In our book Exploring Norwegian Genealogy one of the two main characters is Ingvald Johan Hansen Bratli who emigrated to New Zealand. He was son of Ingvald Johan Hansen, who is my 3 times great grandfather. His father died in 1888. Father and son owned properties together which were financed by taking out mortgages. Previously I have written about the son and his working life here. But new information emerges all the time, this time that Ingvald went AWOL from his duty as an officer. It is shown in the clipping on the right.

I went to Statsarkivet in Bergen in January 2026 to see the records in the file on his court martial. The main archive of Norway and of national records are Nasjonalarkivet (former name Riksarkivet). The regional archives (Statsarkivene) are in Bergen, Hamar, Kongsberg, Kristiansand, Oslo, Stavanger, Tromsø and Trondheim. The Sami archives are situated in Kautokeino and the Health Archives in Tynset.

I have been working on this part of my genealogy for 20 years, but I had a breakthrough around 2012, when I found out that Ingvald had emigrated to New Zealand. In 2022 I started to look at him disappearing from his duties as officer, after I found the clipping.

The archive staff will perform lookups in files and send you copies of the main aspects of a record set. If you want more, you will have to go in person, to make the required copies. And now I had both the desire and opportunity to go, even though Bergen is a flight of about an hour away.

The file consisted of about eighty documents. I read through some to find the most important information. I am, at a later time, going to use AI to transcribe them all, but now I can hopefully give some highlights. My theory of why Ingvald went to New Zealand was that when probate was held after his father’s death the estate was insolvent. So I thought Ingvald junior left Norway to get away from it all. He probably had no means or rather, he owed money.

Now I wanted to find out what information these records held. The result is: Ingvald had asked for leave to go to Great Britain and its colonies before he left in late 1890. His requests for leave of absence were repeated until 1893. So in 1894 he was wanted, thought to have deserted.

His brother-in-law, Christian Solberg, had also served as an officer and I believe he and Ingvald were friends. Solberg was asked, by the military authorities, to tell if he knew where Ingvald was. He told them the facts he had and he gave them an address. But it does not seem like the authorities managed to get in touch with him or that Ingvald answered the letters he got. In December of 1894, Ingvald married Margaret Mills (in NZ).

The papers show the supreme court trial or the court martial. I cannot, at present, be sure if it is the one or the other. There had previously been a regional trial in Bergen. How the military authorities acted in the case of a deserter, I do not know. And who decided that it had to go to a higher court is also not obvious.

The verdict was that Ingvald lost his status as an officer and was sentenced to pay 500 kroner for the military education he had received. Strangely enough, the verdict was read to his former landlady as this was the last place they knew he had been before leaving for New Zealand.

A lot more could have been said, as there are so many questions. I had a working title for this post: When is the job done? First of all, I have not done a complete job of analyzing the probate records for Ingvald’s father. I usually say that when I am going to do my doctoral thesis, this will be my subject. The Court Martial is also special, one has to learn about military history and even more documents will have to be found. One problem is that they are in different Statsarkiv (regional archives) and this therefore requires travel. He was probably conscripted in Oslo, but why did he serve in the Bergenhusiske (Bergen) infantry? And why in Nordfjordeid? Back then it took a lot of time to travel from Kristiania to Nordfjordeid. What was his service like?

Stay tuned, and I will in the coming months answer some of these questions on the blog.