Ancestry Search

The remains of an old farm

Looking across to the Rodland Peninsula from our deck.

Our goal for this day before we headed back to Bergen and the Hurtigruten was to check out an area we know is home of one of Linda’s great-grandparents, Lars Carlson Rodland. Lars was born on a farm near Bergen and came to America in 1883. We had done some searching in the area a couple of years ago when we found the church they would have attended and drove through the countryside, but really didn’t have enough information to find any specific property where he lived. You can see some pictures from that trip in this previous blog entry. Since then we learned much more with the help of Ancestry.com and the efforts of cousin Jerry and his wife Joni Smith in Everett. We visited Joni and Jerry last spring and they shared a lot of information Joni gathered on the family. We learned the approximate location of the farm and linda managed to find an Airbnb host one peninsula over from where the Rodlands had lived.The area is still called Rodland on the map..

Until recently water was the only practical way to travel.

Hosøy Peninsula may have been owned by Lars

Our drive from our beautiful lakeside hotel in Oppheim to the Myking area really showed off the Norwegian road system. A trip of 90 miles took a bit over 2 and a half hours. That wasn’t bad considering that over over half of those miles are on curvy one lane roads along lakes, rivers, and fjords, and through 42 tunnels, most of which were also one-way. That’s an average of about one tunnel per kilometer. With one exception, the longer ones have been widened so two cars can at least squeeze by each other. That exception did have a number of pullouts making it possible to pass other cars. Fortunately, we did not meet anyone in that particular tunnel. The amazing thing is that the Norwegians managed to build roads in this area at all. Many of them are literally carved out of steep hillside. Making them any wider would have necessitated cutting out hundreds off feet of rock on those steep cliffs. Obviously, one does not drive with speed on these roads and everyone slows down even more when approaching the many blind curves. We never felt in danger, but were always aware of the possibilities. Part of the fun of driving these roads is the ever-present possibility that one car (or truck or bus) might have to back up to make room for passing. Over the course of the day, we had to back up seven times. Fortunately, our rental car had a backup camera and beeps when it gets close to danger.

Narrow roads are the norm

As we checked in with our hosts we chatted about our plans for the afternoon. Laila pointed across the bay to the Rodland peninsula where we were headed and said she would talk to her dad about meeting with us in the evening. She said he has lived there his whole life and knew just about everybody on both peninsulas. These are two narrow peninsulas with only one access road each. They are slightly wider than those we traveled earlier in the day in that one can generally squeeze past another car without having to back up.

We neglected to ask why these buildings have only one wall of stone.

It took us about 45 minutes to get around onto the other peninsula and reach its end where Lars had lived. As we drove around the area, we kept thinking about how difficult farming would be on these rocky hillsides. There is hardly any flat ground anywhere. Today, almost no farms exist on this are at all. What used to be farmland is now overgrown with forest so it is even harder to imagine the farms that used to be there. The area we were told belong to Lars looked impossible to farm even with the best of our imaginations as it is even rockier than most of the land and we could find no place where even a trail used to enter that section. We drove around it without any hint of a former farm.

Most of the old farmland has reverted to forest.

Before we left the peninsula, we found one side road that took us about 20 gravel switchbacks up the hillside. As we rose above the fjord, we saw some actual farms for the first time basically a few sheep scattered amidst the rocks and grasses of the hillside. At one point we saw a small orchard of about 20 trees, probably either apples or plums. Not many fruit trees can succeed in this cold, damp climate even with the long summer days. These few farms really showed how hard it would be to make a living from the land. It’s no wonder that so many Norwegians emigrated to the United States and Canada where the land was cheap and productive and you didn’t have to clear it of trees and boulders.

Sheep are the main crop we found today.

Stones cleared from the land were used to build terraces.

After an early dinner at a truck stop cafeteria where we also purchased a couple of large breakfast rolls for the morning, we returned to our home for the evening. Laila took us to meet her father. Over a couple of beers he pointed out several places on the map where farms were owned by families named on Linda’s family tree. The location he showed us for Lars’s farm was much more conducive to farming as it included some flatter land and was closer to the fjord.

We were told one can find more of these broken homes
and fences when tramping through today's forests.

Some harvested wheat drying before gathering.

We also learned that about 80% of the population farmed at that time and they all had to have a second income. Most of them fished for cod in the winter and mackerel in the spring and fall. Crops included apples, plums, gooseberries, and redcurrants. They also raised cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, and some grain to feed them. Goat’s milk was prized for the excellent cheese that they made from it. He surprised us when he said that roads out these peninsulas are very recent. The road to their home was built in 1979 and another six years later. Before that all travel was by boat.

The Myking Parish church

An old schoolhouse now a museum.
The name of this location is Lindås.

Two of the many Nævdal tombstones we found.

He also told us that Nævdal, one of the names in Linda’s tree, is close to the Myking church and only two farms. We decided to visit it on our way to Bergen the next morning. First, we stopped at the church again to really examine the gravestones in its cemetery. We were rewarded by about a dozen Nævdal stones although no other names were present. We should have asked Laila’s father about other burial sites. We did leave our information and he said he would talk to friends to see if he could gather any more details for us. Obviously, we will be returning.

The owners of this farm may be related to Linda.

The road to Nævdal ended at the farms. As I got out to take a couple of pictures, a car from the last farm stopped and the driver got out. I expected he wanted to know what we were doing, but when he learned that we only speak English, he said, “Ah, tourists.” and explained that he was just getting some water for his sheep, necessary because of the hot, dry spring they have had here in western Norway. When I shared why we were there, he introduced himself and we had a nice conversation about the families. He said he is from a different Nævdal line, but the other house might be more closely related to Linda. He tried calling his mother about the family tree book they have that goes back 300 years. She did not answer, but he asked for our email so he could check with her later. We thanked him profusely and headed off for Bergen as he began filling his canisters with water for the sheep.