Who’s who
- Halvor Steinarsen Kjemhus, born at Kjemhus in 1835, the fiddler Steinar’s son. He sold the farm in 1886. Clara Kjemhus’s grandfather and Carl’s great-great-grandfather.
- Kjersti Tollefsdatter, from Ruud, his wife since 1868.
- Steinar, eighteen, Tollef, sixteen, Kari, eight, and Torstein, not yet four: the children at home. Tollef was Clara’s father.
- Peder, born in Minnesota that October.
- Kari Tollefsdatter, Halvor’s mother, the fiddler’s widow, who died at Kjemhus that January.
- Knut Steinarsen Kjemhus, Halvor’s brother, in Minnesota since 1854.
- Maren, forty-five, a servant who traveled with the family. Who she was, no record says.
- Knud Helle, a Veggli laborer who sailed on the same ship four weeks earlier. In America, Knute Stenerson.
- Bergit, born at the next farm two days before the family sailed. Knud’s daughter, and later Tollef’s wife.
January
Kari Tollefsdatter died at Kjemhus on the last day of January 1887. She was eighty-three. The register entered her as a widow on her kår, her keep: a farm fed and housed the people who had handed it on, for as long as they lived. The farm that owed her that had been sold the year before.
She had come to Kjemhus with Steinar in 1835, three years married, and had been the great farmer’s wife for thirty-two years and his widow for twenty-three. When her son sold, his household moved off to a holding called Nirigard. She didn’t go with them. A keep usually went with the farm, not the family, so she stayed on at Kjemhus among new people, and lived one winter of it.
She was buried at Veggli on Saturday, February 12, and the priest read the committal over her eight days later, on the Sunday. The burying was the family’s work and the blessing the church’s, and they were often days apart.
The fall
The farm history gives it in a few plain sentences. Halvor was industrious and capable. He had been a peddler as a young man, and alongside the farming he ran a forest and timber business. Then came hard times, the losses that come to a man who has signed for other men’s debts, and failing health. He sold Kjemhus in 1886 to Ole Larsen, a man from Uvdal. The farm history says Kjersti was known as a very beautiful woman. It doesn’t mention her again until she is a widow in North Dakota.
Halvor was fifty-two. Kjersti was forty-three. Steinar, at eighteen, and Tollef, at sixteen, were grown men by the valley’s count. Kari, who carried her grandmother’s name, was eight, old enough to remember Norway. Torstein was not yet four, and wouldn’t.
The parish list
A Norwegian parish kept a list of the people who left it, one line each: name, birth, where to. On May 16 the Rollag priest wrote six lines for Kjemhus, and the next day he signed the attestation, the paper that said who they were, to be shown to a church at the other end. The list has the second son as Tallef, which is how the valley said Tollef. The clerk in the capital would write it the same way.
Christiania
Christiania is Oslo now; the city took its old name back in 1925. Its police kept a protocol of every emigrant who left through the port, and on May 26 the clerk took the family down in a column of seven names: the six of them, and after the children a woman named Maren, forty-five, bracketed with the family. Agent, J. Krantz. Ship, the Rollo. Fare for the party, one thousand kroner. Destination, Montevideo.
Montevideo, Minnesota, sat where the Chippewa River met the Minnesota, a day’s wagon ride from Sandnes Township in Yellow Medicine County, where Halvor’s brother Knut had a farm. Knut had left Veggli in 1854, at sixteen, alone. He had fought in the Civil War, filed on a homestead, married Oline Stevens and been elected the township’s first constable. Thirty-three years after he walked out of the valley, his brother booked passage to the railroad town a day’s ride from his farm.
The Rollo
The Rollo was a Wilson Line steamer out of Hull, built seventeen years before to carry five hundred in steerage; on one sailing that April she carried six hundred. She ran from Christiania down the coast to Kristiansand and across the North Sea to Hull. From Hull the emigrants went by train across England to Liverpool, and at Liverpool a bigger ship took them over. Krantz was the Dominion Line’s man in Christiania, and the Dominion Line meant Liverpool to Quebec and up the St. Lawrence.
