Five Atlantic crossings produced the American side of this family. Lewis Lorentsen Kyllo arrived in 1871. Christine Talla followed in the 1880s. Larsen Sjölseng and Johannesen Jerpbak crossed in the same broad window. Baard Jensen arrived at Enderlin, North Dakota, in 1908. By the early 1900s all five lines were on the prairie within a half-day’s drive of Grand Forks, North Dakota. The next two generations — Clarence and Ida Kyllo in 1926, then Ray and Mary in 1953 — drew the geography around the family that now exists.

The Kyllo household in North Dakota

The four Norwegian lines on Grammy’s side settled in and around Grand Forks County. Lewis Lorentsen Kyllo raised fifteen children with Christine Talla in McCanna. Their son Clarence Albin Kyllo, born there on the sixth of July 1895, married Ida A Solseng (born at Shawnee on the nineteenth of June 1897) in 1926; the wedding’s centennial falls in 2026. They settled at Larimore. Their five children were Louise, Mary, Howard, Ruth, and Roger.

The Jensen line settled at Enderlin — the small town twenty-five miles south of Fargo that became Baard Jensen’s American home after his July 1908 emigration. His daughter Anna Jenny Marie, born at Bodø, followed her father across the Atlantic in 1913 and raised her son Ray in North Dakota.

Ray and Mary met as students at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. They married on the sixteenth of August 1953 at her parents’ farm outside McCanna. The marriage brought all five Norwegian lines into one household. After a first job for Ray with DuPont in Iowa, the couple settled in Rochester, Minnesota — the Mayo Clinic city in the southeastern part of the state — where Ray spent the rest of his working life as a civil engineer at IBM. He retired after more than thirty years there, and passed at home on the fifteenth of December 2020. Mary trained as a nurse at the same university, worked first as a travel nurse in Washington and Arizona, then in Iowa once she was married, then in Rochester nursing and nursing instruction, and finally — after a master of public health at the University of Minnesota — as an epidemiologist at Mayo Clinic, where she stayed twenty-five years and put more than a hundred research articles into the journals. She is ninety-five.

The current household

Sara and Kirsten are the two daughters of Ray and Mary. Both grew up in Rochester. Both are on the 2026 trip.

Sara lives in Florida with her husband Robert and their two sons, Jake and Bobby. Robert came to Norway with the family in 1998; Jake and Bobby have not been, and have not been in regular contact with the Norwegian side. Sara is in corrections and law enforcement. She is the one member of the Florida household traveling to Norway in 2026.

Kirsten lives in Minnesota with her husband Dave. They split their time between a townhome in Rochester (the same city Ray wrote his 1993 Norway-trip letter from) and an apartment in the Twin Cities. Kirsten is an attorney by training. Dave is a Nurse Anesthetist by profession — the third pairing in the engineer-and-medical-professional pattern that runs across both halves of the family.

Kirsten and Dave raised their two sons in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Christopher, the elder, is a clinical specialist with Medtronic in cardiac rhythm management and lives in Ohio with his partner Jade. Nathan, the younger, lives in Kansas with his wife Autumn. Nathan and Autumn were married in 2025; Marthe and Trygve flew from Norway for the wedding, and the family-history toast Kirsten delivered that night is the project’s first heritage source. Nathan recently passed his nursing boards. Autumn is an engineer.

The American-side cohort on the 2026 trip is:

• Sara, Kirsten, and Dave — the Gråhårsklubben (the Oldsters), taking the northern Slektsreisen drive into Trondheim, Stjørdal, Hegra, and Kylloplass.
• Nathan, Autumn, Christopher, and Jade — the Ungdommene (the Youngsters), taking the western Norway-in-a-Nutshell journey through Sognefjord country to Bergen.

The two cohorts reunite in Lillehammer for the last days of the trip.

First-time travelers

For some members of the American side this is a return — a Norway they have been to before, a household in Lillehammer they have eaten dinner in, a fjord they have stood at the edge of. For others, every fjord and every cousin is going to be a new fact.

