gone for a while

I wandered away there for a while. Other things got in the way, and I am often crippled by some terrible perfectionism. But mostly, I have been distracted by the thrill of the chase. If you have any Norwegian heritage, this is a likely distraction. Norway has made digital scans of their marvellous church books available online for free. The catch is that a vast majority of this information is not indexed. If you are looking for a particular birth, death, marriage, confirmation, vaccination etc, etc, you must simply scroll through page after page of scans. This can easily swallow days if you let it, but it is absolutely enchanting.
I have followed most branches of my Norwegian ancestors comfortably back into the 18th century using the digital parish books at Digitalarkivet.
What you see here, for instance, are the pages containing the birth record of Inger Danielsdatter, my great, great, great, great grandmother, born in Asker, Norway in 1777. Which is a nice number.
It is addictive.

Image ref: Source information: Akershus county, Asker, Parish register (official) nr. I 3 (1767-1807), Birth and baptism records 1777, page 54.
Permanent pagelink: http://www.arkivverket.no/URN:kb_read?idx_kildeid=7730&idx_id=7730&uid=ny&idx_side=-54

imagine if

There is a lovely passage in Lyng's book on Scandinavian migration to Australia describing the country around Pialba where my Caroline Jensen (later Riemer) lived. It was sent to Lyng by a contributor to his research in 1901:
"I was one of the Danes who in 1875 selected land in the Pialba district. We were upwards of forty Scandinavian families, and more arrived later. Most of these early settlers are still there. The dense forest has disappeared, and the district presents a beautiful landscape covered with luxuriant fields of maize, sugar plantations, and vineyards... In the Mary valley are many Scandinavian farmers, of whom several are orchardists and wine growers on a large scale." (in Lyng 1939: 129)
My Mother remembers Pialba as pretty even in the 1950s. The greater area of Hervey Bay is mostly suburban now. I like to imagine my Jens Peter Jensen as one of these early settlers of the Mary valley area, although I don't have much evidence of that at this stage. I believe he made a business of timber, like so many other Scandinavians. I'm prone to think of them all as quite serious and laconic but a Danish resident of Bundaberg maintained that "with all their toil and self denial, the Scandinavian immigrants were a cheerful lot, and often met to make merry."(in Lyng: 131) Imagine if my Jens Peter was amongst the Christmas revellers, celebrating for three days with sports, games, feasting and dancing? That would change my view of him, wouldn't it?

Reference: Lyng, J. S. (1939). The Scandinavians in Australia, New Zealand and the western Pacific. Melbourne: Melbourne university press in association with Oxford university press, London [etc.].

collaboration

I have developed a habit of collaboration over the past two decades. With friends and colleagues, family, and sometimes even complete strangers. The illusion that we create anything on our own has always infuriated me. There are invisible hands at work in everything that is made, written or built, but we are happiest if we can attribute these to a single author. Working with my father on the Finial/Filial work has been immensely rewarding. We experiment with tangles, branches and limbs. I am getting my own studio space for the first time in years and I am nervous and excited. Like so many artists I have used kitchen tables, spare rooms and other people's workshops to devise and make work. I took advantage of the empty studios at work to photograph an experimental set up for S2Q Finial/Filial. The thought of being able to keep it assembled and play with it for an extended period of time is intoxicating.
My partner, my son and I went to David Nixon's opening at Woolloongabba Gallery last Friday evening. David's printmaking is beautiful but I was particularly taken by his gentle constructions and his video work. There is a warmth and affection in what he does that I really enjoy. I have known David for over 20 years and this is a perfect reflection of his personality.

more lives than a cat...

