I have written several times about my “step-great-grandmother,” Helene Olsdatter. You can find those posts using this link. Some of their assertions are outdated, and I am working on a “page” to update and consolidate them. This weekend, stimulated by conversations with cousin Sheila Geier, I did some work on a new…
My mother, Reatha May Myers, was born 23 May 1914, in the living quarters behind her father’s general store in Thunder Hawk, South Dakota. A month later, on 28 June, my father, Lovell Darvin Larson, was born in hospital at Sidney, Montana. Click here to view their place in the…
Marte Østensdatter Forbrigd, as she is known in most genealogies, or Marte Bø, as I have called her, is at the center of a most bizarre and perplexing “murder mystery,” set in the Gudbrandsdal region of central Norway in the 1690s. The basic facts of the story are well-documented. She…
Welcome to the “original” telling (the first in English, as far as I know) of the Marte Østensdatter story. It was researched, compiled, and first presented in 2011, updated 2014, by Joanne Lillevold, all rights reserved. A thousand thanks to cousin Joanne for her permission to steal big chunks of…
Introduction First and foremost, a thousand thanks to cousin Joanne Lillevold, who originally researched this story, translated the source documents (drawing on her one year of college Norwegian, and struggling with several difficult, unstudied dialects), and presented it as a slide talk to her local genealogy society. While I am…
Marte Bø, Chapter 12 To read Marte’s story from the beginning, click here. Why bring this up? None of our three twentieth-century sources even hint that seventeenth-century witch hysteria had any bearing on the deaths at Huskelien, much less those at Gallows Hill. There was apparently no mention of it in any of…