This is a story about my great-great-grandmother Maria, my great-grandfather Bernt Elias, and my maternal grandmother Magda. Mostly, it is about not knowing one’s family history, and about starting to untangle a few threads in it.
This is how it should be read, I guess: as a first attempt to find out more about a recent past in which poverty and humble conditions, and therefore also my spinning wheel, shaped everyday existence. So this is more than a scholarly article; it is a story about my family – and the time and place they lived in.
This is my old spinning wheel. When our old aunt Signe’s inheritance was passed on, I was lucky to get the spinning wheel. I think this happened for two reasons. I was born in 1968, and the year engraved on the spinning wheel is 1868, the year of my great-great-grandmother’s Confirmation. Also, when they gave me the spinning wheel I was studying textile design at the Arts and Crafts teacher college at Notodden, so I think my family felt I should have it. We though the wheel should actually be used, so my father got a serviceman to put it back in order. It has been with me ever since, though I have somewhat neglected it; I have never learnt to spin proper yarns on it, and I left it idle in my parents’ house when I was a student. But I brought it with me to my new job at Sjølingstad Woolware Factory, and it has been there ever since. I have used the spinning wheel to explain to kindergarten and school children how wool is turned into thread and yarn. It can tell many stories: about our transition from a farming society to an industrial one, and about life lived in humble conditions in our recent history.
Spinning wheels were used for spinning yarn, either to be woven into fabrics or twined into thicker yarn for knitting. The first spinning wheels arrived in Norway at the end of the sixteenth century, but did not become common property until the eighteenth. At first, the villagers had to go to town to purchase on, but village craftsmen soon learned to make their own.[1]
I remember Aunt Signe very well as the lively old lady of more than eighty years who drove her own car to family gatherings, always pleasant and cheerful. She was my grandmother’s youngest aunt, and the sister of my great-grandfather Bernt Elias, who died long before I was born. I was close to grandma, and she told me bits and pieces about her family and upbringing, but I have never really known her family history all that well. But the spinning wheel has always been with me, and it has made both myself and my children fascinated by the story of my grandmother’s family. Little by little, I have discovered more about them, and how things were when they lived. That was not so long ago, but it is a completely different reality to that in which my children are growing up.
The spinning wheel most likely belonged to my great-great-grandmother Maria from Vigmostad. It helps us tell stories of poverty and scarcity, making do with what little could be produced on a tiny farm. It tells us about Marias eleven children who carded wool and spun yarn on it, and had to knit their own underwear; of children who would leave home in order to ease their parents’ burden to provide for them, seeking their fortune in America when they were older; and of elderly care in the old days, when poor older people had to go on legd, staying in private households. It also helps us tell the story of how Maria’s son Bernt Elias could only provide secondary education for the oldest of his three children, his son. His two girls were not allowed to continue after primary school, because the family could not afford it.
Grandmother
I would like to begin with the story of my maternal grandmother. She was born on January 30 in 1916, a hundred years ago now, and was baptized Magda Alfrida Ougland. She had an older brother, Johan, born in 1912, and a younger sister, Anna, born in 1920. Her parents were Judith Neeme Søder, from Sweden, and Bernt Elias Ougland from Vigmostad. Grandma grew up at Viblemo, where her father worked as a road overseer. He dearly wished, she told me, to have a farm of his own. So they eventually moved into a farm at Leland, Vigmostad, in 1929. Having attended school at Viblemo in previous years, my grandmother now moved to the school at Leland that she attended for a year.
She wanted to continue at school, but the family could not afford it. Johan was the only sibling who would get an education. Of course, to ‘get an education’ did not mean then what it does today: it would just imply that you had education after primary school. Folkeskolen provided seven years of elementary education, and the revised countryside elementary school act established that pupils should attend a minimum of 14 weeks of instruction at the central school premises. Johan took up an apprenticeship in furniture carpentry. He left for the United States in 1952, and would remain there for the rest of his life.
After her confirmation, grandma worked as a housemaid in Lyngdal for a year, like many young girls at the time. We retain one of her journals from this period, where she has written down recipes, songs, notes and her accounts.
