The American and Norwegian sides of the family have been keeping each other in their lives for fifty years now. Trips both ways, holidays, weddings, photographs, long phone calls, WhatsApp threads — the moments that get retold every time the two sides are in the same room.

The trips

1978 — the first one back

Ray and Mary fly to Norway and meet Torstein and Anne Ma in Lillehammer. Ray has been corresponding with Torfinn (the airline-pilot cousin his letter reached) and Torstein for about a year. The two couples meet for the first time — both households of working professionals with the same callings, both holding the older generation’s photographs and a small bundle of letters. They drive out to Øyer parish church together and stand at Berit’s grave. They go up to one of Torstein’s cabins. They spend a week and make plans for a second one.

1993 — the saga trip

Ray and Mary return for a second long trip, fifteen years later. They fly into Oslo on the first of July; Torfinn and Edna meet them at the airport and take them down to Aros, Torfinn’s home forty miles south of Oslo. The two couples spend the first weekend sailing on the Oslofjord and touring the area. Torstein and Anne Ma drive down from Lillehammer to join. Ray and Mary then fly north to Trondheim, board the Hurtigruten coastal steamer Nordnorge, and sail up the western Norwegian coast to Bodø, where Ray’s mother Anna Jenny Marie was born — a deliberate homage to a city she had not seen since she emigrated. They continue through Svolvær in the Lofoten Islands, stay one night in a rorbu (fisherman’s shack), and take a hydrofoil to Narvik, where Aunt Christine (Bjorne’s widow, then in her eighties) and her friend Olai Ingabritson host them with the help of Christine’s grandchildren Bjørig and Fredrick. They ride the Ofotbanen up through the Baard Jensen Cut to the Swedish border. They fly south to Bergen to meet Baard Olav at his student apartment and his fiancée Grete for a salt-cod dinner. They drive west to Lærdal to see the Bjørkum farm where Baard Jensen had been born in 1858. They cross the Sognefjord on a ferry, drive through the Jotunheim mountains to a hiker’s hostel at Spiterstulen, and then south to Torstein’s cabin near Øyer, where Berit had spent her last years and where Ray visits her grave. They end at the family’s home in Hamar, north of Oslo, and Torstein and Anne Ma drive them to the airport.

Ray types a seven-page letter home from Rochester on the second of December that fall describing the whole trip. It closes: “In the mean time, I hope you have enjoyed the saga.” The letter is now the family’s central archive of the Norwegian-side trip as it stood after its first fifteen years.

1998 — Kylloplass with the elder Beard generation

Wayne (Ruth’s husband) and Ruth (Mary’s sister), with Ray and Mary, set out together on a third trip — this one focused on Grammy’s Kyllo line in Trøndelag. They are driven out to a Kyllo farm by cousin Leif Olson, hoping it is the right one; only Norma’s 2026 church-book research, twenty-seven years later, will confirm that the right Kylloplass is in Hegra rather than the Selbu cluster they reached that day. They stop in the village of Hell along the way, photograph the famous sign, and the picture is family canon. Mary’s mother Ida had always wanted to return to Norway and never did; the 1998 trip is the closest the Kyllo line has come to its origin point.

Separately the same year, Kirsten and Dave bring infant Christopher to Norway — eleven months old. Sara’s husband Robert is also on this trip. They stay in Bergen at the Thon Hotel Rosenkrantz — the same hotel the Ungdommene will return to in 2026 — and the Norwegian-side relatives meet Christopher for the first time. He learns to walk in Norway that trip, by borrowing the push cart of Trygve’s older brother at the Lillehammer end of the visit. The story is family canon.

September 1999 — Beard-Jensen reunion at Nathan’s birth

Torstein and Anne Ma are in the United States the week Nathan is born — in Kansas City for a Beard-Jensen family reunion. The Norwegian-side relatives in the country for the birth of the next generation of the American-side family, by coincidence of timing and good planning together.

2010 — Kirsten, Dave, Christopher, Nathan

The Minnesota household returns to Norway. Kirsten, Dave, Christopher, and Nathan stay two nights at the Hotel Aurlandsfjord in Aurlandsvangen — a few kilometers from where Stegastein’s platform faces the same fjord — and hike from the town up into the hills behind it for a view of the Aurlandsfjord. Kirsten realizes only later, looking at the map, how close they had been to the Lustrafjord and to Marifjæren, where Mary’s grandmother Christine Talla was born in 1863. They didn’t know it at the time. They then drive to Bergen and stay at the Thon Rosenkrantz — the same hotel Kirsten and Dave had stayed at in 1998 with baby Christopher, and the same hotel the Ungdommene will return to in 2026.

2016 — the parents and the brothers separately

Kirsten and Dave fly to Norway ahead of a month-long European trip with their two sons. They spend three or four nights on their own first — with the Lindseths in Horten, then up to Lillehammer with the wider Jensen household — before meeting Christopher (eighteen, just graduated from high school) and Nathan (sixteen, finishing tenth grade) in Prague.

At the end of the month, after the rest of the trip is done, Christopher and Nathan fly to Norway by themselves. They split their time between the Lindseths in Horten — where they also see Sandra Dvergastein and her father Bjørn — and the Jensen households in Hamar and Lillehammer. In Hamar they spend time with Anne Ma and Torstein. In Lillehammer they spend time with Trygve and with Baard Olav and Grethe. It is the first Norway trip the two brothers make on their own.