I have so many different roles in my life and have done so many different things over the past twenty years, it is hard to remember sometimes how I ended up stumbling onto this combination of art and genealogy. Art is supposed to be about mystique - genealogy about the raw revelation of fact. The battle between these two imperatives is a summation of my own conflicting desires. It is the beginning of another academic year and I have more responsibilities for student affairs than before. To stop feeling like a fraud, who calls herself a maker but makes so little, I cling to the scraps of process that might one day contribute to my work as an artist. For instance, I find myself making a mental note of every student with a Scandinavian sounding family name. As I sweep my polished wooden floor at home I study the grain of the wood and compare it with the architecture I have seen. As I hang out clothes, I am reminded of washing fabric in the Öresund, surrounded by dogs on the beach in Malmö.
The Australian series of Who Do You Think You Are? has put me in contact with an unknown relative and I will endeavour to explain to her how the art and actuality fit together.

scrapbooking

I have been collecting snippets of detail from the photographs I am scanning: wooden fences, pieces of furniture, home carpentry, musical instruments, ship building. I am slowly putting these together as a potential mural device. This is a rough draft.

on photographic restoration

I have become a digital archivist of family images. My own fear of losing touch with the visual evidence of my history has compelled me to scan and store photographs from family collections. When you reproduce an image digitally there are a wide range of alterations you can make. In an instant, specks of dust from the surface of the photograph can be removed. This initial ‘correction’ opens up a vast range of possible actions. Damage, age spots and discolorations, cracks in the emulsion and foxing of the paper: what do you do with these?

I saw an advertisement recently for a photographic restoration service. The restorer warned that their clients sometimes wept when they saw the mended family photo. I do not doubt that customers sometimes get emotional when confronted by a family restoration. I am almost certain that a perfect restoration of the past is exactly what many people would love to see. In actual fact a digital restoration is capable of an improvement on the original print. Clumsy hand tinting can be smoothed over, a badly exposed image made rich and velvety. What is actually being restored here therefore is not entirely clear. Hubert Damisch’s observation on photography’s initial project seems appropriate: “the capturing and restoration of an image already worn beyond repair”. The image of children playing with their Christmas presents is certainly a time-worn one. I am tempted to restore some happy perfection to the physical image, but I am reminded that the taking of the photograph in the first place was an attempt at restoration. Children posed with party hats and presents, shirts partly tucked in as per instruction, toys not yet broken, dress not yet dirty: an image intended to convey familial perfection.

So I am leaving most of the surface damage. It is not my job to correct the passing of time. Here are the Pedersen children on a Christmas morning sometime in the late 1940s. My father’s hands place the tin train on its circular tracks with curious solemnity.

Reference: Damisch, H. (1978) “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image”, October, Vol. 5, Summer, pp70-72

a respected identity

When I detailed my Danish Great, Great Grandfather's obituary in an earlier post, I told you that he was referred to as an 'old and respected identity'. It took me a long time to trace Jens Peter Jensen's history before he arrived in Australia (and there are still gaping holes) but I do know that his Mother was probably not a respected identity.

I am fascinated by the story of Jens Peter's Mother, Jensine Christiane Jensdatter. Jens Peter listed her as 'Christiane' on his records in Australia, so perhaps that is how she was known. She had at least 5 children and, from what I can glean, all by different fathers. As I traced her story through the Danish church records, it felt as though I was witnessing some 19th Century soap opera. I know that being a single mother could not have been easy, so I was thrilled when I discovered her marriage to Jeppe Holm Jonasen in 1848, saddened when both her daughter and Jeppe's daughter from his previous marriage died in 1852, and devastated when her and Jeppe's son died two years later. Jeppe died not long after, and I have lost track of Jensine Christiane from that point on. Unlike other branches of my family where illegitimate births do not have father's names attached, the Danish records have the 'alleged' father recorded. This is a remarkable thing and marvelously useful.

An understanding of Jen Peter's family history goes some way toward explaining why he chose to come to Queensland. Of his 8 children, 6 were daughters. Here 5 of those women are pictured on the beach. The second from the right is my Great Grandmother Caroline, or Grandma Riemer, as she was known in my family.

Image reference: Jensen sisters Edna, Camilla, Helen, Carrie and Elsie, enjoying a day at the beach. Image no. 46859r. Qld Library Collection