On 4 July 1825, a sloop set sail from Stavanger in southwestern Norway with 52 people on board. By the time they reached their final destination – New York – they were 53. A child was born during the 97-day voyage. So did the American dream in Norway.
The emigration on Restauration, often described as the Norwegian Mayflower, heralded the beginning of the Norwegian emigration to the New World. Over the next century, about 800,000 Norwegians would cross the Atlantic in search of better prospects. By some estimates, the Scandinavian Americans outnumber the people living in Scandinavia.
On 4 July 2025, a copy of Restauration set sail from Stavanger to recreate the historical voyage. The sloop is expected to reach New York on October 9. You can follow the sailship’s progress here
Retracing the footsteps of ancestors is an integral aspect of self-discovery. Our story is not complete without the stories of our mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers. Our history is the sum of their stories. This is the reason that Norway is more than a picturesque holiday destination for many Americans and Canadians. This is their homeland.
The story they want to be told is hidden behind decades of oblivion, dusty records and abandoned farms. Yet Norway offers valuable hints to each life passed through this land.
Church records in Norway go all the way back to the 1620s. The official Lutheran church was obliged to keep records of each baptism, confirmation, wedding and funeral that happened in each parish. Anyone patient enough to sift through these records and connecting the data points is rewarded with a fascinating biopic.
From 1769, Norway introduced census as well, but that was basically a list of households with the number of members in it. Names would not be a part of the state records until 1865. Another important source for a genealogist is the emigration protocols which were made compulsory in Norway since 1867.
Even though many of these records have been digitised, sifting through them and finding relevant information is a tedious task. Any genealogist worth their salt will need some amount of familiarity with the Gothic Fraktur typeface used in printed forms and the Kurrent script used by the clerks until the 19th centuries. Some of the letters might seem illegible for a modern reader.
An overview of geography and the unique conditions that shaped disparate communities in different parts of Norway is another prerequisite before you sit down to research your ancestry. The surnames will usually give you an idea about the geography where your ancestors came from, but that is not a given.
Norwegians used the farm name more like an address. When they shifted residence, they changed the surname too – until 1925 when surnames were made mandatory. So most of the “surnames” only tell us where a particular person lived at a given point in time.
Even if you are not able to pinpoint the birthplace of your ancestors, there are specific places in parts of Norway that will give you insights into their lives. If you are in Oslo, visit the Emigration Museum at Ottestad. If you are in Bergen, don’t miss the Western Norway Emigration Centre at Sletta, where you can time-travel to a Norwegian-American prairie village. You can visit a church relocated from North Dakota and a prison originally built in Minnesota among other things.
Check out private day tour from Bergen that covers the villages of Sletta and Mo.
