” relatives
Christmas letters cover years that are too recent to be well documented in public sources, but too old to remember clearly without help.
Examples of questions letters can answer:
When did an aunt or cousin actually move from one city to another?
When did a relative remarry, start a new job, or emigrate?
In which year did a particular baby appear in the family circle?
2. They map out the extended family
A single Christmas letter often lists:
Children and spouses
Grandchildren
“New partners” and step-relatives
Relatives who died that year
For genealogists who like to build descendant trees, these lists are extremely helpful.
3. They preserve place and context
Christmas letters casually mention:
Street addresses
Housing estates and neighbourhoods
Parishes and congregations
New countries for emigrants and return migrants
Those place references can connect modern family members back to specific farms, villages and parishes in Norway – or show how a family spread across several countries.
How to Analyse Old Christmas Letters for Genealogical Clues
If you have a stack of letters, it can feel overwhelming. The key is to treat them like any other historical source and work systematically.
Step 1: Sort by sender and year
Group letters by who wrote them (e.g., “Aunt Inger’s letters”, “Grandma’s Christmas newsletters”).
Within each sender, sort roughly by year.
You now have a simple timeline for each branch of the family.
Step 2: Create a basic index
Use a spreadsheet or notebook and record:
Year of letter
Sender and recipient(s)
Place (return address or described residence)
Names mentioned (children, grandchildren, partners)
Key events (birth, death, marriage, move, job change, illness, emigration, return from abroad)
Even a short summary per letter turns a pile of paper into searchable data.
Step 3: Extract concrete genealogy data
From each letter, look for:
Births – “We welcomed baby Nora in March…”
Deaths – “Sadly, Uncle Olav passed away this summer…”
Marriages/partnerships – “Mari married Thomas in June…”
Moves – “We moved from Bergen to Trondheim in August…”
Education and work – “Lars started engineering studies in Oslo…”
Add these as events to the relevant people in your family tree:
Event type (birth, move, etc.)
Approximate date (year, or month and year if given)
Place
Source: “Christmas letter from X to Y, year Z”
Step 4: Note recurring themes and patterns
Christmas letters often repeat the same topics across years:
Ongoing illnesses
Long-term care arrangements
Strained or close relationships
Emigration plans that appear long before they happen
For genealogists, these patterns help explain why a family made certain decisions – not just when.
Digitising and Organising Christmas Letters for Genealogy
To make Christmas letters truly useful, they should be preserved and accessible.
1. Scan or photograph the letters
Scan each letter at a readable resolution (300 dpi or higher)
Or photograph each page in good light, making sure the text is legible
Save files with descriptive names, for example:
1985_Christmas_letter_Inger_to_Olsen_family_page1.jpg1994_Christmas_newsletter_Hansen_family.pdf
2. Store them in a clear folder structure
For example:
FamilyLetters/Christmas/Inger/1980s/FamilyLetters/Christmas/Grandma_Anna/1990s/
This makes it easier to find and update them over time.
3. Link letters to people in your tree
If your genealogy software allows media attachments:
Attach the scanned letter to the sender’s profile
Add a source citation for each event you extract
Even if your software is basic, you can keep a reference list in your research log:
“Source: Christmas letter from Inger to Olsen family, 1985. Mentions move from Ålesund to Oslo and birth of daughter Kari.”
4. Consider transcriptions
For important or hard-to-read letters:
Create full or partial transcriptions in a text file
Save them alongside the images
This makes searching easier (especially for names and places)
Using Christmas Letters in Norwegian and Emigrant Research
For Norwegian genealogy and diaspora research, Christmas letters are especially valuable. Learn about your ancestors through Christmas letters.
For families who stayed in Norway
Christmas letters can:
Confirm moves between parishes before you find them in official records
Show which branch of the family kept contact with who
Provide modern place names that help you locate addresses on maps and in municipal archives
You can combine Christmas letters with:
Digitalarkivet (censuses, parish records)
Bygdebøker and local histories
Norwegian address and phone directories (historical and current)
For emigrant families
In emigrant research, Christmas letters often run both directions:
Letters sent from Norway to relatives abroad
Letters sent from America, Canada, Australia, etc. back to Norway
They can reveal:
Exact emigration years (“This is our first Christmas in Minnesota…”)
Settlement patterns (which town, which congregation, which job)
Ongoing ties to a specific farm or parish in Norway (references to “back home”).
If your family has saved letters in Norwegian, these can be used alongside:
Passenger lists
Naturalisation records
Local emigrant histories
Norwegian-American church and newspaper archives
Privacy and Etiquette: Using Christmas Letters the Right Way
Christmas letters often mention people who are still alive. Genealogists should be careful and respectful.
Good practice:
Ask permission before publishing text or photos from recent letters.
When posting online, omit or anonymise sensitive details about living people (health, finances, conflicts).
Treat letters with the same care you would give any private family document.
For internal research use (within the family), you can usually work with more detail, but it is still wise to:
Mark documents that contain sensitive information.
Avoid adding unnecessary private details about living people to public trees or websites.
Action Plan: What to Do
If you want to turn Christmas letters into a practical genealogy project this year, here is a simple plan:
Find the letters
Look in drawers, boxes, old albums, desk piles, saved email printouts.
Choose a manageable batch
For example, “All letters from Aunt Inger” or “All newsletters from the 1990s”.
Sort them by year
Even rough ordering is enough for a first pass.
Create a short index
Year, sender, recipients, place, key events, names mentioned.
Scan or photograph them
Save them with clear file names and logical folders.
Add data to your tree
Births, deaths, moves, marriages, schooling, jobs – with the letter as source.
Note follow-up tasks
“Check parish register for child mentioned in 1984 letter”,
“Look up emigration record for the cousin who moved to Canada in 1973”, etc.
In one or two quiet sessions, you can turn a forgotten stack of Christmas mail into structured, searchable genealogy material.
Conclusion: Don’t Throw the Goldmine Away
Christmas letters home may look ordinary, but for a genealogist they are rich sources of:
Names and family relationships
Life events and migration stories
Places, addresses and local details
First-hand descriptions of how a family actually lived
Before any more letters are thrown out with the wrapping paper, consider what they might tell the next generation about your Norwegian family, your emigrant branches, and the connections between them.
File them. Scan them. Index them. Use them.
Your future self – and future family historians – will be glad you did.
