What's known to me about the family, I heard from my Father, relatives here and on my trips in Norway. My father came from the state of Osterdalen, some 200 miles north and east from Oslo, close to the Swedish border. A chain of low mountains separate the two countries, and snow can be seen on the highest parts, from my father's home front door as late as into July. The community or town's name is called Ljfordalen, that is also the name of a long narrow valley. A river, Lora, also runs through this valley, and close to the Fossen farm. It has its start north in Sweden, and runs back into Sweden, in the south. In fact, the Fossen place got its name from the sound of the water as it fails over the rocks. The word waterfalls in English, is the same as Fossen in Norwegian, and so the Fossen farm got its name from a river, by a fellow whom was known as "Fiddler Per". He started the place in the early 1700's and he was a well known shiftless musician at the country dances, weddings, and parties. He was also the first one in the community to learn to play the violin by notes. My father's father (my grandfather) whose name was Bakken, moved onto the Fossen place in the 1860's and took the name of Fossen, that was the thing to do in the early years. All farms in Norway had a set name as did other European countries. My father had five brothers who changed their names from Fossen to the name of the place they moved to, but my father never did farm in Norway; so he came to North Dakota with the name Fossen. 0sterdalen, like much of Norway, is a place of trees, brush, rocks, and hills, and the land not too good for farming. I have often wandered how they settled there, but as far as the winter weather goes, it is not as cold as North Dakota, even though it is farther north. The summer months are never dark because the sun never sets in June and July in far north Norway. In the city of Hamerfest, which is the northern most city in Norway, and the world, the sun at midnight hangs low in the far North and West like a big red ball. It never disappears. If you don't have a watch, you won't know if it is Sunday night or Monday morning. A rather strange sight, but then in the months of December and January at Hamerfest it is dark day and night. At that time the sun is far south over the South Pole. They have the midnight sun but even at that they said in Hamerfest the winter nights never gets coal black because of the thousands of bright stars and the lights of the powerful Northern lights, like we also sometimes see in North Dakota, but here in California I have never seen the Northern lights, or the bright stars, but then it is none difference in the seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumm, and Winter. My father left home early in life. At that time, times were hard in Norway, and more so in Ljordalen. He went to the big city of Oslo. Later to the city of Hamar, there he got a job in a wagon factory and there met my mother and was married in 1900. She was from the town of Lena, in the state of Toten, which is across Norway's largest lake. Mjosa a beauty spot and good farming land. Before the 1870's people started to leave Norway by the thousands, for the promised land of the United States of America. In July 1903, father decided to leave Norway, times still were not good in Norway. About that time they were also ready for war with Sweden. My father had a aunt Siri, a sister to his mother. She and her husband, Jon Nordhagen, and a few kids, had come to a town close to Thief River Falls, Minnesota in about 1885, so he (my father) came to them in Minnesota, but he had left mother with two girls in Norway. His first job that winter 1903 and spring 1904 was on a farm. He made the fare for mother and the girls in June 1904. Also, that fall 1904 he made his first trip to Edmore, North Dakota to work (shock and thresh grain on a farm two miles east of Edmore). That farm and one seven miles east in Walsh County, where Sigvart Byberg lived, was owned by Oen and Granum, large store keepers in Thief River Falls. The spring of 1905 my dad took over as manager and later rented the Edmore farm. That March, Mr. Granum, my dad, and a hired man Left Thief River Falls with ten horses, three wagons loaded with machinery, household goods, for the Edmore farm. A trip of 125 miles, it took them about four days and they walked most of the way. Later my mother came and I was born on that place, September 1905, the promised land of North Dakota. Since that time, the country seems to have gone haywire. Farms are vanishing, so are small towns. It's a rather sad, lonely ordeal to drive for miles and not see a farm, as I saw them from the time I remember until the time I left for health reasons to California in 1925. At that time it was at least 50 live farms in Newland township. Now in the fall of 1977 it looked like a dozen. When I started to school in the fall of 1911, the two-room Newland School had about 70 pupils. Now it has been closed for years. My home community (like us humans who come into this world with nothing) is slowly going out with nothing. I asked my relatives how come they settled in rugged 0sterdalen, they did not know ... anyway my family history is recorded from the early 1700's, as I have copied it, so read on.