2025 — Norway comes to Kansas

Nathan and Autumn are married in Kansas. Marthe and Trygve travel from Norway for the wedding, the first sustained presence of the next-generation Norwegian relatives at an American-side family event. Kirsten delivers the family-history toast that becomes the project’s first heritage source — naming Trygve as Nathan’s and Christopher’s third cousin, naming the seven children of Baard and Berit, and tracing the seventy-year silence and the late-1970s reconnection in a few sustained paragraphs.

2026 — Lillehammer in late July

The Ungdommene (the Youngsters) — Nathan, Autumn, Christopher, Jade — meet Marthe and Trygve at Oslo S for the Bergensbanen and ride the western leg of the trip together. The Gråhårsklubben (the Oldsters) — Sara, Kirsten, Dave — drive north to Trondheim, the Stjørdal valley, and the literal Kylloplass ground. The two cohorts reunite in Lillehammer for Days 6 and 7 at the household of Baard Olav and Grethe and across the dinner table at Torstein and Anne Ma’s. Ray is not there in person. Torstein, in his late eighties, is.

The visits between

In between the named trips, Ray and Mary went to Norway about five times in total. Torstein and Anne Ma visited the United States about seven times. The two couples traveled together to places that were neither — through northern Europe, to the Canary Islands more than once, across the United States to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and both coasts and Florida and even Las Vegas. The American side’s combined trips to Norway across the four decades since 1978 number well over a dozen; the Norwegian side’s combined visits to the United States across the same window are similar in scale.

The small things that became canon

A few moments have settled into the stories that get retold every time the two sides are in the same room.

Ray’s “saga” letter from 1993 — the typed seven pages from Rochester that detail the trip in the way Ray noticed things. The phrase the saga survives in family vocabulary for Norway-related letters and updates of any kind.

Aunt Christine’s reception in Narvik in 1993 — the eighty-plus-year-old Norwegian matriarch who, in Ray’s words, “did her duty as the King’s ambassador and matriarch of the Norwegian side of the family,” gathered her grandchildren on the day Ray and Mary arrived, hosted them at every meal, and showed them the street where Ray’s mother had grown up.

The roast reindeer at the Sami restaurant at Bjørnfjell on the Swedish border in 1993, after the Ofotbanen ride through the Baard Jensen Cut. Ray describes it: “much like beef but with a unique flavor which we found much to our liking.”

Christopher learning to walk in Norway at eleven months in 1998 by borrowing the push cart of Trygve’s older brother. Christopher, now twenty-nine in 2026, has been to Norway twice since (2010 with his parents and brother, then 2026) without being there in a way that would let him remember the first trip. The story is what he carries instead.

Torstein and Anne Ma in Kansas City in September 1999 for the Beard-Jensen reunion in the same week Nathan was born — the Norwegian relatives present for the birth of the next generation, by happy coincidence of timing.

The four-generation professional pairing — engineer married to nurse on both sides in the Ray-Mary and Torstein-Anne Ma generation, then Anesthesiologist married to Neurologist on the Norwegian side (Baard Olav and Grethe) paired with Nurse Anesthetist on the American side (Dave) in the next, then Nathan just-passed-his-nursing-boards and Autumn an engineer in the next. The pattern has not been deliberate.

The 1998 photograph at the Hell village sign — Ray and Mary and Wayne and Ruth with the welcome-to-Hell signage behind them, an image that the family still cites every time the trip comes up.

Kirsten’s wedding toast in 2025, with Marthe and Trygve at the table.

The thread of communication

The technology of keeping in touch changed without the relationship changing.

The 1978-to-late-1990s era was letters in the mail and the occasional long-distance phone call. Ray’s typed letters home, Torstein’s hand-written replies, the photographs sent in envelopes addressed to Rochester or Lillehammer. The 1993 saga letter is a representative example of what that era produced.

The early 2000s added email. Cousins on both sides set up addresses and the back-and-forth accelerated.

The 2010s added Skype and then WhatsApp. The Norwegian and American sides began to be in real-time conversation across the seven-hour gap — Christmas calls scheduled around the time difference, casual photos sent without occasion, the wedding planning thread for Nathan and Autumn running on a WhatsApp group with Norwegian-side participants from the beginning.

The 2020s is constant. The Norwegian relatives know about new jobs and new apartments within days. The American relatives know about Norwegian holidays, hikes, school milestones, and weather. The 2026 trip itself is being planned across a WhatsApp thread that includes people in five American states and a Norwegian household in Lillehammer.

The thread has not gone dark since Ray’s letter reached Torfinn’s desk in the late 1970s.

After 2026

The 2026 trip will leave its own moments behind it. A meal at Baard Olav and Grethe’s table that someone will remember in twenty years. The photograph at Berit’s grave at Øyer that joins the photographs from 1998 and 2010. The standing on Kylloplass ground itself, which Ray never did. Most of those moments won’t make it into the family canon. The relationship survives on the volume of small ones, not on the rare big ones.

The natural next questions are when Sigrid Baardsdatter Kleveland’s children Jarl and Eir first come to the United States, when Trygve and Marthe start a family of their own, and what name they give one of their children. None of those questions need answers now.