Having lost my father when I was young and growing up thousands of miles away from his birthplace of Norway, I knew nothing of them. I had knowledge of both Scandinavian grandparents. I knew my Swedish grandfather, but he passed away before I even had the chance to ask anything about the rest of the family. I apparently didn’t care yet.

Although I had met a handful of my father’s family who had immigrated to the US, we had never discussed our ancestors, or any of the family left behind in the proverbial “old country”. Let’s not forget the photo album my father left behind. Lot’s of great pictures… Not a single caption. So, I never knew who any of those people were other than my father and grandparents. I have a fairly decent tree through 4th great-grandparents on multiple branches, so the names were there.

And then one day I was minding my own… Fine, I was snooping on my ancestors, and stumbled upon what supposedly were photographs of my Norwegian Great-Grandmother on Family Search. Just like that there was her name. I had just really researched her whole immediate family through her grand-parents, so I was pretty clear on the names involved. And it was her. Before, she was simply a name, I recently learned, and guess what… There were photos of her in my father’s uncaptioned photo album all along. Well, played Dad. Well played.

And speaking of my Dad, the same person who posted the photo of my great grandmother also posted pictures of my grandparents and my dad when he was around nine or so. They were photos I had never seen before obviously because they were taken a century ago. So no digital cameras and no two prints for the price of one special from your corner drug store. One to keep. One to share.

I am now in contact with the person who posted the photos. It turns out he is my second cousin through my Norwegian grandmother’s oldest sister. Thankfully he reads and writes English. He is one of the closest DNA relatives I have on Dad’s side since he was an only child. But how cool is it that our grandmothers were sisters and our fathers played together as children?

So, I gained all of this knowledge of a branch of my family tree which had always been a closed door for most of my life. But it was unlocked without a paid genealogy subscription or a DNA test this time. It happened because two people were trying to put the pieces together and ran into each other.