The dot is the farm’s probable place; the map register names more than one spot that could be it.
Hvammen is in Nore, west of the Lågen where the river runs into Norefjorden, about eight kilometers above Hvåle and twelve above Kjøntveit. The old farmyard sat on a terrace, at what later became middle Hvammen. It isn't Gvammen in Veggli, which sounds the same.
Halvor and Helga
The farm history makes Halvor Anulfsen of Hvammen the husband of Helga Gulbrandsdotter, from Sporan, and the father of her sons. The priests' censuses of 1664 and 1665 do find a Halvor at Hvammen, 52 and then 53, so born about 1612. The rest is the farm history's.
Halvor leased the Crown's share of Hvammen and held land elsewhere. He sat as a lay judge and was churchwarden. In 1657 the farm had a horse, thirteen cows, ten sheep and eight goats, and the next year Hvammen's part of the provisions tax was bread, meat and cheese for the soldiers at Akershus, the fortress in Christiania. Halvor died about 1675.
Helga, about twenty years younger, kept the farm going with her sons. She also kept her own share of Hvåle, where Lars farmed, and in 1683 held more of it than he did. The sons were Lars, Anulf and Gulbrand.
Anulf stayed at Hvammen. In 1682, the farm history says, he was in a fight that left a man dead, and in 1684 the local court sentenced him to death. It didn't stick. Later on he paid a fine instead, and he was still living at Hvammen. The court papers themselves haven't been read yet.
Helga's choice
On July 17, 1711, Helga's keep came before the district court. Her nephew, Halvor Larsen Sporan, her brother's son, spoke for her. The record names "her 2 children, Lars Waale and Anulf Hwammen." The question, the farm history says, was which of her two living sons, and the widow of a third, should support her. The answer was all of them: six riksdalerdaler The silver money Norway counted in before the krone of 1875: the riksdaler, and from 1816 the speciedaler. In the 1830s a farm in Veggli sold for a few hundred speciedaler. All the words a year from each. And Helga got to choose where she lived.
She was buried on March 27, 1717. The church book calls her Helge Hvammen and gives her age as eighty-six. She'd been a widow for about forty years.
The storehouse
An old storehouse at middle Hvammen has initials worked into its door iron: H.A.S., H.G.D. and L.H.S. The farm history reads them as Halvor Anulfsen, Helga Gulbrandsdatter and Lars Halvorsen, and thinks Helga's brother, Lars Gulbrandsen Sporan, a smith, made the ironwork. His name and the year 1665 are on the door iron of a storehouse at Sporan. Some of the iron is dated 1591, older than any of them, and a beam is dated 1705, which the author credits to Anulf rebuilding. So it's a building put together over a century, and the initials are a reading, not a deed. Whether it stands today hasn't been checked.
Later
The farm namefarm name In rural Norway a family often took the name of the farm it lived on, and changed it when it moved. Emigrants often kept one as their American surname: Aamodt became Amoth. All the words turns up again in the 1800s. Tollef Tollefsen, born at Kjøntveit in 1797, a brother of Kari Tollefsdatter, the fiddler Steinar's wife, went by Hvammen, and his daughter Helga died here in 1907, the tree says. How they came to it isn't known.
Who lived here
born or died at Hvammen · a pale bar is a life whose start isn’t recorded
Show them as a list, with what puts each of them here
- Helga Gulbrandsdotter –1717 · buried 1717 as “Helge Hvammen”; the 1711 support case
- Tollef Tollefsen Hvammen 1797–1871 · named for it
- Helga Tollefsdtr. 1830–1907 · died here
- Anulf Hvammen – · lived here; named for it; “Anulf Hwammen,” Helga’s son, in the 1711 support case
The records
- 1664–1665. The priests' censuses: Halvor, 52, at Hvammen on November 22, 1664, and Halvor Anulfsen, 53, on November 27, 1665: 1664, 1665.
- 1711. Helga's support, July 17. Tingbok I 41, folios 39b–42a: the opening, the continuation, the judgment.
- 1717. Helge Hvammen buried, March 27, aged 86. Rollag ministerialbok I 2, p. 147: the page.
The farm history: Nore–Uvdal i forn og nye, part 1, vol. 4, pp. 2209–2217, at the National Library, and for the 1711 case, vol. 1, pp. 440–441, at the National Library.