The Stavdals

For years I've had a fascination for ancestral quests, asking questions about my forefathers. However, a pretty large chunk of the knowledge I used to have of my ancestry, was based on oral accounts by my immediate family. But when my sister started delving into digitalized Church records a few years ago, many pieces of the puzzle started falling into place. Myth-like stories that have been passed down turned out to be partly true, and in other instances, the stories of several generations had been both mixed and compressed. The picture to the left is of Joel and Hanna Emilie in 1883. They are my great great grandparents of the "Stake" family.

An exciting trip into the past
Fortunately, our ancestors were into pictures and we're looking forward to spending hours digitalizing old pictures so we may attatch facts and stories to actual faces. Winnie has spent numerous hours peering at faded documents and close to unreadable handwriting. In her research she has had to deploy the stamina, endurance and oftentimes an acute sense of scrutiny and attention to detail. Every person further back than four generations is difficult to find, particularly when no-one alive today possesses written documentation of their exact name, date of birth and so on. There is still plenty of work to be done, but gradually, with the help of aunt Wenche's knowledge of the Stake and Olsen families and and uncle Tor's previous work on the Ulsteds only recently made available to us, more information will be unveiled weekly.

Following the Stake ancestorial trail, has already at this stage in our research taken us to Sweden, Finland and Russia. We're expecting to find a trail from South Norway to Denmark and further to Germany in the material provided by the work of my uncle Tor. We'll keep you posted!

Myth or the truth?

During the course of our quest for ancestors and piecing together fragments of their story, a few family myths actually turned out to be true, others slightly twisted. There has always been a somewhat silent claim of a lineage of Russian blue blood, but where? Reportedly, my great grandfather said he traced the Stake family all the way back to France and Napoleon! Whether this claim holds water is yet to be proven. Since I'm sure others in my family might be just as curious about our common ancestors, I've created a sub-domain with the url http://ancestors.stav-dal.net/ to share our discoveries. The site will continually be updated as history unveils itself.

Good software makes the job easier

Sharing heaps of paper and pictures is difficult, not to mention creating a good and easily accessable overview of all the information involved. A good software package saves hours and even makes web-publishing possible. We chose Roots Magic which has a variety of easy to use features you learn after just a few hours. Click here to see a list of features in this software package.

Do you have information that might help us?

If you have read this and feel you've got valuable information, please post a comment here on our blog. Even in case of a wrong date or missing info of some kind, perhaps a good story that would somehow tell something valuable about a particular person, we're interested in including it in our database. Anyways, we make sure to use discretion when publishing info on the web.

Here I've posted the link between me and the couple in the picture above. This is only one of numerous report and chart options available.