My biggest brick wall was my 4th grandfather Lars Monsen from somewhere near Bergen. He was a Norwegian sailor who met a girl from Farsund and married her, settling in Norway's southernmost city Kristiansand.

My Norwegiam American Dad did not know much about his ancestors but his older sister had an album of photos and lots of stories

My biggest brick wall was my 4th grandfather Lars Monsen from somewhere near Bergen. He was a Norwegian sailor who met a girl from Farsund and married her, settling in Norway's southernmost city Kristiansand.

My biggest brick wall was my 4th grandfather Lars Monsen from somewhere near Bergen. He was a Norwegian sailor who met a girl from Farsund and married her, settling in Norway's southernmost city Kristiansand.

My biggest brick wall was my 4th grandfather Lars Monsen from somewhere near Bergen. He was a Norwegian sailor who met a girl from Farsund and married her, settling in Norway's southernmost city Kristiansand.

Our brick wall on the Munson line was my 4th grandfather Lars Monsen from somewhere near Bergen. He was a Norwegian sailor who met a girl from Farsund and married her, settling in Norway's southernmost city Kristiansand.

My biggest brick wall was my 4th grandfather Lars Monsen from somewhere near Bergen. He was a Norwegian sailor who met a girl from Farsund and married her, settling in Norway's southernmost city Kristiansand.

The collaborative world tree at GENI has lots of Norwegians but no one had solved our mystery

My 2nd cousin Dick, a wonderful genealogist, and I had looked at the ten possibilities of Lars Monsen's we found in the censuses born between 1785 and 1795 in the Bergen area. These days you can use the online digital archive...

Father's father's

line

Mother's mother's line

All your recent ancestors

(reliably about 5 generations)

Then along came DNA testing, Lars seemed a perfect candidate to find this way since my Dad is in the direct male line of descendancy from him.

Your 23rd chromosome pair is either 2 X's (girls) or an X and a Y (boys)

The Y chromosome changes very little over time and is passed father to son without recombination (since there is only one copy) so the only changes are mutations. Thus it can be used for paternal line searching quite easily.

SNP - Single Nucleotide Polymorphism

a DNA mutation where a single letter chang3s

STRs are short tandem repeats

An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA

An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA

An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA

An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA

An extra copy is made of a sequence of DNA

Deep ancestry - haplogroup

More recent ancestry - surname studies

Dad matched almost 6000 people at 12 markers on the family tree DNA site. Upgrading to 25 markers got him down to about 2000. Upgrading to 37 eliminated all his matches but one with an ancestor from Sweden who never replied to my emails. This is a common problem. If you are not part of a surname project but just test your Y hoping to find a match, much of the time there will not be one so either wait many years or try some other approaches.

My other approach was to try a site where people had uploaded reulsts from other testing companies - the Ysearch.org site (no longer available). Again no good matches at 37 or 33 markers. So I decided to look for only Bergen area matches with fewer markers tested

These days there is the mitoYDNA.org site which collects other Y results but not that any users have added results yet

Now Sigmund tracked down Einar, a male line descendant of the paternal grandfather of the most likely Lars, my possible 6th grandfather Ole Monsen Titland born 1702. Sigmund called Einar on the phone and convinced him to test. Sigmund had a spare test he had gotten on sale which he sold me and then mailed to my possible cousin. We decided to start with 12 markers and only upgrade it to 37 if it matched at 12 Waiting is always hard

There is a facebook group as well as an ftDNA project for our terminal SNP L-238

It is likely that there will be no close matches so develop a theory and test a descendant

You could get lucky and find a Norwegian cousin willing to help!

Join relevant geographic and SNP based projects and possibly a surname one

My grandmother Anna Lee

My great-grandma Maren Wold, my brick wall

Then one day I got an email from a MIchael Wold who said I think your great grandmother was the sister of my great great grandfather Martinius Wold

Michael and his Dad had hired a researcher in Norway who found much information about our family. He sent me photos of Maren's parents Jorgen and Anna Wold,  photos from the late 1800s

Maren was from Skoger not Drammen

Part of Skoger was in Vestfold county not the same county as Drammen (Buskerud) !!

OK did some research and told me I had the wrong parents for Anna! There were two Anna Knutsdatters born that year in Seljord

But when I connected her to the correct parents it seemed too distant

OK's parents' tests came in ...

Our cousins in Norway who have tested DNA are happy to help us

Double check the geography when you can't find your ancestor

Confirm your research with DNA

New Tools like clustering can help confirm your ancestors via matching cousin groups or show an anomaly

https://blog.kittycooper.com/2020/05/who-is-my-great-great-grandfathers-daddy-a-thrulines-experiment/

ThruLines shows the Westby relationship but a half 3rd once removed is less than 1% while a half 2nd once removed is 18%

Getting a male Westby to do a Y test should resolve this see

blog.kittycooper.com/2021/12/the-westbye-mystery-finding-a-y-tester