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20.The Story Continues

1998

On a Sunday morning in 1998 the telephone rang, and in a dis-tinctly Scandinavian accent came the words, “This is Halvor

Forberg calling from Larvik, Norway, and I ‘tink I must be your cousin.” Halvor’s first words began a tour of discovery I could not have imagined.

Three years earlier I had begun my personal genealogical study. On my third trip to Salt Lake City with our Family History Group, I began searching for Norwegian grandparents. Fortunately a profes-sional researcher was available to help with the Norwegian language. She explained that about the time my grandfather came to ‘Ameri-ka,’ most of the European countries were asking citizens to take and keep a permanent last name. Instead of following the historic patro-nymic naming system, where a child’s last name was formed from the first name of their father by adding ‘son’ or ‘datter,’ many people took their family name from that of their home farm. By examining a huge book that recorded the Telemark farms we found it: the land known as Forberg.

Finding my grandfather’s family in Norway opened a whole new world of possibility. The man I had known as Grandpa Andy, had been born Einar Einarson on the Forberg family farm in Bo, Tele-mark, Norway. When he left the ship in New York Harbour in 1893 he had used his new name, Forberg. After hours of searching I found him on the ship’s passenger list.

Arming myself with pages from the Norwegian telephone directory

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that showed several towns in the Telemark state with listing for For-bergs, I mailed from home forty-three envelopes. In each Forberg addressed package I placed a genealogy chart of those of us living in Canada along with old family photographs. The covering letter explained where I fit into the family picture. The response took only two weeks.

When several of my Forberg ‘cousins’ in Norway received their letter they had called Halvor asking him to respond on behalf of all of them. As the telephone conversation proceeded I discovered that for his business Halvor had traveled to ‘America’ many times and had searched in telephone directories for the name ‘Forberg.’

On one such visit to Canada he had been as close as Victoria, British Columbia, looking for us. Had he looked further North on Vancouver Island he would have found the name he sought. Forberg was a well known name in Campbell River, 100 miles north of Vic-toria. My parent’s street had been named Forberg and each of Ingolf Forberg’s three sons had telephones. I had grown up aware that both of my grandparents had come from Norway but I knew little else about their early lives. The only Forberg cousins I knew were my uncle’s three boys, born long after I left home.

From that day of Halvor Forberg’s first call, my ‘family’ has con-tinued to expand. He told me about of a whole new group of people to whom I was directly related. The eldest son of eight children, Halvor is a grandson of my own grandfather’s brother. Our grandfa-thers had had two other brothers and one of them had given rise to a new branch of the family, also living in Norway. I became aware that ‘Forberg’ relatives consisted of three branches and up until now I had only known mine.

Halvor and I began a process of reconnecting our families using letters, fax, email and telephone calls. Finding a way to go to Nor-way became my focus. That summer, after the International Fed-eration of University Women meeting in Gratz, Austria, I found a connecting flight to Oslo. This book, from Fjord to Floathouse, one family’s journey from the farmlands of Norway to the coast of British Columbia was inspired by that first visit with my new-found family. That first meeting of ‘cousins’ in Norway during September of 1998 left me overwhelmed and I tried to describe those feelings in the last two chapters of the book.

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Back home again I settled in to getting the book written and hav-ing it published. I discovered that writing such a personal story be-came easier for me when it was written in the third person. With continued writing, I experienced a growing desire to leave a record for my three children of what I had learned about the family’s his-tory.

As the manuscript grew it became not only the story of my own family over one hundred years but was also an introduction to the lifestyle of families such as mine, who lived during the first half of the 1900s in floating houses on the remote shores of mainland Brit-ish Columbia.

I am continuing to write the memoir about those early years and my part in it.

April 1999

I had learned that my grandfather, Einar Forberg, had grown up with three brothers, Gunnulf, Knut, and Olav. Until my family history research prompted them, some of Knut’s descendants had not even realized they were related to the Forbergs in Bo, although the fami-lies lived within a few miles of each other.

As explanation, when Knut Einarson was able to buy his own farm he took its name, Østbø, while Einar in Canada and Gunnulf in Norway had taken the name Forberg from the farm they grew up on. The word ‘forberg’ means in front of the berg or outcropping bluff and it forms a landmark above the fertile valley of farmland. Their fourth brother, Olav, had no children.

To my surprise and delight in the spring of 1999 I received word that one couple that I had met in Norway were hoping to visit us. Liv, a second cousin from the Østbø branch, and her husband Magne, came in May for a brief four days. Their reasoning was, “If we can travel all the way across the ocean to rent a vacation condo in Florida, we can go a ‘little farther’ across the continent to find out where our relatives live.” They drove up island with us to meet my three Forberg first cousins and together we flew over the ocean and inlets where I had lived as a child. It was a happy family meet-ing and plans were made for further reunions of all three of the family branches.

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Rae with Norwegian cousins and three aunts.

June 2002

After much planning and communications by letter and email the two branches of grandchildren in Norway planned a family reunion for June of 2002. I did my best to encourage representation from our branch in Canada. With much anticipation all the grandchildren of these two Norwegian and one Canadian brother came together as ‘cousins’ in a grand and long- anticipated family reunion.

My two daughters and I represented the Canadian branch of the original family. Present also were three elder ‘aunts’ who were my father’s first cousins. How sad he had never known of their existence. At the Bø Hotel a total of sixty-four people, including children, cel-ebrated their shared heritage. There were champagne toasts, photo-graphs taken, a traditional beef dinner served and later a buffet of decadent desserts made by the Norwegian relatives.

