up the hill, over the city

This is the Gamle Aker Kirke, the church where my great, great grandparents were married. It is a severe building positioned on a hill above central Oslo, with a beautiful cemetery attached. The late spring evening I visited here with my parents it was almost silent. There was no sense of being in a city at all. There were purple flowers in the trees around the church and occasional birdsong. The church was built here in the eleventh century and it is Oslo’s oldest surviving building. It was originally a basilica in the Roman style. Frederick Martinsen (later known as Pedersen) and Anne Lovisa Iversdatter married here on 28 April 1871, only 10 days after Anne Lovisa registered as emigrating from the parish of Aremark and a mere 18 days before leaving Hamburg for Australia on the Lammershagen. She was 6 years older than him. When you assemble the genealogical data on individuals there are always fascinating gaps and mysteries. This is the addictive element of the research. Standing on the top of the Telthusbakken hill on a beautiful, fine and mild evening, I try to imagine them coming to the church to marry. He was a cork cutter and I assume she had been a farm servant girl. But I cannot know how they met, how they decided to marry and emigrate together or how they decided upon Queensland as their destination. What struck me most about the church grounds was how richly green everything was. This whole part of the world seems to have an astounding wealth of water. What a shock it must have been for them. Anne Lovisa had expressed her intention to leave Aremark for Amerika, but instead she would end up in Aramac.