Sketches of Ordinary Lives: Bringing Norway’s Past to Life

I have always enjoyed writing. It has been one of those things I have returned to throughout my life, whether writing about genealogy, family history, or simply things that caught my interest.

For years, however, my writing was confined to blog posts. I enjoyed writing them, but publishing an actual book was another matter. I suppose I never quite worked up the courage to take that step.

Eventually, I decided to give it a try.

My original ambition was actually quite modest. I wanted to be able to hold something in my hands that I had written myself. A real book, nicely formatted, with a proper cover and pages bound together. Something that could sit on a bookshelf and that I could point to and say: I wrote that.

I didn’t begin with grand plans of becoming an author or selling hundreds of thousands of copies. I simply wanted to see whether I could do it.

As it turned out, I could. And once I had published my first book, I discovered that I rather liked the whole process.

In fact, I have now started exploring my own archives, so to speak. I have several old hard drives containing manuscripts, unfinished stories and ideas that have been sitting around for years. I have begun digging them out, dusting them off, editing them and seeing what might be worth publishing. Some need quite a bit of work before they are ready for anyone else to read. This is where AI has become a useful assistant, helping me smooth the language, improve the flow and make my writing more readable. The stories and ideas are mine, but I am no longer afraid to give some of those old manuscripts a second chance.

It seems I have opened a door that I had kept closed for quite a long time.

And that brings me to my latest book:

Sketches of Ordinary Lives: Norwegian Lives 1718–1905.

Why this book?

Genealogy has taught me that behind every name in a family tree there is a human being.

We spend hours looking at parish registers, census returns, probate records and old photographs. We discover where our ancestors lived, whom they married, how many children they had and, sometimes, when they left Norway for a new life overseas.

But there is another question that has always interested me:

What was life actually like for these people?

What did a young woman think about as she prepared for marriage? What was it like to grow up in a husmann family? What happened inside a household when a son left for America? How did ordinary families experience a Norway that was changing around them?

The records can tell us a great deal, but they rarely tell us what someone thought, felt or worried about while going through an ordinary day.

I wanted to explore that gap between the historical record and the human experience.

Eleven stories from Norway’s past

Sketches of Ordinary Lives contains eleven stories set in Norway between 1718 and 1905.

The settings range from a coastal household in Finnmark and a husmann’s farm in Hedmark to a merchant’s house in Bergen and the growing industrial city of Christiania.

The stories explore different aspects of Norwegian life:

• A Sea Sami household in northern Norway.
• Life in a coastal community.
• The hardships and circumstances of a husmann family.
• A farm daughter’s experience of inheritance and family expectations.
• A mountain wedding.
• Life in a merchant’s household.
• Family life around the Sunday dinner table.
• The journey of a young emigrant crossing the Atlantic.
• A mother receiving news from her son in America.
• A working-class family in Christiania in 1905.
• A modern genealogist discovering the story behind an old photograph.

These are not stories about kings, famous explorers or people who made their way into the history books.

They are about ordinary people. People who worked, worried, loved, argued, raised children, made difficult decisions and tried to make the best of the circumstances they found themselves in.

In other words, people rather like the ancestors many of us are researching.

Fiction built on historical research

There is something I want to make clear about the book.

The characters are fictional. Their names, families and individual experiences have been created for the stories. They are not disguised biographies of particular people.

However, the historical worlds in which they live are real.

The settings, living conditions, social structures, occupations, customs and historical circumstances are drawn from Norwegian historical research, archival material, ethnographic studies and local history.

I have tried to be careful about the distinction between what we know and what we can only imagine. That distinction matters to me as a genealogist.

Behind the Scene: The history behind the stories

Each story is followed by a section called Behind the Scene.

These sections explain the historical background and distinguish between what is supported by historical evidence and what has been imagined for the story.

They also explore the circumstances of the period: how people lived, what they ate, how households were organised, what opportunities were available to them and what limitations they faced.

Where relevant, I also point readers towards books, archives, museums and online resources where they can explore the subject further.

Readers who simply want to enjoy the stories can read them on their own. But if you are a genealogist or someone with an interest in Norwegian history, I hope you will find the historical notes particularly rewarding.

My intention has been to bring historical research into a form that allows readers to enter the world described by the sources, without pretending that we know things the records cannot tell us.

For everyone with Norwegian roots

Although the book is written with Norwegian descendants abroad particularly in mind, you do not need Norwegian ancestry to enjoy it.

Perhaps you have spent years researching your family in Norway. Perhaps you have found ancestors in parish registers from the eighteenth century, or followed an emigrant from a small Norwegian village to Minnesota, Wisconsin or the Dakotas.

You may even recognise some of the circumstances described in these pages from your own family history.

I hope the stories will give you another way of thinking about the people in your family tree.

A census entry tells us that someone lived in a particular household. A church record tells us when someone was baptised, married or buried. But between those events lies an entire human life.

That is the space this book tries to explore.

Available now on Amazon

I am pleased to announce that Sketches of Ordinary Lives: Norwegian Lives 1718–1905 is now available on Amazon.

If you enjoy Norwegian history, genealogy, historical storytelling or simply want to know more about the lives of ordinary people in earlier generations, I hope you will enjoy it.

Find Sketches of Ordinary Lives on Amazon

Thank you to everyone who has followed my writing, read my blog posts, bought my books or encouraged me along the way.

And perhaps the next time you look at an old parish register or photograph, you might pause for a moment and wonder about the ordinary life behind the name.

After all, those ordinary lives are what family history is really about.