Mary’s grandmother was born on a fjord-side farm called Talle, in Luster Municipality on the Lustrafjord. Ray’s grandfather was born on a cotter’s parcel called Bjørkum, in Lærdal, a hundred kilometers further down the same fjord. Both villages survived the nineteenth century roughly intact. Both gave up most of their young people to North Dakota.

The Norwegian half of this family runs through one couple — Mary Beard and her husband Ray, known to his grandsons as Buppa — and from them upward into five distinct family lines, in five separate regions of Norway, four of those on Mary’s side and one on Ray’s. They emigrated at different times, on different ships, into different American counties, and met for the first time when Ray married Mary on the sixteenth of August 1953 at her parents’ farm just outside McCanna, North Dakota.

Mary’s father — the Kyllo line, in Hegra

Mary’s father Clarence Albin Kyllo was born on the sixth of July 1895 in McCanna, North Dakota, the eldest son of Lewis Lorentsen Kyllo and Christine T Talla. Lewis had come over in 1871, on a ship called Norway, at the age of twenty-two. He was the fifth child of a Trøndelag bricklayer named Lorents Andersen Kyllo and his wife Serine Andersdatter Stokmoen. Lewis settled in North Dakota, raised fifteen children with Christine, and died in McCanna in September 1936, having lived longer in America than he had been alive when he left Norway.

The bricklayer Lorents was Mary’s great-grandfather, and his life is the deepest record the Kyllo line keeps. He was christened at Værnes Church in Stjørdal on the ninth of March 1812. His mother Marit Larsdatter Bergsnes was twenty-one and died the same year he was born. His father Anders Nicolaysen, a bachelor sailor from Kristiansund, did not marry her. The baptism is entered in the parish register the way these things were entered — both parents named, the absence of marriage between them recorded as fact. Norway in 1812 did not hide its illegitimate births. It wrote them down.

On the thirteenth of June 1836 Lorents married Serine at the same Værnes Church, and the couple moved up the valley to a small holding called Kyllo Ovre — Upper Kyllan, a piece of land carved out of a larger Kyllo farm that had been mentioned in local records since 1363, when it was spelled Kyliar. He worked the holding for fifty-four years and died there on the last day of 1890. The local real-estate record shows the holding ceasing to be inhabited in the same year. Their fifth child Lewis had been christened at Hegra Church in 1849 and had been gone to America for nineteen years by then.

Mary’s father’s mother — the Talla line, on the Lustrafjord

Christine T Talla, Mary’s grandmother, was born at Marifjæren on the third of July 1863, on the Lustrafjord — the northernmost arm of the Sognefjord, in western Norway. Her father Tøge had been born at the Talle farm in 1829 and would eventually follow his daughter across the Atlantic. He did not, however, follow her to North Dakota. He settled in Goodhue County, Minnesota, in a township called Cherry Grove, and died there in 1892. The two halves of the Talla-and-Kyllo marriage met in McCanna having come over separately, from different parts of Norway, by different ships. Christine lived to be only forty-eight. She died at McCanna in May 1912, twenty-four years before Lewis.

The Lustrafjord and the Stjørdal valley are not close. Marifjæren sits inland, near the head of a steep western fjord, in a region whose Sogn-fjord settlement reaches back to the Iron Age and whose narrow strips of cultivable land between the water and the mountain are measured in meters. Hegra sits east of Trondheim in central Norway, in a wide farming valley reachable by a day’s drive from the coast. Mary’s father Clarence carried both these geographies in him.

Mary’s mother — the Solseng and Jerpbak lines

Ida A Solseng was born on the nineteenth of June 1897 in Shawnee, North Dakota, the daughter of John Solseng and Gitta J Jerpbak. Her two Norwegian grandfathers came from regions far from each other and from her husband’s Trøndelag side.

John Solseng’s father — Mary’s great-grandfather on this line — was Larsen Sjölseng, born in 1834 on the western coast of Norway, in Litldalen in Sunndal Municipality, in the fjords-and-island archipelago between Ålesund and Kristiansund. He emigrated in middle age and died in Grand Forks County in 1922. Gitta Jerpbak’s father was Johannesen Jerpbak, born in 1830 in Hemnes, in Nordland county, much further north — close enough to the Arctic Circle that the summer sun does not fully set. He emigrated to Lincoln, Minnesota, and died there in 1921.

Ida married Clarence at Larimore, North Dakota, in 1926; the centenary falls in 2026. They raised five children: Louise, Mary, Howard, Ruth, and Roger. Mary was born in McCanna on the twenty-first of April 1931. She is Grammy.

