Missing in Photos: 52 Ancestors 2023 Prompt “Me, Myself and…”

 

Always the Photographer, Never the Subject
 

I had a brilliant idea for this post—a photo of me as a child at Christmas, a photo of me with my own children at Christmas, and a photo of me with my newest grandchild this Christmas. Sounds great, right? Except I struggled to find a SINGLE photo of me with my children at Christmas when they were young. I searched several years of albums. There were tons of photos of the kids alone and with my husband, but I was missing in action. Why? I was always the family photographer, and in an era before the “selfie”, I couldn’t take a photo with me in it.

Yes, my husband should have taken photos of me. Years later, I started demanding that he take one of me on every holiday and on every trip—I joked I wanted proof that I was alive. Sadly, it seems I really needed that proof. Paging through our family photo albums, my children and their children might start to wonder if I was part of their lives at all!

So a word of warning to the family photographer: get someone to take photos of you! Lots of photos! Better yet, encourage everyone in the family to take photos. One person shouldn’t be solely responsible for recording the family. Luckily in the age of cell phones, that’s much easier than it used to be.

Me at age 3, my brother at 5 months. Christmas 1962

Here are the Christmas photos of me at three different stages of life. Yes, I finally found one of me and my daughter when she was one year old. It was a four-generation photo I made my husband take during a Christmas visit home to my parents’ house. Proof I was alive in 1989!

Christmas 1989: from left, Roxie, Amanda, my Grandma Nora Macbeth and my mom Ione Peterson.

Christmas Eve 2023 with grandbaby Kaia, 6 1/2 months

Krumkake or Skrullers? 52 Ancestors 2023 Prompt “Family Recipe”

 

My Favorite Norwegian Christmas Cookie

 

I grew up in an area of southern Minnesota that was settled by Norwegian immigrants. My ancestors were among those immigrants. Their descendants liked to celebrate their Norwegian heritage with food, especially at Christmas. They would dig out the old family recipes and would cook and bake wonderful Norwegian foods like sot suppe (sweet soup), rommegrot (cream porridge), rommebrod (cream bread), kringlar, lutefisk, rosettes, and of course lefse. My favorite among these treats was a thin, rolled cookie similar to Italian pizzelles. Most Norwegians call them krumkake (translates roughly as “curved cookie”), but many people in my small town called them skrulle or skrullers (translates to “scroll”).

So far I’ve been too lazy to learn how to make lefse, but twenty years ago, I bought a krumkake iron and learned how to make skrullers. I wanted my children to be exposed to at least one Norwegian treat—to celebrate that part of their heritage at Christmas. Skrullers or krumkake have become a staple in my annual Christmas cookie baking binge.

Krumkake tools: electrice Krumkake Iron, spatula and wooden dowel roller

So krumkake vs. skruller? It appears to be a regional difference—a certain area of Norway called them skrulle, probably because they resemble scrolls when they are rolled into a cone shape. I found a Norwegian webpage titled “Fant 16 synonym til krumkake”, which I believe means “16 synonyms for krumkake”. “Skrull” is number 3.

Batter on the krumkake iron

Here’s the recipe I use for my skrulle/skrullers/krumkake:

Ingredients:

4 eggs

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

1 cup sugar

½ cup butter, melted

2 tblsp corn starch

1 tsp vanilla extract

½ tsp cardamom OR 1 tsp almond extract

Beat eggs and sugar—don’t overbeat. Add cooled, melted butter, vanilla, and cardamom and mix in. Sift flour and corn starch and add to egg mixture. Batter will have a dough-like consistency. Spoon batter onto the heated, greased krumkake iron. It is best to place batter a little toward the back of the iron as it will be squeezed forward when iron is closed. Press iron tightly closed and cook till krumkake are lightly browned.

Rolling the Krumkake

Use a spatula to lift off krumkake one at a time and wrap around wooden spindle and shape into a cone. Sprinkle finished krumkake with powdered sugar. Makes about 50 krumkake.

Ingredients and finished krumkake, ready to sprinkle with powdered sugar

The finished cookies are light and crispy with just the perfect amount of sweetness. Some people like to fill them with whipped cream, but I like them just as they are.

I think of my grandmother whenever I make these cookies—Regina Syverson Peterson died before I was born, but she taught her daughters to make lefse and krumkake, and I feel connected to that tradition when I make them. 

Grandma Regina, wedding photo

Happy holidays! Or as they say in Norway, God Jul!

Back to Norway Through DNA Matches: 52 Ancestors 2023 Prompt “DNA”

 

Tracing a Connection to a Distant Cousin Leads to Norway Discoveries

Marit Johannesdatter Rolstad: 1731-1788 (Paternal Third Great-Grandmother)
Anne Ohlsdatter Bottom: 1700-? (Paternal Fourth Great-Grandmother)
Marit Arnesdatter: 1663-1718 (Paternal Fifth-Great-Grandmother)
JB: Paternal Sixth Cousin

 

Much of my research on the Norwegian side of my family tree ends one generation before the ancestor who immigrated to America. I feel confident that I can correctly identify the immigrants’ parents and siblings who remained in Norway. But I am nervous about moving back any additional generations. The old Norwegian surname system, where each generation had a different “surname” (which were a combination of patronymics and residence names), makes it hard for me to feel I am correctly identifying distant ancestors. I need to start learning about how to use the Bygdeboks, research records that trace the family ancestry of Norwegian farm families. They could help me add more generations with some confidence. But until then, I make the occasional discovery with the help of DNA matches. A recent match was especially serendipitous, extending my tree an additional three generations, back to a Norwegian ancestor born in 1663!

I originally was looking at a different potential fourth cousin when I ran across “JB”, the DNA match that helped me so much. I was trying to determine what part of the family line this other cousin came from, so pulled up our shared DNA matches on Ancestry DNA. JB was one of those shared matches. Ancestry had helpfully flagged JB as having a shared ancestor with me. I immediately pulled up the chart showing how we might be related. I was stunned to see the chart added three generations to my family tree: my great-grandmother Anne Gulbrandsdatter Peterson’s own grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother (my 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th great-grandmothers).

According to Ancestry’s DNA algorithm, JB and I shared my fifth-great-grandmother, Marit Arnesdatter, as a common ancestor. She was born in 1663! A tiny piece of her DNA travelled down through nearly four centuries of her descendants to me, to my son, and to our very distant cousin JB.

Lesja Bygdebok bind III pg 613

I am still in the process of verifying these new tree generations, but one of my distant relatives kindly posted on Ancestry copies of the Lesja, Norway Bygdebok that shows the family and descendants of Marit Arnesdatter’s daughter Anne Olsdatter Bottem, so it appears that I can verify at least two of these new generations on my tree. The research will continue!

Photo labelled in Norwegian as 'LagenLesjaBottem', and in English as 'Gudbrandsdalslågen river at Lesja, previously outflow of Lesja lake'. Note that both Gulbrands and Bottem were parts of my ancestors' surnames. Were they from this area of Lesja?

In one final note on the interesting little quirks of DNA: my son has a DNA link to JB, but my daughter does not. So the tiny DNA fragment I inherited from Marit Arnesdatter and passed down to my son didn’t get passed down to my daughter. Perhaps she has inherited a different fragment that will connect us to a new ancestor.

Sources:

Ancestry.com

Kjelland, Arnfinn. Bygdebok for Lesja Lesja kommune, 19872008.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:L%C3%A5genLesjaBottem.jpg