Olsdatter from Ytrehorn

After I had spent hours entering data into an online genealogy data base my coworker asked me if I had found an ancestor of any notable achievement. My answer was that the only notable achievement in the family tree was surviving the Black Death, or the Plague. This disease reportedly came on a trade ship from England to Bergen, Norway in the summer of 1349. These drawings by Theodor Kittelsen are a good representation of the mood of that era. About half the population of Norway died during the reign of the Black Death. The records which my uncle has researched for our family only go to the 1600's; the Black Death was really old news by then, unless it really did reoccur in 1565-1567.

Those who survived the Plague were the ones who managed to avoid contact with fleas, rats and other people. They must have fled to remote mountain cabins and stayed there until the disease had extinguished itself for lack of hosts. In my casual perusal of my uncle's research I get the impression that I'm descended from a long line of "the youngest kid who didn't get the farm and had to move on", or individuals like the unknown Olsdatter.

In our tree there is a woman known as Olsdatter, born in Ytrehorn in1702; a little farm under the mountains on the edge of Hornindalsvatnet, the deepest lake in Europe. Olsdatter was not her name, it means simply “daughter of Ole”. But it was when I entered this unnamed woman into my family tree I got “smart matches” with other family trees on the web. At the age of 17 she married Knut Rasmussen. Knut was from Kringlen, the site of an illfated Scottish 1612 invasion led by Colonel Sinclair. His army of over 900 men was defeated by some 500 villagers. One hundred years later Knut the son of Rasmus grew up; perhaps there was not room for him on the family farm so he traveled looking for work and met the daughter of Ole in Ytrehorn, a distance of about 250 km away from his home in Kringlen.

The story of this unnamed woman is known. I think about her and wonder what her days were like, she likely cleaned and fried lots of fish, made flatbread, didn't plant potatoes, they didn't exist in Europe until early 1800; maybe she kept sheep? Knitted sweaters...she didn't have internet, but likely had a network of spools and threads and yarn; did she have a loom? We don't have any tokens to show show that the daughter of Ole ever did anything remarkable besides survive, but survival in itself is remarkable. She may never have had an umbrella; they were just starting to use them in Paris about then. There may have been a pair of scissors on the place, Scissors were manufactured in Sweden in the mid 1600's in a place called Fiskars. I also wonder how she kept cheerful in a sometimes rainy, gloomy valley. Did she brighten the gloom weaving bright rugs from worn out clothes in her loom? Why is her name unknown? Did she marry one of those men who begin to call their bride "mama" after the first child was born?

But regardless of what she did and regardless of what she didn't have, she is one who made our family tree come to life and connect with other trees in cyberspace as the unknown daughter of Ole of Ytrehorn d.o.b. 1702 who married Knut Rasmussen of Kringlen d.o.b.1695 and bore Rasmus Knutsen of Ytrehorn d.o.b.1719.