In the Midwest, particularly Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota and areas such as those, many of the immigrants were of Norwegian descent, which presents it’s own special problems when trying to trace your roots.

Most people know well about the explorations of the Vikings along the coasts of North America, which began long before the English expeditions.

Few people are aware however of the fact that there were many Norwegians who were the early settlers or pioneers.

In 1620,which is the same year that the Pilgrims landed their Mayflower, another ship, the Dano landed on the Hudson Strait in the northern parts of Canada.

It was this group of explorers who supplied the interpreter for Minuit when he purchased Manhattan from the Native Americans. (Canarsee tribe)

Only ten years later, the Delaware River valley was settled by Norwegians, while another Dutchman, Vanderbilt settled in northern New York, marrying a Norwegian woman who lived there, and created what was the first generation of one of the richest families to exist in what was then an infant country. They remained wealthy through present day.

In about 1820 there was a small beginning movement to America, which saw Kleng Pedersen Hesthammer as the leader of the movement. In 1840, only about 400 people immigrated to the US, while a scant decade later, in about 1850, those numbers jumped to nearly fifteen thousand.

The civil war saw the immigrations slow dramatically, but at the end of it, they did a huge upsurge, and between then and the beginning of World War one, just forty odd years later more than 750 thousand people arrived from Norway to the shores of the United States.

Many of them settled in the Midwestern United States, peopling Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, and Iowa.

While it can be easier to trace your roots here, and you can in fact use ships logs to find their transport here, what about those who have ancestors they’d like to trace in the country of their origination? Like most other countries, many of the Norwegian resources have begin to be placed on the internet, so it is possible to trace your roots there as well, using some of the resources that are available to us online.

You may find the National archives particularly helpful in finding your ancestors before they arrived in this country

http://www.arkivverket.no/

(there is a link to translate the text into english for those who require it.)

The Norwegian Historical Data Center may also be a place that you will find helpful, publishing as it does many of the census’ facts for online research.

The census records and other historical sources are available on internet in searchable databases. The internet address to NHDC is: http://www.rhd.uit.no/indexeng.html