My grandmother’s accounts are interesting, as they testify to both frugality and diligence. They tell us what she spent her money on when she was 15 and 16, staying away from home for the first time. The fact that she has registered several expenses on envelopes, stamps and packages, suggests that she was often in contact with her family back home. The accounts also show her spending 1,50 on a car trip. This amount appears to have been reimbursed by her parents, as it has been entered back into the accounts. She bought yarns, buttons, stockings, underwear and shoelaces, but the account also reveals that she made and mended her own clothes. She nevertheless spent money on a haircut, and had her long braids at the confirmation removed. She also paid 5 kroner to a seamstress. Her monthly salary was 20 kroner, but her brother Johan also gave, or loaned, her 30 kroner. That amount was spent on buying an overcoat and hat, but it did not quite cover the expense, so she had to make a final down payment in the next month.
Later, my grandmother got work as a housemaid in Kristiansand, and then travelled to a similar position in Oslo, where she took a course in sewing and was taught stitching techniques by a seamstress. That was all the education she would ever get. My grandmother told me a lot about this when I was young. She would always feel sad that she did not get to go to school more than that. Even so, she spoke affectionately of her time in Oslo, and how the family she stayed with gave her the opportunity to learn sewing. It might have been useful for them that their maid knew how to sew clothes. These skills were also to stand her in good stead when she had her own family, since she would be able to sew and knit clothes for her children. I have always thought that grandma’s lack of education explains her support for her own girls when they wanted to go to school and make something of themselves. She encouraged us grandchildren too, adding her strong-minded opinions about what we should become. I should become an arts and crafts teacher, she declared, since I was so good at making things!
I do not recall my grandmother either sewing or knitting. Nor did she own a spinning wheel. But she did have a loom that had been moved to the basement when I was little. As her family’s economy improved, she started buying clothes and fabrics, but continued with her chores, in the garden and in the house. She kept the part time job she got in 1961 until she was seventy years old; it was important to her.
Grandma still lived in Oslo when she met my grandfather, Jon Hoskuld Seland, who was born in Lyngdal in 1970. He was the oldest of three siblings, and his family was slightly better off than my grandmother’s was. In the 1910 census their household had a maid, a manservant, and two apprentices staying with them. His father, Sigurd Seland, had started his own smithy in 1902,[2] when he was 22 years old, and my grandfather would also became a blacksmith. He was enrolled in the managerial school at Kongsberg Weaponry Factory when he met my grandmother. She explained that they had intended to settle down in Kongsberg, but the war intervened to change their plans. They had to move to Lyngdal, and my mother got work at the Bondeheimen Hotel, where she would work until they got married, in March 1942. They were the last couple to marry in church in Lyngdal during the war years. My mother, Kari Seland, was born in February, 1943, only four months before my grandfather was arrested and sent to Germany. But that is a story for another time.
My mother and grandmother have both told me about their family when I was a child, but only in fragments. My grandmother always referred to Besta (Grandma), her paternal grandmother Maria, but I do not remember much of what she told me about her. So I have tried to find more information and piece the stories together, in order to understand how their parents and grandparents lived. My main source apart from my mother has been the Vigmostad Book, a local history by Tore Bergstøl, and popular narratives. Names have different spellings in different sources, so it has not always been easy to find all the information.
My great-great-grandmother Maria
My great-great-grandmother, Maria Bernt Eliasdatter, was born in 1854 at Bergstøl in Vigmostad. The ending, støl, of the name Bergstøl suggests it has once been the site of a milking shed. Marias parents were Bernt Elias and Rakel, who were married in April, 1854, in Vigmostad, and who lived at the factory site by Eastern Bergstøl. Maria was the oldest of ten siblings. Rakel gave birth to Maria when she was 23 and had her last child at 45. Such large flocks of children were not unusual in the 19th century; child mortality was down, and more children survived their first years. Vigmostad’s population grew in the 1800s. Tore Bergstøl writes that Vigmostad had a tradition of dividing up the old farmland among the different farmers. Thus, farms would be rather small and could barely sustain a whole family. Maria and her siblings grew up on very meager fare, and it was expected of them to help with work at the farm.
The census of 1865 says that six of the children had been born, that the family owns six cows and fourteen sheep, and that they had sowed one-eighth barrel of barley, one-fourth barrel of mixed cereals, two and a half barrels of oats, and three barrels of potatoes. Tore Bergstøl writes that farming at Vigmostad in the 19th century was done with very simple tools. Spring chores began on April 28: the fields were spaded, harrowed and manured before the seeds were sown by hand. The utensils were at first wooden, and then eventually made of iron. The manure, seeds and potatoes were carried on their backs in baskets that were braided or clasped together. Maria’s father Bernt Elias made the clasps himself. Autumn chores started three weeks after Jonsok, St. John’s Eve. The hay was mowed with a long scythe, dried flat, and then turned with a rake. Bergstøl points out that it was not until 1900 that agriculture started to be modernized.
The farm animals provided the family with milk, meat, hide and wool. The milk could be churned into butter, or boiled into cheese or gome, a sweet soft cheese for dinner and dessert. Sour milk was a common drink. The women at the farm did the grooming and milking; the cows were milked by hand, and the sheep were milked too. The period between mid-October and mid-November the animals was slaughtering time. They made use of the entire animal, including the intestines and other tripes. Bergstøl writes that the marrow of the sheep’s’ thighbone was used to lubricate the spinning wheels and other implements.
The sheep were sheared three times a year, and the people in Vigmostad had set rules for what to do with the wool. It was spun into threads that were used to weave fabrics for clothes and other textiles. Weaving means tying different threads, the warp and weft, together; the weft is tied to the loom, and the weft is pushed through it. The warp was made of summer wool sheared in October, and the weft from winter wool. The spring wool was used to make verken, a fabric where the warp was made of cotton and the weft of wool. The finest fabrics were pressed to become tighter and softer, either by hand in a small tub, or in a wooden trough. The spring wool also supplied yarns for socks. At Bergstøl, the family probably kept Spælsau sheep, which could be black, gray or white and gave them nice and glossy wool. They also made threads out of flax. In the Vigmostad area, people would also spin long threads on a spindle, a simple utensil that could easily be taken with you, but each farm also disposed of at least one spinning wheel. Maria probably got the one I inherited as a confirmation gift, since the year engraved on it coincides with the year of her confirmation, 1868.[3] Bergstøl writes[4] that the spinning wheel and loom were the most important pieces of household furniture in the old days, so Maria’s spinning wheel would have been a both decorative and useful confirmation gift.
Maria and her siblings most certainly contributed to the work on the farm from a rather early age. Maria had to learn how to milk and clean the animal sheds, and she had to learn carding, spinning, knitting and weaving. Making your own garments is time-consuming work, with plenty of time spent on carding, spinning and twining the knitting yarn together. Since woven garments were sturdier, most of the yarn they made was intended for weaving.
In the evening, textile work and other chores were done inside the house. This was long before electricity, and Maria remembered well when her father came home with the household’s first kerosene lamp, which must have made it easier to work in the evening.[5] Most Vigmostad farms had scanty resources,[6] and Marias family was no exception. They had to work hard from morning to evening.
Child migration
Vigmostad’s population grew in the 19th century. People had many children and the farms were split up in such small units that it became difficult to provide for everyone. Many therefore left the village or travelled to the United States to look for employment. In the autumn, the men went to Lista to help with the threshing, and some of them travelled to do road work in Telemark, Numedal and Hallingdal.[7]
Such labor migration was common in Vigmostad in the 19th century, and in the rest of the Audnedal area. Many who worked in other places were craftsmen, and in Vigmostad there were many carpenters in particular.[8] But the most common reason for travel was to work in agriculture in the chilly Austlandet, the coastal regions from Kristiansand to Arendal. There was a surplus of agricultural workers in Inner Agder, and the eastern parts needed their labour.[9] In Austlandet, men would often work at sea and were not as interested in farming.
Older children also had to go east in the summer, to work as herders or take other jobs. They were paid in food and accommodation, with salaries of up to 20 kroner that were often paid in clothing.[10] Sometimes their parents had made agreements for their children when they were working in the east, but there were also agents in the villages who would sign the children up for work. Child migration was especially common in the inner parts of Agder.[11] Torbjørn Ougland writes that children would start travelling already when they were only seven or eight years old. Bergstøl describes how they left, several together, with clothes and food provisions in swag bags on their backs. Many were out of luck, staying with hosts that gave them little and poor food; they would sometimes have to eat bog bilberry leaves to fill up their tummies. Some parents could not afford warm clothes for their children, and many of them were cold.[12] That said, many would also have had a good time, and were treated well at the farms where they worked. Those child migrations started around 1830 and continued for the rest of the 19th century, and did not cease entirely until 1910.[13]
I do not know which of Marias siblings who went east to work, but there is a photograph in the Vigmostad Book of her brother Bernt Tobias in his best clothes. It was taken by a photographer in Grimstad, when Bernt Tobias was on his way back from his ‘summer job.’ The school registers from Brådland school district shows that Maria was often away from school in some years. At 11, she was absent 26 days, and at school 46 days, while the following year she was only away for five days. It is likely that she was absent because she had to work.
The main reason for child migration was poverty. Most people had little money to spend and the farms did not give work or food to go around for everyone. The salaries and clothes that the children brought home helped improve the economy back home. But Ougland also refers to Eilert Sundt, who has suggested that poverty was not the sole reason for the migrations of young children; they were also, he argues, seen as a part of their upbringing. Ougland corroborates this, as he has heard this explanation in his own home place.[14]
Many people in Vigmostad left for the United States to search for fortune, and many of Maria’s siblings did so as adults. This was another way of finding work when things were scarce at home. Maria’s youngest brother, Reier, took over the farm. The census registers show that the siblings who married at home were frequently in touch, and the church books reveal that they often became godparents for each other’s children. They also kept many of the old names in the family, passing them on to new family members.
In 1875, Maria married Søren Salvesen Aukland, born in 1845 at Outer Augland. He had bought the farm in Lower Augland from his uncle Andor in 1866, and his brother Eirik took over the Outer Augland farm. In the 1865 census, Søren was registered as a ship carpenter. Bergstøl mentions that there were many skillful craftsmen in the Augland family; bricklayers, carpenters and joiners.
In 1875 Søren’s uncle Andor had føderåd, the traditional right for the previous farm owner to food, accommodation and income, at Lower Augland. The farm had five cows, one calf and eight sheep. The household planted three potato barrels and sowed one-eighth barrel of wheat, two and a half barrels of oat, and half a barrel of barley. Conditions at the farm were similar to the one where Maria had grown up. Like her mother, she also had a large progeny to take care of: Maria and Søren had eleven children. One of them was my great grandfather, Bernt Elias, born in 1877 and the second oldest sibling. Maria gave birth to her children across a period of 25 years; she bore her first one at 22 and the last one at 47. She must have felt worn out by so many child births, though the oldest children would eventually have grown able to help her care for the smaller ones.
The 1900 census lists both parents and the ten children who had been born then. Søren was now 55 and listed as a farmer, Salve, 24, as a carpenter, Bernt Elias, 23, as a road construction blacksmith, Andreas, 20, as a shoemaker, and Edward, 18, as a farmhand and bricklayer’s apprentice. Maria was 45, but neither she nor the rest of the children are registered with an occupation. The youngest child, Signe, was born the year after the census.
From 1900, conditions in Vigmostad improved little by little, and the population began to decrease.[15] Things got better for the family at Augland too, when the older children grew up and were able to start working and provide for themselves. In the years between the census of 1900 and that of 1910, the were profound changes in the family. Several of the oldest siblings emigrated to the United States, and the girl Rakel died in 1904, 13 years old. Four years later, Søren and Maria’s father both passed away.
The census of 1910 shows my great great grandmother Maria and eight of her children registered at Augland. But only the three youngest are there at the time of the registration. Maria is entered as currently being in Mandal – perhaps on a shopping trip? This time, Maria herself has been registered as farmer. Bernt Elias, now 34, is listed as farmer and day labourer in ‘Vashingthon A’, and Edvard, 28, as working in a gold mine in ‘Transvold’ (Transvaal) in South Africa. Ola, 25, and Severin, 28, are also registered as day labourers in ‘Vashington Amerika,’ and Johanna, 24, as a housemaid in ‘Vash. Amerika’. Ragna, 14, works as a housemaid and Bernt Tobias, 12, as a farm hand. Only eight-year-old Signe has been entered without an occupation.
Bergstøl describes Maria as a special lady, in many ways. She was a good storyteller with an excellent memory, and she did not only take care of her own children, but took in several sick and elderly to stay at the Augland farm. Maria took in the last person in Vigmostad to be cared for through the ancient custom of legd – the practice for parish households to care of the poor and destitute. The last person she was ever to nurse was her son Edvard.[16] Maria died in 1940, 86 years old.
Maria probably used her spinning wheel for most of her life; it gives evidence of being well used. Even when industrial yarns became available, many people in the villages continued spinning their own yarn, and many of them also spun commercially. Even Vestagder husflid, the traditional arts and crafts company established in 1924, probably sold home spun yarns in its first years, as the yarns produced by machine could still not measure up to those from the spinning wheel.[17] In 1930, when Vestagder husflid helped fund a course in plant coloring at Hægebostad, the yarns the students coloured had been spun by themselves.[18]
When she was ten years old, my mother wrote an essay at school in which she interviewed her grandfather Bernt Elias about his childhood. This essay is sadly lost, but some of the things he said remained engraved in the mind of the ten-year-old, such as his stories about growing up at the farm, and having to help make his own clothes. Bernt Elias recalled that he had to knit his own underwear, and that he found this so embarrassing that he hid his knitting gear when there were guests in the house. This story is clear evidence of the hard times at the farm.
In his old age, Bernt Elias took up knitting again. My mother recalls her grandfather knitting in his rocking chair; his health did not allow him to do much else. He knitted socks and mittens with thin steel needles. The mittens were tightly knit, in a two knit – two purl flat-knitting pattern, and the yarn was always gray. My mother does not recall having a spinning wheel at home at Leland, so those yarns had probably been purchased. Sadly, we do not retain any of the garments he made; they were probably used up and sent to a fabric shredder.
Not until she was an adult did my mother find out that Bernt Elias had travelled to work in places far away from home in the summers; that he had, in fact, been a child migrant. My grandmother never told her children about this, but when she became older she tried to find out more about those travels. And although she was not particularly interested in history she took my mother with her to a seminar on the topic, most likely in 1988, that would result in a collection of articles called ‘Labor journeys in Agder.’
Emigration to America
As I have already mentioned, Several of Maria’s children went to seek their fortune in the United States of America at the beginning of the 20th century. I have found seven of them in emigration registers; three of them travelled to South Africa, and the rest to the United States. They returned to stay at home for a while, and then they left again. When Johanne travelled back to America in 1908, she said it was ‘in order to earn more.’
I on went on a car trip to Vigmostad with my parents. We visited the farm at Leland that my great grandfather Bernt Elias bought, and where my grandma spent her last year at school. Then we drove to Bergstøl, where my great-great-grandmother Maria grew up, and to Augland, where Maria and Søren lived.
At Tryland, we encountered a man who told us an amusing story that he, in turn, had been told by his father. He said that Bernt Elias’ brothers, who had travelled to South Africa, made good money in the gold mines there, and returned to Augland in 1907 with plenty of cash. So there was a lot of traffic to Augland at the time, he said: of six-liter canisters of alcohol! The Tryland man’s father had not even seen his seventh birthday yet, but got drunk at Augland; the first and only time he was drunk in his life. But to be fair, as the man remarked, they probably needed to let their hair down a bit at Augland, to forget about the hard life they had lived.
This story underscores that the family, at least in later years, was regarded as poor. Travelling to the United States and South Africa was a way to improve one’s economic conditions; in emigrant areas, money earned in America was an important way for people to rise from poverty and eventually achieve a measure of prosperity.
My great-grandfather Bernt Elias went to America on the boat Hvide Stjerne in 1903. His destination was Iowa. He returned home briefly before going back to the United States in 1908. There, he met and married my great grandmother Judith. After a time, the couple moved back home to Vigmostad, where their children were born. Grandma told me that her father Bernt Elias had always wished to have a farm, and that this was the main reason for returning to Vigmostad. In this period, it was common to travel back and forth between America and one’s homestead, and the money earned over there came in handy at home. In this way, Bernt Elias was rather typical of his day and age.
Conclusion
My grandmother talked much about Besta, who I have now come to understand meant my great-great-grandmother, Maria. She did not like us knitting on Sunday, a sentiment she had gotten from Besta that I did not quite understand when I was young. For me, knitting was such a great way to relax! But in the course of time, I came to understand that this is not how it was for Maria and her children. For them it was a necessity, and one that they had to deal with in their spare time. But never on a Sunday!
There are many things I do not know about my family and its history, even if their story is quite recent. Salve took over the farm at Augland, but after he died it was sold to new owners. The house where Maria and Søren lived with their 11 children caved in during a snowy winter, after having stood abandoned for many years. Only ruins remain now. But the Augland house is where it has always been, on a beautiful site up there on the heath in Vigmostad.