She had made the same run four weeks earlier with a passenger from the same corner of the valley. Knud Helle, laborer, twenty-five, ticketed through Krantz and booked all the way to Edgerton, Wisconsin, had crossed England, sailed from Liverpool on the Dominion Line’s Montreal and landed at Quebec on May 18. He was born at Lillehøiset and raised at Helle, and took the farm’s name the way everyone did. His story is told on its own page.
Møgstu
A week after Knud landed, on May 25, a girl was born at Møgstu, the farm that shares a boundary with Kjemhus. Her mother was Ragnild Tostensdatter, twenty-four, a daughter of the farm, unmarried. The child was christened at Veggli on June 12 and entered under the heading the church kept for children born outside marriage. The register asked for the father, and the entry gives him: Knud Ingemundsen Helle, bachelor, living in America. By the time the priest wrote living in America, Knud had been on that side of the ocean less than a month.
They named her Bergit. Nineteen years later, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, she married Tollef, who on the day she was born was sixteen years old and two days from sailing, and who had lived his whole life a short walk from her mother’s door. The records establish who belonged to whom. They don’t say who knew what. Her story has the rest.
Liverpool to Quebec
On May 27 the Rollo cast off from Christiania with the Kjemhus family aboard. Bergit was two days old. Halvor’s mother had been in the ground since February. The farm had been Ole Larsen’s for a year.
They had the North Sea to Hull and a train across England, and on June 3, a week to the day after Christiania, they went aboard the Dominion Line’s Toronto at Liverpool, a Glasgow-built steamer of thirty-three hundred tons, twice the Rollo. The purser’s sheet wrote them down as Stenerson, all seven, Maren last, as a domestic servant, with the word Montevideo in the destination column and ditto marks under it. The same wrong ages the Christiania clerk had written came with them: Tollef as fourteen, Kari as four and three quarters. The ship called at Belfast the next day, and her arrival at Quebec was entered on June 14, with two passengers in cabins and a hundred and forty-eight in steerage.
What the eleven days were like, no one wrote down. There is no diary and no letter. There is the parish list, the police protocol and the purser’s sheet. For a family that had answered everything with paper for two hundred years, it’s a thin file. It’s also the whole of it.
Dawson
Montevideo is a word in a Christiania ledger. The first American record of the family is a birth.
The family’s own record has it, and so does his stone at 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 → in North Dakota: Peder, born October 5, 1887, at Dawson, a railroad town west of Montevideo. No church book or county register has been found for it yet, and the farm history, written a century later, puts his birth two years earlier. But two clerks, one in the valley and one in the capital, counted four children in May, not five, and neither was in the habit of leaving out babies. If the family’s date is right, Kjersti crossed the Atlantic five months pregnant, at forty-three, and Peder was the first of them born in America, in the fall of the year they came.
Halvor died the next year, by the farm history. His niece Margit, writing in a NumedalNumedal A long valley in southern Norway, running north-west from Kongsberg, where Flesberg, Rollag and Veggli lie. Numedal and its farms → yearbook in 1922, said he died the same year they came. The family’s record puts his death in Sandnes Township, Knut’s township. Carl hasn’t found his grave. He had held Kjemhus for twenty-two years. He had a year in America, or less.
Kjersti was left at forty-three with five children, the youngest a baby, in a country she had been in for a year at most. The farm history, which spent a sentence on her beauty, spends a clause on the rest: she moved later to North Dakota and lived until 1928. Those forty years are the next page.
Back in Veggli, the farm history closed the account in two sentences. “This whole old family, with the exception of Kristi Steinarsdotter Landrud, the father’s sister, went to America. Entirely new people now moved to the farm.”
