How to find living persons in Norway

These steps may help you find the person who today lives at the farm your ancestor left.

I am sometimes asked to help find out who is living on particular farms today.

The question is often raised when someone is planning a trip to Norway and wants to visit the farm where their ancestors once lived.

I know some people who just went to the farm, knocked on the door, and were given permission.

It is still wise to contact the persons that live at the farm to ask for permission to enter their property. Also if you are taking pictures from public land or the road, while not illegal, it can be smart to have given the owners a heads up in advance.

Before I go on to tell you the technic I use to find the names, I have to state that this method does not always work. I will tell you about the limitations as we go along.

The first thing we need to do is to make certain that we are looking at the right farm, in the right parish. If our ancestors came from the farm Berg, Dal, Vik, and so on, we need to be very careful. These are names that refer to commonly appearing landscape features and are found all over the country.

Norgeskart

To help find the right place I use Norgeskart. You may want to check out my article Find Norwegian place names where I among other things write about the use of this resource.

Norgeskart is very good at finding place names.  When we have found the right place we need to keep the map open and open up a new tab or instance of our web browser.

The 1881 map

1881 is not a year in this context. It is one of several online white and yellow page services (and the number you call if you are in Norway trying to find someone’s phone number). You find it here.

The 1881 map does search for places, but its main purpose is to find people. If you type in the same place name that you searched for in Norgeskart you may get different results or no results at all.

This is the reason we need to keep both maps open at the same time. If we have the maps on different instances of the web browser we can arrange them side by side. (Or get a second monitor. It is sooo helpful doing genealogy).

I readily admit that it can be a bit tricky and confusing to navigate both maps and find the right place on the 1881 map.

The menubar up in the right corner of the 1881 map allows us to choose between a map, satellite photo, or a hybrid map/photo. At this stage, I prefer to deal with the map, but you are, of course, free to choose what works best for you. There is also an option to get an overlay of historic maps, but we’ll not look at this now. Ha! You went ahead and clicked it, didn’t you? :-))

When we have found the right place on the 1881 map, we can click on the property and up in the left corner we should get a box like to one to the right. We can see that The address is Råket 1 in a place called Hjelset (zip code 6450). There is also a satellite photo of the property.

By the mouse pointer, we can see “Personer og firma på denne adresse” which translates to “Persons and companies at this address” That is if we are lucky. Unfortunately, not all properties list the inhabitants. For some properties the information is outdated.  I don’t know the reason for this but that’s just the way it is.

When we click on the link “Personer og firma på denne adresse” the box changes to this view (left). We can see four people living at this address.

I have blanked out my family’s names and all the phone numbers

The guy at the bottom of the list is yours truly and when you use this resource you will, of course, see all the names and the phone number.

You may want to just send off a letter in the mail, using the address given. If you are really brave you could try to call. While I don’t recommend it if you do call make sure you take the time difference into account. Norway is 6 hours ahead of Eastern Standard time.

The reason I don’t recommend calling is that we get so many strange calls these days and most of us if we see a foreign phone number don’t bother to answer. (I answer foreign calls because I love to piss off the Microsoft scammers). Some people may not                                                                           be able to communicate very well in a foreign language.

You could try a general search for the name on the internet and see if an email address pops up. Facebook can be a way to contact the people you are looking for. If a search for the names doesn’t bring up anything you can ask in a relevant forum.

I hope this is helpful. If you have questions comment below or send me a word through my contact page