Ray’s grandfather — the Jensen line, from Lærdal to Narvik

Ray’s Norwegian ancestry is concentrated, where Mary’s is fanned. Most of it runs through one man, born on the twenty-third of May 1858 on a cotter’s parcel of the Bjørkum farm in Lærdal, on the inner Sognefjord. His name was Baard Jensen. His father Jens Baardson was a husmann (cotter — a tenant smallholder) on the Bjørkum farm and also a seafaring man who, in Ray’s later words, “sailed down the Sognefjord to wherever the sea would take him.” Baard’s mother Guri Andersdatter died when he was eleven.

His siblings — Anna, Jens, Marta, and the two half-siblings Joakim and Ola — emigrated to America at varying ages, between 1875 and 1897. Their father followed his children across the Atlantic in 1897. Baard alone stayed in Norway. He moved to Bergen at eighteen, lived there for ten years under the surname Bjørkum (the farm’s name), and in 1886 took a job in the construction camp at the mouth of the Ofotenfjord that the English company building the new railroad to the Swedish iron-ore mines called Victoria Harbor. The town that grew up around the project would soon be renamed Narvik. Baard would spend the next twenty-two years there, become a labor leader through the August 1888 strike against the English company, marry a Sami-descended woman from the high north, raise a household of six children, found the local Social Democratic chapter in 1903 and the Narvik Labor Party in 1905, give his name to a stretch of the railway that mapmakers misheard as Børjensen-skjoringa and to a memorial stone twenty-seven kilometers outside Narvik, and finally, on the twenty-eighth of July 1908, leave Norway for North Dakota. His own line from his own writings: “I left Narvik and never saw it again.” His wife and three of his sons stayed.

His daughter Anna Jenny Marie, born at Bodø, was Ray’s mother. She followed her father across the Atlantic in 1913, five years after him; her sisters came separately. By the time Ray married Mary, in their generation, the Bjørkum farm and the Talle farm and the Hegra valley and the Hemnes parish were all four to five generations behind them. The Norwegian half of the family lived in family memory, and in the seven-hour gap between Ray’s letter to SAS in the late 1970s and the answer that eventually came back.

What the villages were

A Norwegian parish in 1812 was a hundred or so people farming and fishing within walking distance of a wooden or stone church. The state church kept baptism, confirmation, marriage, and burial records reaching back to the late 1500s. A small-holder’s name survives, if it survives, in the parish book. The two oldest direct ancestors on this family’s Norwegian side — Anders Nicolaysen of Kristiansund and Jens Baardson of Lærdal — would have known a few hundred people each, mostly within their own valley, and would have walked the length of those valleys on foot in the course of a normal year.

Hegra in the 1810s was a clustered farming country east of Trondheim, organized around Hegra Church (wooden, eighteenth century) and Værnes Church (stone, twelfth century, the older of the two), with cotters’ parcels carved out of larger Kyllo and Ingstad and Bjørngård farms. Lærdal in the 1850s was a fjord-head village a hundred and twenty kilometers up the Sognefjord from Bergen, on the same fjord system whose inner Lustrafjord arm held the Talla farm.

Marifjæren, where Christine Talla was born in 1863, sat on a thin strip of shore between the fjord and the mountain on the inner Lustrafjord, on land that had been farmed for two thousand years and that supported about as many people in 1863 as it had supported in 1063. Sunndal in Møre og Romsdal, where the Solsengs came from, ran along a coastal fjord-and-island region that had been cod-fishing and small-boat-building since the medieval. Hemnes in Nordland, the Jerpbak parish, sat at the head of a fjord system three hundred kilometers north of the Arctic Circle.

Narvik in 1886 was the one outlier. It did not yet exist. Baard moved there into a construction camp of about a thousand men and watched a town grow around it across the next two decades, a town whose founding political history he wrote a substantial portion of. The Narvik labor museum still cites the August 1888 strike as the founding event of the northern Norwegian labor movement, and still names him.

The convergence

The four Norwegian lines on Mary’s side converged in mid-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century North Dakota. The Jensen line converged with them one generation later, when Ray married Mary on the Kyllo farm at McCanna in August 1953. Ray and Mary settled and raised their two daughters Sara and Kirsten in Rochester, Minnesota. Ray was a civil engineer; he had met Mary at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, taken a first job with DuPont in Iowa, and then moved to IBM in Rochester, where he worked for over thirty years before retiring. Mary trained as a nurse at the same university and later took a master of public health at the University of Minnesota; she spent the last quarter-century of her working life as an epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic, with more than a hundred research articles to her name. Ray passed in December 2020. Mary is ninety-five.

Kirsten and her husband Dave raised Nathan and Christopher in Eden Prairie. Sara and her husband Robert raised Jake and Bobby in Florida. Nathan married Autumn in Kansas in 2025; Christopher and Jade live in Ohio.

Five Norwegian villages hold the deepest answer to where the family came from — Hegra, Marifjæren, Litldalen, Hemnes, Lærdal — with Narvik a sixth, two generations later in the Jensen story. None of the current generation has set foot in any of them. The 2026 trip reaches three.