How we know
- Kari’s burial, Veggli, 1887: Kari Tollefsdatter, widow on her keep, born 1803 at Kjøntveit in Nore, of Kjemhus, died January 31, buried February 12, committal February 20. Veggli ministerialbok II 1, p. 99 (the page ↗, Digitalarkivet).
- The farm history: Knut Hoff, Rollag bygdebokbygdebok (plural bygdebøker) A Norwegian local history, usually a few volumes per district, going farm by farm through who lived there and when. Compiled from church registers, censuses, probate, tax and court records. The Kjemhus line comes from the ones for Flesberg and Rollag. All the words, vol. 1 (1988), pp. 446–447, for Halvor’s business, the losses, the sale, Nirigard, Kjersti, and the closing sentences (at the National Library ↗). It names the buyer Ole Larsen Myran; the title index has Ole Larsen Gjermundstad for the 1886 conveyance. Both say Ole Larsen, from Uvdal.
- The departure list, Rollag ministerialbok I 11, pp. 224–225, entries 10–15, dated May 16, 1887, attestation May 17 (the page ↗).
- The police protocol, Christiania, protocol 14, p. 79: contract May 26, sailing May 27, 1887, the Rollo, agent J. Krantz, 1,000 kroner, “Montevideo”; Halvor 52, Kirsti 43, Stener 18, Tallef 14, Kari 4¾, Thorsten 3½, and Maren, 45 (the page ↗). The ages for Tollef and Kari are the clerk’s errors against the parish list.
- The Toronto’s passenger list, Library and Archives Canada, Passenger Lists 1865–1935, RG 76-C-1-a, microfilm C-4535: the Liverpool sheet dated June 3, 1887, Belfast June 4, the family on sheet 5 under contract ticket 4975, entries 22–28, and the arrival docket, June 14, “2 Cabin, 148 Steerage” (item 744160 ↗). The indexes misread Kirsti as Kersh and Torsten as Forster; the image is the record.
- The ships: Norway Heritage’s pages for the Rollo ↗ (built 1870 at Hull for Thomas Wilson, Sons & Co.; 498 in steerage as built; 602 emigrants out of Christiania on April 15, 1887) and the Toronto ↗ (built 1880 at Glasgow, 3,315 tons), and its note that Krantz represented the Dominion Line in Christiania from 1880.
- Knud Helle’s crossing: Christiania protocol 12, April 29, 1887 (the page ↗), and the Montreal’s list, Quebec, May 18, 1887, as cited on his page.
- Bergit’s baptism, Veggli ministerialbok II 1, p. 24 (the page ↗): born May 25, 1887, christened June 12, mother Ragnild Tostensdatter of Mogstue, 24, father Knud Ingemundsen Helle, bachelor, living in America. Her mother’s marriage to Ole Gjermundsen, November 17, 1894, is at p. 80 (the page ↗).
- Knut in Minnesota: Neill, History of the Minnesota Valley (1882), entry “K. S. Kjemhus”; Rose, History of Yellow Medicine County (1914); the Norwegian-American Genealogical Center’s record of his Civil War service, no. 794. Read as transcriptions.
- Peder: the family tree, October 5, 1887, at Dawson, Lac qui Parle County, uncited; his stone at Nore Numedahl Cemetery, photographed on Find a Grave ↗, gives the date; the 1900 census gives Minnesota. Hoff has 1885.
- Halvor’s death: Hoff, p. 447, “the following year”; Margit Bergseid, Aarbok for Numedalslaget 8 (1922), pp. 72–73, the same year. Find a Grave was searched in November 2026 for a Halvor Stenerson or Halvorson dying 1887–1889 and had none. Kjersti’s stone at Numedahl (Find a Grave ↗) calls her the wife of Halvor Stenerson.
- The family tree, for the children’s birth dates: Steinar March 13, 1869; Tollef 1871; Kari September 24, 1878; Torstein June 28, 1883.