Jade has never been on an international trip. The whole experience — the passport stamp at Gardermoen, the kilometers-per-hour on the Bergensbanen, the kroner at the Bryggen cafés, the long northern evening that does not get dark — will be new at the most basic level. The translation work between a country one of you knows and one of you doesn’t is a job Christopher will have on this trip, the same job Ray had for Mary in 1978.

Autumn is on her first trip to Norway, though not her first time overseas; she did a two-week trip to Slovenia in college at the University of Kansas. She has been a member of the family by marriage since 2025, and on every video call with the Norwegian relatives since then. The faces will be familiar. The country will not.

The other five — Sara, Kirsten, Dave, Nathan, Christopher — have all been to Norway before. Christopher learned to walk in Norway as an infant in 1998, on a trip he does not remember. Nathan has been twice, in 2010 and 2016. Kirsten and Dave have been three times together. Sara has been multiple times.

The wider American family

Several other members of the American side are part of the trip’s background even though they’re not on the trip in person.

Mary’s siblings make up the extended Clarence-and-Ida Kyllo descendants across the Upper Midwest. Howard Kyllo has passed. Roger Kyllo lives in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Louise Benz lives in Bismarck, North Dakota. Ruth Olson lives in Bloomington, Minnesota; her husband Wayne, who joined Ray and Mary and Ruth on the 1998 Kylloplass trip alongside cousin Leif Olson, has also passed. Roger’s own Ancestry DNA research helped confirm Mary’s tree. The Kyllo-descendant network extends across the Upper Midwest and includes the recipients of Kirsten’s May 2026 Ancestry-tree email — Andrea Bonney, David and Joanie Kyllo, the Benz family, and others.

Lila and Clifford Kyllo — Clifford was Mary’s first cousin and a U.S. military veteran of the Second World War whose service had left him with contacts back in Norway — were the recipients of the Harstad genealogy package that came over from Selbu in the early 1990s. Clifford and Lila shared it widely with Mary and her siblings at the time. Kirsten came across the letter again in 2025 and brought it into the present round of research.

Norma Elisabeth Hübenbecker is not American, but earns a mention here as the Norwegian researcher who connected with Kirsten through the Norwegian Heritage, History and Culture Facebook group in May 2026 and pulled the original church-book records of Lorents Andersen Kyllo’s baptism and Lorents-and-Serine’s 1836 marriage at Værnes. Norma’s research closed a question the family had been carrying for over a century: the literal piece of ground (Kyllo Ovre in Hegra) and the literal church (Hegra Church) the Kyllo line traces back to.

What carried forward, what didn’t

The American side inherits a thinned version of what the original emigrants brought across.

Lefse is the food that survived. Ray and Mary made it together at the holidays for years, and it is still the one Norwegian dish the family looks forward to. A handful of Norwegian phrases — uff da the universal Lutheran-grandmother interjection at any small disaster, tusen takk for the thank-you, god jul at Christmas — are still in family use. The engineer-and-nurse professional pairing, peculiarly, has held across four generations on both sides of the Atlantic without anyone trying.

What did not survive in physical form is most of what one might expect. The household does not hold many objects from the Kyllo or Jensen ancestors; the inheritance is mostly experiences and people. The connection to the Jensen family is the heaviest of those — eleven visits across the Atlantic between the two couples and the next generation, decades of letters and emails, a wedding in Kansas in 2025 with Norwegians at the table. The connection to the Kyllo side is thinner in people and heavier in place: the churches the family will walk through at Værnes and Hegra are themselves the inheritance, in a way the Selbu mittens never quite were.

Of Mary’s many cousins on the Kyllo side, it is Sara and Kirsten who have done the most to pull on the family-genealogy thread and to keep the connection with the Norwegian relatives alive across the decades. They were not the only ones who could have. They are the ones who did.

The 2026 trip is the family choosing to put a fresh deliberate finger on the parts it wants to carry forward into the next generation. Standing in Værnes Church where Lorents Andersen Kyllo was christened in 1812, or at Berit Nikoline Andersdatter Jensen’s grave at Øyer parish church, or in the kitchen at Baard Olav and Grethe’s home in Lillehammer, are different rooms for the same gesture. This is where it came from, and this is where it still lives.