Ole's Blog

Here is a link to the High Court document I was asking about in the DISchat yesterday. Warning: It’s a large file (<800KB) for best resolution. It is the first of two pages. Here is the second page. Please don’t laugh at the fragments of error-ridden transcription I have been picking at on my own. Thanks in advance to anyone who would like to comment on it.

The day before Thanksgiving, I received two documents from the National Archive of Norway. They are the act of the Supreme Court, 23 April 1841, sentencing Anne Larsdatter to 8 months in Oslo prison, where Ole Larson would be born on 10 December of that year. My friend Berit Carlsen has translated one of them for me; the other is hand-written and will take longer to transcribe and translate. In a nutshell, she was convicted of stealing food (no surprise) in March, 1840 (over a year before this sentence), first by the local authority in Christians Amt (now known as Oppland Fylke [county]). The conviction was upheld on appeal by a diocesan “higher court,” then finally in this act by the Supreme Court. I will try to get the lower court documents, but it will not be as easy. They are housed in “regional state archives,” which are not as well-staffed as the National Archive. It may be necessary for someone to visit these archives in person to copy the documents.