Have you tried to search the Norwegian Historical Data Center to find family from the past? It is easier to search here than on other websites, you do not have to use wildcards. You can write only the first letters of a name or a location. It is a work-around for misspellings or variations like Henrik (Henrich, Hendrik, Henry and so on.)

The website contains a few censuses, and some parish records, not anything in size like the Digital Archives, but easy to use for those who are not as experienced in searching.

The English language page is here. 

Scroll down the page to find the search menu. This is comprised of three parts:

1. Easy search in the censuses
2. Advanced search in the censuses
3. Search in parish registers

When we click on: Easy search in the censuses: we see 4 search fields and 4 censuses to choose from. Farther down we can select the province or county we require, or several, and if we want to be more specific, we can tick the box for limiting our search to one or several parishes or municipalities within the chosen county.

Census records can often help us construct a skeleton family tree, which can later be confirmed and expanded by using parish records and other sources of vital information.

Unlike the Digital Archives’ search fields, we can use different technique to solve the problem of different spellings of names. In the Easy search we can enter only the first few letters of a name, and the results will include all names which began with those letters.

To show you how to search, we will use the example of Anna Rahn who is from from Minnesota, and came from Norway to the U.S. in 1906. Her maiden name was Anne (Ane) Henriksdatter. We’d like to find her before she emigrated from Norway, so we select the 1900 census by ticking the appropriate box.

We enter ANN and HENRI, in order to include spellings such as Henriksen, Henrichsdatter and so on. We know she came from Oppdal, so we select Sør-Trøndelag county, and tick the box: Limit your search criteria to one or more parishes. We select Oppdal from the list which is in alphabetical order.

We then press the search button, and find two young women with the same name on different farms. We have already discovered from US sources that Anna was born in 1890, so we select the bottom option. This shows a family, probably three generations judging by the years of birth, living on a farm or smallholding called Detlirønning. We know Anna’s brother Ole used the surname Detle in the US, so this – and the fact that Anne is living with Maret Taraldsdatter and Ragna Halvorsdatter – lead us to believe that we have found the correct person. Anna immigrated to the US with a Marit Taraldsen and a Ragna Olsen.

While we are on this page, we would like to show you a useful function, which may help your farther research.

Note that there are twist icons to the left of the first two names (picture above). Let’s click on one and see what happens: We click on the icon beside Thore Taraldsen’s name. This page only comes up in Norwegian but shows a timeline: matches for Thore in both the 1900 and 1910 censuses. We click on 1910, and see Thore is still unmarried, he’s living with his mother who is a widow, and a lodger, and we see their full dates of birth. Anne, Marit and Ragna are gone, confirming our belief that they are in the U.S. by this time. These links to other censuses are generated automatically, so are not guaranteed to be correct, though they usually are.

Have a look at the YouTube Video 1 The Norwegian Historical Datacenter or Video 2 Norwegian Historical Data Center – Advanced search, where we show the site. Or read our book Exploring Norwegian Genealogy.