Who’s who
- Kjersti Tollefsdatter Kjemhus, Halvor’s widow, forty-three when he died, with five children.
- Steinar (Stener in the records), the eldest, born 1869. The first to file.
- Tollef, born 1871, Clara Kjemhus’s father.
- Kari, born 1878, who married at Morden, Manitoba, in 1897.
- Tosten (Torstein), born 1883, and Peder, born 1887 at Dawson, the youngest.
- Knut Kjemhus, Halvor’s brother, in Yellow Medicine County, Minnesota, since 1867.
- Bergit Knudsdatter, whom Tollef married in 1906. Her page.
The invisible years
For six years after Halvor died, the family is invisible. The census that should show them, the count of 1890, burned in a government basement in Washington in 1921, and no letter, deed or church book from those years has turned up. What’s left is arithmetic. Kjersti was a widow at forty-three with five children, the oldest nineteen and the youngest in arms. Her husband’s brother Knut, who had gone ahead in 1854 and fought in the war, had a farm in the same county and a houseful of his own.
August 1894: Steinar files
The first of them to surface again is Steinar, and he surfaces three hundred miles to the north. On August 10, 1894, at twenty-five, he went before the district court of Cavalier County, North Dakota, and declared his intention to become a citizen. Three days later his homestead entry was made at the land office in Grand Forks, on a hundred and seventy-five acres in the last tier of sections before the Canadian line. The odd acreage is the border’s doing: two of his parcels were the fractional lots the survey left along it.
The line itself ran along the top of the township. Two governments had surveyed it in the early 1870s and marked it across the country with mounds of earth and cairns of stone, and in 1875 with iron posts, lettered G.B. on the north face and U.S. on the south. That was the border: a row of posts in the grass. Steinar’s claim ran up to it. Its north edge was Canada.
The next summer Minnesota counted its people, and Tollef was still at Dawson. Dawson was a railroad town, a stop on the Minneapolis and St. Louis line that a townsite company had laid out on a prairie section eleven years before and named for a St. Paul banker. Peder had been born there, by the family’s record, in the fall the family came. So they had been at Dawson, or near it, from the start, twenty miles or so from Knut’s farm, and the eldest son had already gone.
Numedahl
The place Steinar had filed on was the last county of North Dakota before the Canadian line, where Norwegians from NumedalNumedal A long valley in southern Norway, running north-west from Kongsberg, where Flesberg, Rollag and Veggli lie. Numedal and its farms → were taking up land in the hills above the Pembina River. They had named it for home. The first of them came in 1888, the rest in the early nineties. The land had been Métis and Ojibwe country within the memory of people still living on it; the government had cleared the title before the Norwegians came. The congregation was organized in 1896 and named itself Nore, for the parish up the valley from Veggli where Kari Tollefsdatter, Halvor’s mother, had come from.
It isn’t open prairie. The Pembina comes out of the west there and has cut a wooded gorge through the edge of the plain, and the settlement sat on the high ground above it. The book about it calls it hidden in the hills of the Pembina valley, and the county history calls it the most isolated community in Cavalier County. Walhalla, the nearest town, was six miles east, down where the river comes out of the hills. Langdon, the county seat, was twenty miles southwest. Morden, in Manitoba, was sixteen miles north.
1897 to 1900: the family comes north
They came in stages. Kjersti filed next, in January 1897, on a quarter section a mile south of the line, with Tosten and Peder, thirteen and nine. That year Kari, who had been eight on the Toronto, married a Nelson at Morden, on the Canadian side. In March 1899 Steinar took the citizen’s oath at the courthouse in Langdon and signed himself Stener H. Kjemhus, NumedahlNumedahl A Norwegian farming community in Cavalier County, North Dakota, named by its settlers after Numedal, the valley in Norway. Tollef Kjemhus farmed there, and his grandson Pete spent boyhood summers on his farm. Numedal and Numedahl →, with Halvor B. Nelson as his witness; he stood witness for Nelson the same day. Tollef came last. In June 1899 he filed on a quarter two sections east of his mother’s. Two men had filed on that quarter before him and let it go; the second claim was cancelled on the day Tollef’s was entered.
In June 1900 the census taker found them in a row: Kjersti, a farmer, with Tosten and Peder, and on the next line Tollef, twenty-nine, single, a farmer, with a farm of his own. Both farms were owned free of mortgage. The county atlas of 1912 puts the Numedahl post office in the section between the two quarters.
The government’s paper caught up slowly. Steinar’s patent came in 1901, Kjersti’s in 1904, Tollef’s in October 1905. The files behind them, with the sworn answers about the house and the acres broken, are still in Washington, unread.
The church
The congregation met for eighteen years without a church. In 1914 the members bought a one-room schoolhouse on the Canadian side for five hundred dollars and hauled it south past the posts onto donated land, and that is the church that stands at Numedahl now. Family memory puts Steinar among the men who founded the congregation. Most of the family lies in the cemetery beside the church.
August 1907: Steinar
Steinar died on August 14, 1907, at twenty minutes to eleven in the morning, the congregation’s book says, and was buried two days later in Nore’s churchyard, the first of the family in that ground. He was thirty-eight. No wife or child of his appears in any record. Part of his land passed to his mother; the county map of 1912 has her name on eighty acres of it, beside her own quarter.
