It All Started . . .

Getting Started with Genealogy

Darlene (Strand) Owen Jones

It started with Mom.

Mom collected early photos of her family and asked my artistic husband to make them into a collage.  Who were these people?  When and where were the photos taken?  I recognized my Grandma and Grandpa Strand and my aunts and uncles.  But who were the others?

Then there were names and birthdays.  Mom wrote them down.  I wrote them down.  And when we visited Norway in 1986, her cousin Anna wrote down our Norwegian ancestors back for most of two hundred years.

What do you do with the photos and the names and the birthdates?  I didn’t know, so just continued to collect them in notebooks.  Then last year I got a software program, Family Tree Maker.  Easily I typed in the names and dates we had collected.  There were several hundred – which seemed like a lot.

As I started, I had two questions:  “How did my grandparents get from Norway to North Dakota?” and “Who are my other cousins - second and third cousins, second cousins once removed - the ones I’ve never met?”

The first discovery was that my grandparents didn’t know each other in Norway.  They a lived thousand miles apart.  We don’t know exactly how they met, but in 1907 they lived only a few miles from each other in North Dakota.

Through the magic of the internet, I found the ship manifest showing that my grandfather, Enevold Strand, left Liverpool, England in April 1904 and two weeks later, via Canada, was in Fingal, North Dakota with his friend Emil.

After considerably more searching, I found that Esther Anderson arrived in Boston in April 1907, traveling to North Dakota to meet up with her brother Enoch in Valley City, North Dakota.

So my first question was answered.  And as often happen, finding one answer leads to many more questions: why Fingal, how and why did all of the Strand family join Enevold, why did they leave Fingal, and many more.  Tracking down grandpa’s brothers and sisters led me to many new “Strand” cousins.

Once again, the internet has played a huge role in my searches.  Through Face Book and ancestry.com I am now in contact with many cousins throughout the country.  Best of all, I’m now connected to cousins in Norway.  I hope to visit them in the near future. And I’ve joined the local chapter of Sons of Norway to learn more about my Norwegian heritage.  Genealogy is alive!

Strand Family photos collected by Clara Strand Owen

Collage created by Jimmie Jones
March 2014