My mother and sister have helped me find old photographs. There are few photos from Augland, but the family picture from around 1897 was thrilling to come across. We also found other items that are miraculously still in the care of our family, such as a diction and handwriting notebook which belonged to Rakel, Maria’s daughter, who died in 1904 while only thirteen. It is the strangest of feelings to leaf through her books in the knowledge that she, Rakel, wrote this, and that someone, first Maria, and then some of her siblings, decided to keep these books to preserve her memory. Perhaps my own daughter, who also bears the name Rakel, will soon read it too?
It was also strange to find the journal of my grandmother, whom I knew so well as grandma, but of course not as a fifteen-year-old in her first housemaid position. And to think that my grandma knew her own paternal grandmother, Maria, so well. Oh, and to think of all the things I would have asked her if I had known! I guess this is how I would like to use these fragments from my own family: to raise interest in my own children and in other children, making them ask their family about the old days, and compare conditions today with the life in the countryside in the last half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
I do not know how long the spinning wheel was in use. My mother cannot recall a spinning wheel in Bernt Elias and Judith’s house at Leland. The wheel was passed on to Bernt Elias’ older sister Johanna from her mother Maria, and Johanna gave it to Signe, who was fifteen years younger. Most likely, the family stopped using it when they became more prosperous and ready-made yarns could be bought. Perhaps my family at Augland made excursions to Sjølingstad Woolware Factory, founded in 1894, to exchange wool and worn-out wool garments for new yarns and other woolware? I have actually looked for Bernt Elias’ siblings in the register of employees in the factory during its first years, but I have not been able to find them there. Perhaps Johanna used the spinning wheel, but for aunt Signe, who worked as a teacher, it was probably mostly decorative, like many old spinning wheels. My mother’s accounts from when she was fifteen years old, in 1931, shows that she bought yarns, so if she knew how to spin them she did not actually do it. But I think Maria used it for as long as her fingers worked, except on Sundays.
It is difficult for me to call my family poor. That families who send their children away to work from a young age will do this out of poverty is fairly obvious, I think, and that children have to knit their own underwear also testifies to poverty, especially if they are ashamed of it. When girls are not allowed to continue at school, this is also because of poverty, strictly speaking. Despite all this, I find it difficult to call my family poor. They lived in meager conditions, certainly, but so did most people back then, as my mother puts it.
For me, the spinning wheel symbolizes our capacity to cope. The spinning wheel helps us make a crucial thing, one that we all need; thread to make warm clothes.
Sources:
Bergstøl, Tore (1926). Atterljom I. Oslo.
Bergstøl, Tore (1957?). Vigmostadboka, Band I, Gardar og ættar. Mandal.
Bergstøl, Tore. (1960). Vigmostadboka, Band II, Nærings- og kulturlivet. Mandal.
Johannessen, Silje. (2004). Vestagder Husflid. Kultubærer i 80 år. Mandal.
Ougland, Torbjørn: Barnevandringar og andre arbeidsvandringar frå vest til aust i Agder, i Berit Eide Johnsen og Hans Try (red.). (1990). Arbeidsvandringar på Agder. ADH-serien nr. 20, s. 57-75.
Seland, Kari. (2002). Fra hestesko til offshore-roboter. Glimt fra smia i Lyngdal gjennom 100 år. Mandal.
Slettan, Bjørn. (1998). Agders historie. 1840-1920. Kristiansand.
Other sources:
Census registers
My grandmother’s journal
IKAVA (Inter-municipal archive in Vest-Agder): Nord-Audnedal kommune – Skolestyret – Dagbok Brådland og Risdal (1853-1879)
Illustrations:
Private and Judith Seland Nilsen
Notes:
[1]Bergstøl Vigmostadboka II p. 153
[2] Seland p. 7
[3] IKAVA Nord-Audnedal kommune – Skolestyret – Dagbok Brådland og Risdal (1853-1879)
[4] Bergstøl Vigmostadboka II p. 156
[5] Bergstøl Vigmostadboka II p. 111
[6] Bergstøl Vigmostadboka II p. 245
[7] Bergstøl Atterljom s. 43
[8] Ougland p. 61
[9] Ougland p. 69
[10] Bergstøl Vigmostadboka II p. 250
[11] Ougland p. 63
[12] Bergstøl Atterljom p. 51
[13] Ougland p. 63
[14] Ougland p. 68
[15] Bergstøl Vigmostadboka II p. 246
[16] Bergstøl Vigmostadboka I p. 59
[17] Johannessen p. 57
[18] Slettan p. 35
More on the project: «Being poor i Southern Norway»: www.vestagdermuseet/fattigdom
