Ole's Blog

One of the two sentencing documents (the one in Gothic *printing*) is now fully up, with its translation, at Supreme Court Sentence. Have a look and please comment. The handwritten document is also up – page 1, page 2 – but is not linked to within the site itself. It still needs a lot of work to decipher the script, and then translate. It is tantalizing, because it has a lot of detail not included in the printed version.

There are some big questions nagging at me:

1) Was the criminal justice system so advanced as to allow multiple appeals, all the way to the Supreme Court, for a what surely amounts to a “petty crime,” and was Anne’s legal defense provided by the state? Surely she could not have afforded to pay for it herself.

2) Was Anne free on something like “bail” for almost 11 months during these appeals? Keep in mind that Ole must have been conceived about 1-2 months before the final sentence on April 23, 1841.

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.