Memoar and Norwegian-American Heritage

2025 marks the 200-year anniversary of the first organized Norwegian emigration to North-America. The Crossings 200 jubilee includes events and exhibitions taking place both in Norway and North-America. 

Project goals

• The collaboration with Bryggens Museum started 01.07.2025. Our goal for this is to collect as many interviews as possible from visitors of the museum. The interviews content will primarily be about the history of migration to - and from Norway. 

• Below you will find our main interviews, short interviews and snippets from the project.  

• Feel free to contact us at: - migrasjonsminne@memoar.no 

Main interviews

The Summer Project for 2025 has concluded after several months of labor, and summer has come and gone. During this period, our skilled contributors have managed to gather dozens of interviews with tourists visiting Bergen – all with a familial connection to Norway. In collaboration with Bryggen Museum, Memoar initiated a project to collect narratives about migration to and from Norway. Throughout the summer of 2025, a multitude of interviews were gathered – short and long, in Norwegian and English, with both elderly descendants of migrants and with younger representatives of their families.

Common to the material is an underlying motif: identity is rarely conveyed in unbroken lines, but rather in fragmented memories, traditions and symbolic markers. In this series of interviews, a great diversity of voices emerged, each with their own story, yet all sharing a common undercurrent: the struggle to both understand, preserve and recreate the family's original identity across generations.

This text poses some questions: what really is Norwegian-American identity? To what degree is it related to living Norwegian culture as it appears in the present? Furthermore, what about the many and disparate immigrant/diaspora cultures of Norway? Are these true representations of the cultures of their ancestral fatherlands – as some descendants of Norwegian emigrants to America claim about themselves vis-à-vis Norway – or are they all something thoroughly unique?

In this collection, the majority of the interviews were conducted by Norwegian youths with immigrant backgrounds themselves. The questions they ask, the details they latch onto, the silences they recognize – all of it is filtered through a lived understanding of what it means to navigate between different cultures, multiple languages and multiple sets of expectations.

For Joel, the encounter with his new country was twofold: the cold, the long, dark tunnels under the mountains, the unfamiliar people… but there was also safety to be found, along with opportunities and "new music". He reflects, however, on the belief that he will never be fully seen as Norwegian; that he will always stand in a sort of dual position as an outsider:

While today's immigrants find new communities in the here and now, many Norwegian-Americans first rediscover their roots much later in life. When genealogy research and results from DNA tests were discovered, or after visits in historical archives, the memories were revitalized… the family-names somehow gained geographical coordinates – the old photographs acquired living landscapes and histories around them.

Another common feature among both emigrants and immigrants is the central role that old traditions assume. Many narrators of both affiliations express that the language has been lost – in some families already by the second generation – but that the traditions themselves have functioned as a kind of replacement language. For most Norwegian-Americans, it is not grammar and syntax that perpetuate Norwegianness, but taste, smell (often of nauseating lutfisk), dance and song, typically around the Christmas tree.

Food is very often central to the family identity. The distinct Norwegian dishes are mentioned with pride. Holiday celebrations – especially Christmas and the 17th of May – stand as particularly important anchors to Norwegian culture for many of the Summer Project’s participants. Even when scarcely anyone in the family could express themselves (linguistically) in Norwegian, the national day is celebrated with flags, parades and with shared dinners.

The loss of the ancestral language is a recurring experience. Several narrators describe this with sorrow or resignation: Norwegian became a language that only their grandparents knew. For some families, it seems to have been a conscious choice: English was the language of America – of integration and opportunities –, while Norwegian made them stand out as different.

When the language disappears, the longing for cultural roots can instead manifest as a yearning for the ancestral homelands … a desire to seek out the old landscapes, the farms and the municipalities where their ancestors once dwelled. Memoar's interviewers also noticed this pattern, and often recognized themselves in the impulses of the Norwegian-American tourists:

The absence of such seems to have acquired a kind of positive function. The feeling that “something’s missing” drove the emigrants' descendants to seek out Norway – to search for relatives, to participate in the culture. In some cases, through contact with the organization known as Sons of Norway, Norwegian courses were offered in local chapters. Many of the summer project's narrators mention this organization in their accounts, for example Marilyn Molinari:

Today, Marilyn's connection to Norway remains through the beforementioned Sons of Norway. It started in the 1800s, when farmers in Minnesota realized they were alone in a new country. They banded together and created a community for socializing and mutual support. Still active today, it is open to anyone with an interest in Norway – regardless of whether they have relatives there.

Common to all narrators is the need for a structured community – a space where Norwegian identity can take concrete form. It is worth noting that not all the narratives emphasized such institutions. For many, the extended family in Norway became the most important arena. Trips, visits to long-lost relatives and (dearly bought) souvenirs became the main elements in the relationship with Norway – with their old family identities.

When today's immigrants interview descendants of past emigrants, a shared experience emerges: the dual national identity. For Negusse, this is about being both Eritrean and Norwegian… and at the same time neither of them: