Sometime in the late 1970s Ray sat down at a typewriter in Rochester, Minnesota, and wrote a letter to the Norwegian airline. He did not know the name of any of his Norwegian cousins. He knew there were several. He had heard, in the diffuse way these things travel down through families, that one of them worked for SAS. So he addressed the envelope to the company’s corporate headquarters in Oslo, wrote “To Whom It May Concern” at the top of the letter, described what he could about the family connection — his grandfather Baard Jensen, the four sons who had stayed in Narvik, the airline cousin somewhere among them — and asked if anyone there could pass the letter on.

The letter worked. It moved up and across the company’s internal mail, and it reached a pilot named Torfinn. Torfinn was Bjorne’s son, Baard Jensen’s grandson on the Norwegian side. He read the letter, recognized the family from his own father’s stories, and wrote back. The seventy-year silence between the two halves of the family ended on a typed page that crossed the Atlantic in a few weeks.

Torfinn put Ray in touch with the wider circle of Norwegian-side cousins. Within a few exchanges of letters one had emerged as the central correspondent. His name was Torstein Jensen. He lived in Lillehammer. He was an engineer. His wife Anne Ma was a nurse. Ray was an engineer and Mary was a nurse. Both households recognized the symmetry the first time it came up. In 1978 Ray and Mary flew to Oslo and met Torstein and Anne Ma in person. The four of them have been the founding partners of the modern Norwegian-American family relationship ever since.

Ray

Raymond Gerald Beard — Ray to nearly everyone, Buppa to his grandsons Nathan, Christopher, Jake, and Bobby — was born in North Dakota in the late 1920s, the son of Anna Jenny Marie Jensen and an American father. Anna had crossed from Bodø to North Dakota in 1913, five years after her own father Baard had landed at Enderlin. Ray grew up Norwegian-American in the upper-Midwest sense: a household that still knew its Norwegian, kept the Lutheran calendar, and remembered which valley each grandparent had come from. He took a civil engineering degree at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, where he met Mary Kyllo, and married her on the sixteenth of August 1953 on the Kyllo farm outside McCanna. He took a first job with DuPont in Iowa and then moved to IBM in Rochester, Minnesota, where he stayed for over thirty years before retiring. He died at home on the fifteenth of December 2020.

The texture of Ray as a person comes through clearly in the long letter he wrote home from the 1993 trip — the only sustained piece of his prose this archive holds. He is meticulous, dry, generous, and patient. He calls a Sami host “a lovely Norwegian lady such as we have all met.” He notices that aunt Christine in Narvik “did her duty as the King’s ambassador and matriarch of the Norwegian side of the family.” He writes the names of his Norwegian relatives correctly even when the typewriter cannot render the Norwegian letters; he quietly substitutes “Irven” for a name with one of those letters and notes the substitution. He is the kind of person who, given a difficult genealogical puzzle, will spend years on it without complaint. He is also the kind of person who, when something matters, will write a letter to a corporation across the world and trust someone to pass it on.

What mattered enough to write the letter, in the late 1970s, was the awareness that he had at least five or six first cousins in Norway he had never met. His grandfather Baard had named the four sons who had not emigrated. The names had been kept in family conversation through Ray’s mother Anna and through her siblings. Ray, late middle-aged and beginning to think about retirement, decided he would find them.

Torstein

The letter reached Torfinn, and Torfinn passed it along, and within a few exchanges of correspondence Torstein had emerged as the cousin whose life intersected Ray’s most cleanly. He was Olav’s son — Olav the brother who had stayed in Narvik when Baard emigrated, the brother who had taken Berit in when she came south during the war. Torstein had been born in Øyer, the small parish fifteen minutes north of Lillehammer where his grandmother Berit was buried at the parish church. He had built a career as an engineer. He and his wife Anne Ma had two children: a daughter named Ragnhild — after Torstein’s mother, the Ragnhild who had taken Berit in — and a son named Baard Olav, after Torstein’s father Olav and his grandfather Baard Jensen at once. The single given name Baard Olav threaded two generations of forebears into one child.

The kind of person who answers an unfamiliar letter from another country and does not put it back in the drawer is a particular kind of person. Torstein turned out to be that kind. He answered Ray’s first letter quickly, sent photographs, sketched the Norwegian-side family tree as he knew it, named names. Within a few months a first trip had been planned.

Anne Ma was the second half of the Norwegian-side household and the immediate symmetric counterpart on the American side to Mary. Engineer and nurse, on both sides of the Atlantic. The pairing was noticed at the first meeting and has never not been a quiet running joke since.

The first trip

In 1978 — about a year after the first exchange of letters — Ray and Mary made their first trip to Norway. They met Torstein and Anne Ma in Lillehammer.

What was said and what was understood without translation is not on the archive’s record. What is on the record is the texture that followed. The two couples drove out to the Øyer parish church together and stood at Berit’s grave. They went up to one of Torstein’s cabins in the hills above the parish. They spent a week together and made plans for a second one.

Over the next four decades they kept those plans. Ray and Mary went to Norway about five times. Torstein and Anne Ma came to the United States about seven times. They traveled together in places that were neither — through northern Europe, to the Canary Islands more than once, across the United States to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and both coasts and Florida and even Las Vegas. They were in Kansas City for a Beard-Jensen family reunion the week Nathan was born in September 1999. They saw each other’s families grow up. Their children grew alongside Kirsten and Sara, then alongside the next generation of Nathan and Christopher.

A long letter Ray typed at home in Rochester on the second of December 1993, after his and Mary’s second trip together, is the family’s central archive of how the relationship looked from the American side in its first decade and a half. He describes the trip in his own dry voice — Oslo, the Hurtigruten up the Norwegian coast to Bodø where his mother Anna had been born, the night in a rorbu (fisherman’s shack) in Svolvær, the hydrofoil to Narvik to meet aunt Christine then in her eighties, the ride on the Ofotbanen through the Baard Jensen Cut that bears his grandfather’s name, the flight to Bergen to meet Torstein’s son Baard Olav at his student apartment, the western auto tour that ended at Bjørkum in Lærdal where his grandfather had been born, and finally Torstein’s cabin in the hills above Øyer where Berit had spent her last years. He closes the letter: “In the mean time, I hope you have enjoyed the saga.”

By the time Nathan was born in 1999 the relationship between the two couples had been running for twenty-one years. By the time Christopher learned to walk in Norway at eleven months in 1998 — borrowing the push cart of Trygve’s older brother on a trip Kirsten and Dave brought him on — the next generation had begun adding its own stories to the catalog.

What grew

What started as a two-person bridge between Ray and Torstein widened on both sides.

On the American side it gathered in Ray’s daughters Sara and Kirsten, then Kirsten’s husband Dave, then Mary’s siblings Ruth and Wayne and Roger and the rest, then the next generation of grandchildren. Kirsten and Dave have now been to Norway three times with various combinations of their family. Nathan has been twice, in 2010 and 2016. Christopher’s 1998 trip as an infant was his first; his return in 2010 with his parents and brother was his second; the 2026 trip will be his third and the first for his partner Jade.

On the Norwegian side it gathered in Torstein and Anne Ma’s children. Baard Olav, the son Ray met at his student apartment in Bergen in 1993, finished medical school and married Grethe Kleveland, who became a Neurologist. They raised three children in Lillehammer. The eldest is Sigrid Baardsdatter Kleveland, who now lives nearby with her husband Christoffer and their children Jarl and Eir. The middle is Torstein Jr., named for his grandfather. The youngest is Trygve Baardson Kleveland, who in 2025 traveled with his partner Marthe Ringstad to Kansas to attend Nathan and Autumn’s wedding. Trygve and Marthe are joining the western leg of the 2026 trip, from Day 3 to Day 8.

The technology of keeping in touch changed over the decades without changing the relationship. Through the late 1970s and into the 1990s it was letters in the mail and the occasional long-distance phone call. Through the 2000s it was email. Through the 2010s it was Skype, then WhatsApp. Through the 2020s it is constant: Christmas messages, photos of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the planning thread for the 2026 trip itself. The thread has not gone dark since the letter at the airline reached Torfinn’s desk.

The 2026 trip

Trygve sat at Nathan and Autumn’s wedding table in Kansas in 2025 because his great-grandfather Olav had been Baard Jensen’s son in Narvik in 1904; because his grandfather Torstein wrote back to Ray’s letter in the late 1970s; because his father Baard Olav hosted Ray and Mary at his student apartment in Bergen in 1993; because all of those people thought it worth the work of staying in touch across an ocean. Christopher will sit at Baard Olav and Grethe’s dinner table in Lillehammer in 2026 for the same reasons. Neither Ray nor his mother Anna Jenny Marie is alive to attend. Torstein, in his late eighties, will be there.