Weyburn Rotary Club member Jill Thorn shared a presentation to the club about a trip she and a relative, Lila Jensen, made to Denmark and Norway, to find out more about her ancestors before they immigrated to Canada in the 1880s.
Her great-grandparents, Jens and Martha Jensen, immigrated first to South Dakota in 1898, and then her grandmother was born in 1903 close to Weyburn.
The three-week trip began in Denmark in Helsinger, the location of Kronberg Castle, which is believed to be the castle which was featured by William Shakespeare in “Hamlet”.
“There were lots of walls and moats around the castle,” said Thorn, noting they next traveled to Copenhagen, where they saw the Round Tower, took a canal boat tour, and saw the famed statue of “The Little Mermaid”.
She noted the Round Tower was built for star-gazing, and after taking the circular stairway up to the top, she was treated to an “incredible view” of the city.
The ladies travelled on to Hillesrod where the Fredericksburg Castle is located, with the primary purpose to find more information about her ancestors. They stopped at the National Archives, which was hard to find, and this visit didn’t yield very much information.
There were also visits to the Danish National Museum, and to the Viking ship museum in Roskilde, where there was an extensive effort made to recover Viking ships and restore or reconstruct them. Thorn also noted that Roskilde Cathedral was where many members of royalty have been buried over the years.
An open-air museum is also located there, featuring house styles of all sorts on display from throughout Denmark. Some investigating through a photographer from Hjorring yielded some family information, plus they made a stop in Mygdal, where Thorn’s great-grandmother is from. They found the church where she had been baptized, and the minister there was able to help provide information from written records.
She noted that headstones didn’t help, because the headstones in that part of the country are removed after about 30 years, and she was able to find the farm that her great-grandmother grew up on.
The family who currently lives on that farm, Little Grontved farm, invited her to visit them, and the minister, who is a member of the local historical society, was able to translate for them.
The trip took Thorn to Skagen, the northernmost point in Denmark, and to Vive, where her great-grandfather was from, finding the church that he had been baptized in.
The two ladies then took a nine-to-10 hour trip by ferry across to Oslo, Norway, and was then able to have an extensive tour of Oslo, including seeing the Royal Palace.
In a trip from Oslo to Bergen, they travelled by train, ferry and bus, “and we saw incredible sights. It was very worth it. On the train, you go through tunnels and up steep inclines, and you see just incredible sights.”
They were able to stay in a Norwegian farmhouse, as the hotels were very expensive, and took a bus to Voss, a trip that included 13 hairpin turns through the mountains.
The sights in Bergen included a market and the old Bergen Museum, which was similar to Weyburn’s Heritage Village, which included people in character and in costume.
Asked if language was a problem, Thorn was able to get by with English, which was helpful as she cannot speak any Danish or Norwegian.
