Archives
They Came to America: The Immigrant Experience
Posted on November 22, 2025 5 Comments
The loved ones we call the dead, depart from us and for a while are absent. And then as if called back by our love, they come near us again. They enter our dreams.We feel they have been near us when we have not thought of them.They are simply here, simply waiting while we are […]
We Can’t Write What We Don’t Know: A Journey from the Fjords of Norway to the Shores of New York Mid 19th Century
Posted on August 8, 2023 2 Comments
If you decide you want to write about an ancestor be prepared to go down many gopher holes you never dreamed of visiting. Almost every time I decide to dig deeper into an ancestor’s story I end up researching things I never knew anything about. My last blog post Deep Diving: Water Wheels and Papermaking […]
FILLING IN THE BLANKS: Researching the Story of How They Met
Posted on July 25, 2023 1 Comment
See How my Forty Year old Brick Wall was Broken and Locating Immigration Records for the earlier part of this story. It is amazing how much you can find to fill in pieces of the story. For this part I searched for early maps of Chicago at the Library of Congress. Searched for histories of […]
Locating Immigration Records: As luck would have it from Norway to Chicago in 1852
Posted on July 20, 2023 2 Comments
Retracing the steps of our ancestors is a time consuming research challenge, but it is almost always worth the effort. Like most of my blog posts, although this is about a specific ancestor, the process is what is important. If you happen to have Norwegian ancestry a search of Norway Heritage is in order to […]
How My Forty Year Old Brick Wall Was Broken: The Benevolence of Strangers and the Problem with Names
Posted on July 13, 2023 7 Comments
This is a brick wall that my Aunt Dorothy and I began working on in the 1970’s and it took Forty Years to solve! Sadly it was solved 17 years after my aunt passed. And it happened over ten years ago! I have written several drafts but I am hoping to properly thank those genealogists […]
Wheaton Wood 