Amateur genealogist and family historian
Roger L. Anderson has spent decades tracing his Norwegian-American family. His research has filled four books, published between 1989 and 2008, and all four can now be read, searched and explored online.
It started in the corner of a living room. As a child, Roger visited his Grandpa Anderson and Aunty Ida Lee, whose small library held old family Bibles, Psalmbooks and sermon books, most of them in Norwegian. A few had come over on the ship from Norway. “I’ve never forgotten those books,” he wrote in his first book.
His uncle Orville Anderson began researching the Lee family, and his mother, Mavis Anderson, carried on after Orville died in 1980. Roger took it up expecting to assemble what others had already found. “How wrong I was!” he wrote, three years and more than 350 pages later.
A civil engineer by training, with a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Roger learned to read Norwegian, studied the original records and traveled to Norway to see the farms and churches and meet the relatives in these pages.
Published 1989
Roger’s first book follows the ancestors and descendants of Aslak Halvorson Lee and Liv Tarjeisdatter, who left Vinje in Telemark, Norway, for Wisconsin.
Published 1992
The ancestors and descendants of John Anderson Kåsa and Kjersti Andersdatter Jontvedt, from Norway to Wisconsin and beyond. It includes 51 letters and traces the family’s relationship to Queen Sonja of Norway.
Published 1997
From the farms of Fet, Norway, to Dovre Township, Barron County, Wisconsin, with six centuries of ancestors, church records, journals, obituaries and photographs.
Published 2008
Roger’s fourth and largest book, in two volumes, follows the Nymo and Vestli families from Målselv, Norway, to North America, including his great-grandparents Andrew L. Newman and Marit Audensdatter Vestli. It includes 178 letters. Its online archive is titled The Newman family.
Go page by page, with the original page beside clean, searchable text. Names and places link to their records.
Find every person, place, event, story and photograph, each pulled out of the book as its own record.
Follow the family across places and years on modern, aerial and historical maps.
See one household at a time, or an hourglass, a fan of ancestors, an outline of descendants, or lifespans on a timeline.
Read the stories, photos and recordings relatives have added since the book, and the conversations around them.
Anyone can read the books. Family members can ask to join a book’s archive to add their own memories, photos and recorded stories.