After
Kjersti died at Numedahl in January 1928, at eighty-three. She had been in America forty years and a widow for all but the first of them, and had buried a son. The farm history in Norway, which had given her a sentence for her beauty, gave her a clause for the forty years. She lies in the churchyard at Numedahl beside Steinar. Peder joined them in 1936, and then Kari, in 1964. Tosten, who had been not yet four on the Rollo, went to Chicago, married there at thirty-seven, and died there during the war.
Tollef and Bergit stayed on the farm, and every census through 1940 found them on it. By 1910 both farms carried a mortgage; by 1920 Tollef’s was clear again. The census sheet that says so is signed by the man who took it, T. H. Kjemhus, which is Tollef’s name and also his brother Tosten’s. One of the two brothers counted Fremont Township that January. For two hundred years clerks had written the family down. This time a Kjemhus held the pen.
The name
He had been Tollef Halvorsen on the parish list and in the police protocol, a boy with a patronymicpatronymic A second name made from the father's first name: -sen for a son, -datter for a daughter. Tollef Halvorsen was Tollef, son of Halvor; Karen Torkildsdatter was Karen, daughter of Torkild. It changed every generation, which is why Norwegian lines are traced by farm as much as by name. All the words, from a farm that was already sold. The family didn’t keep the patronymic. His uncle Knut had gone by Kjemhus in Minnesota since at least 1882, when a county history wrote him up under it. Steinar filed on his homestead as Kjemhus in 1894, and when the family began to die at Numedahl the graves were recorded the same way: Stener Halvorson Kjemhus. Kjersti T. Kjemhus. Peter Halvorson Kjemhus. In Langdon, one stone for Tollef and Bergit, KJEMHUS across its face. Clara was christened Kjemhus and carried it until she married.
In Norway a name like that belonged to the land. You took the name of the farm you lived on, and when you moved you took the next one. In 1923 a law froze those names into surnames, and Carl’s cousins in the valley carry farm namesfarm 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 now from one generation to the next. The Kjemhus family had done the same thing thirty years early, in a country that wanted a last name on every form, and they did it with the name of a farm they no longer had.
How we know
- The tract book, General Land Office, Dakota Territory, vol. 86, township 164 north, range 58 west: Stener H. Kjemhus, the south half of the southwest quarter and lots 3 and 4 of section 27, 175.06 acres, entered August 13, 1894, at Grand Forks (p. 93); Kjersti Kjemhus, 160 acres in section 33, entered January 21, 1897 (p. 95); Tollef Kjemhus, the southwest quarter of section 35, 160 acres, entered June 12, 1899, with the two earlier claims on it (p. 96). FamilySearch, collection 2074276. Patents: February 20, 1901; July 2, 1904; October 19, 1905 (the General Land Office’s index). The land entry case files are at the National Archives, Record Group 49, unread.
- Steinar’s naturalization, Cavalier County district court, naturalization record, pp. 97–98: declaration of intention August 10, 1894; oath March 31, 1899, signed “Stener H. Kjemhus, Numedahl, N.D.,” witnesses P. Erickson and Halvor B. Nelson; Nelson’s own oath the same day names Stener H. Kjemhus as a witness (Ancestry, account needed).
- The boundary: Manitoba Historical Society, Transactions, “Markers on the Forty-Ninth”; Dakota Datebook, “Boundary Survey Completed,” Prairie Public, May 16, 2022.
- Dawson in 1895: the family tree’s residence for Tollef, from the Minnesota state census. The town was platted in 1884 and incorporated in 1885.
- Numedahl’s history, as summarized for the Nore Numedahl church: first settlers from 1888; the congregation established in 1896; the Elk Creek School bought in 1914–15 for $500 and moved across the border. The county history’s “most isolated” is quoted there. Numedahl: A Norwegian Community Hidden in the Hills of the Pembina Valley (2001) is in the Red River Valley Genealogical Society’s library and hasn’t been read yet. Steinar among the founders is family memory.
- The 1900 census, Fremont Township, Cavalier County, enumeration district 45, sheet 6A, June 14–15, 1900, lines 1–4 (Ancestry, account needed). The 1910, 1920, 1930 and 1940 censuses of the township, the same way; the 1920 sheet (enumeration district 35, sheet 1A) is signed T. H. Kjemhus.
- The county atlas: George A. Ogle & Co., Standard Atlas of Cavalier County, North Dakota (1912), p. 20, Fremont Township: “Numedahl P.O.” in section 34, Kjersti’s 160 acres in 33, Tollef’s in 35, and eighty acres in her name in 27.
- Steinar’s death, in the congregation’s book: ELCA Archives, congregational records, Big Pembina Lutheran, Langdon, p. 185, under 1907: born March 13, 1869, in Numedal; died August 14, 1907, at 10:40 a.m.; buried August 16 in Nore congregation’s churchyard (Ancestry, account needed). His stone: Find a Grave ↗.
- The graves at Numedahl: Kjersti, February 18, 1844, to January 6, 1928 (Find a Grave ↗); Peder, 1887–1936 (Find a Grave ↗); Kari, 1878–1964, and Tosten, 1883–1943, from the family tree.
- Knut as Kjemhus in 1882: Neill, History of the Minnesota Valley (1882), “K. S. Kjemhus.” The 1923 law is Norway’s Names Act (Lov om personnavn), which required a fixed, inherited surname.
- The family tree, for births, marriages and deaths.