Gamle Landet (Old Country), 2008
Untold generations of my family were farmers in Norway before the 1870s, when six of my great-great grandparents emigrated and settled in North Dakota. They were unmarried women, husmann (tenant farmers), or younger sons who would not inherit any land. When they immigrated to the United States, they left their homes, their extended families, and everything they knew. They would never return.

As I combed through our family archive, I became increasingly curious about the farms they had left behind and what might remain. Building off the genealogy research conducted by my grandparents, I traveled to Norway and found that most of the the farms still exist, having been cared for by other families. Only two farms were entirely gone, having been absorbed into larger pastures. The few physical traces of my ancestors that survived include a scattering of graves, a letter of recommendation, and a signature on a barn wall.

These Norwegian farms are a nexus between people and through time, linking my ancestors to the families now living there. To explore this relationship to place, I present documents and portraits from our family archive alongside my contemporary images of the farms and their current owners in diptychs and triptychs. By exploring these origins, I discovered that the beginning is also an epilogue: as others have sustained the farms vacated by my ancestors, perhaps the Christianson farm in North Dakota will continue in this way when that time comes.

Gamle Landet (Old Country) is the first section of Homeplace (Daylight Books, 2013). Order a signed copy from the shop.