One of the most interesting experiences for my girls and for me was to meet Halvor’s youngest brother, Torfinn Forberg. I compared him to a photograph of my father, whose name was Einar but every-one called him Buster, taken at approximately the same age as this

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man was now. Although only second cousins, the resemblance was so strong they could have been twins. My daughters were amazed to find they were related to young people in Norway who had similar in-terests to theirs, and who possessed excellent English language skills.

Many of us lingered to visit together until well past midnight, evi-dence of newly formed friendships and a wish to learn more about each other’s lives. Except when communicating with the older gen-eration, little interpretation was necessary.

September 2002

The next phase in what seemed like a fairy story came in September of 2002 when Halvor, who had first communicated with me, and his wife Karin, visited us at our home in Sidney, BC. During our two weeks together Halvor and I discovered similarities of character and habits that could only be explained by the blood relationship we share. We drove to Tofino and Ucuelet to experience the true West Coast of Canada, then on to Campbell River for Halvor and Karin to meet the Canadian Forbergs.

Halvor Forberg with Canadian Cousins, from back left: Don, Barry, Myrtle, Peter and Judy.

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With a few of the Campbell River cousins on board we chartered a pontoon equipped plane which allowed us to land at the Port Nev-ille dock where my parents had picked up their mail and supplies for so many years. It was a shock to our visitors to see how uninhabited the area still is. Later the Forberg cousins in Campbell River provid-ed a fresh seafood buffet in one of their homes, and twenty people, including my sister and my own three children, enjoyed good food and fellowship with relatives from ‘the old country.’

June 2003

In a surprise visit in 2003 Halvor’s brother, Olav Forberg, also made the trip. Olav, whom his family calls Lolla, had promised his daugh-ters a trip to Canada and San Francisco if they did well in school. They had produced good school grades so Hanne and Helene, his sixteen-year-old twin daughters, accompanied him to Canada and were with me to celebrate my sixty-fifth birthday. We knew by then what highlights of Vancouver Island to show our Norwegian rela-tives and once again, we all enjoyed precious time together discover-ing more shared family traits.

These were the third set of relatives who had visited us from Nor-way and it was difficult to remember that until that first phone call I had been unaware they existed. When I had gone to Norway for the family reunion in 2002 I took copies of my book and carefully distributed a signed copy to each of the eighteen second cousins. By now even if I had not met all the relatives they knew of us.

On the very morning I said goodbye to Lolla and the twins, an email arrived from the daughter of my first Norwegian visitors, Liv Haaland’s daughter Elizabeth, who had read her mother’s copy and wrote:

I finished from Fjord to Floathouse last summer and somewhere in the middle of it I decided I had to thank you again for sharing such a great story with us. Not only does it serve as an interesting history book for Norwegian immigrants, and an invaluable insight to a not-so-everyday people’s everyday life, it is also a great novel that made me both laugh and cry. I recognized myself so many times while reading and sometimes I had to smile at myself for thinking, “Yes, we are definitely family.”

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It is always sad to finish a good book. I often miss fictional characters and wish they were alive. With your book it was even more sad knowing that the ‘characters’ I felt so close to while reading were real people that I would never, apart from you of course, get to meet.

Luckily, you saw the value of telling people about them. That is why I’ve taken time in the middle of cleaning my office (I’ll start my English studies this fall) to tell you how much I appreciate the book. I’ve thought about translating it for my grandmother but it would take too much time. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to present it for my class this year.

Give my regards to Norma and Linda and your husband and son. Hope to meet you all again one day.

October 2005

My next visit with newly found relatives came as a result of an invi-tation from Olav and his twin brother Einar to their 60th birthday celebration in 2005. I have learned that among Norwegian people the sixtieth birthday is considered a significant life mark much the same as Canadians think of their sixty-fifth birthday. The party for both men and all their friends and relatives was held in a football clubhouse not far from the Forberg farm. My son and his wife were able to join me for this party and together we spent a few days tour-ing the places that my grandfather had known as a boy. I was sur-prised to see how much Einar Forberg, present owner of the farm, resembled my son, Eric, in both size and gait as they strode along the path together.

Halvor took us up to the old church (behind the big new one) where Einar, my dad’s father, had learned his Lutheran lessons and been “signed off” by the priest to go to ‘America’ in 1893. The build-ing is still used occasionally for weddings or special services, and the grave markers all around it are dotted with Forbergs.

In June of 2007 other Forbergs celebrated in Norway the 70th birthday of Halvor Forberg, who made the first call to me from Nor-way in 1998. I was unable to join his family for that celebration but there were more happy connections to be enjoyed.

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October 2011

In September 2011 I received a rather surprising e-mail from Olav Forberg, stating he and his brother Halvor had landed in Texas and would be satisfying their lifelong wish of driving Route 66 and tour-ing across ‘America.’ They expected to drop off their rented car in Seattle, Washington, a month later. From there they would come to visit us.

As it turned out the first part of their Canadian tour was a trip to Alberta to see my daughter, Linda and her three children at their Calgary horse farm. In British Columbia Halvor and Olav stopped to see my older daughter Norma, at her boarding barn facility in the Fraser Valley. When they arrived here we drove to Campbell River together and enjoyed an evening with all of the Forberg cousins and some of their children. In Nanaimo we had a waterfront lunch stop and then walked around son Eric’s home and acreage.

Our visit with the two Forberg brothers stretched to two delight-ful weeks which I know they also enjoyed. They learned to carve a pumpkin for Halloween, not a big celebration in their country and we picked and made rose pip jelly together. After their long drive across the continent they were ready for down time, which our home could provide. And on, the story continues......

XThe End