Two households hold the Norwegian end of the trip. The Jensen line, blood relatives through Baard Jensen and Berit Nikoline Andersdatter, has lived in and around Lillehammer for three generations now. The Lindseth family, friends of Kirsten and Dave from their Concordia College years, has lived in Horten on the western shore of the Oslofjord for forty years and has been the trip’s first day in Oslo on every American visit since.

The Jensen line — Lillehammer

Torstein and Anne Ma

Torstein Jensen is the family’s central Norwegian-side correspondent and has been since Ray’s letter reached him in the late 1970s. He is Olav’s son, Baard Jensen’s grandson, Ray’s first cousin. He was born on the twenty-seventh of December 1939 and is in his late eighties. He lives in Lillehammer with his wife Anne Ma. The four-person partnership that anchored the modern Norwegian-American family for forty years was him and Anne Ma on one side, Ray and Mary on the other. The first trip in 1978 was hosting in the literal sense: Torstein and Anne Ma walked their American cousins out to the Øyer parish church, up to one of Torstein’s cabins above the parish, and through what each side knew of the older generation. Across the four decades that followed they visited each other roughly twelve times in total and traveled together as far as the Canary Islands and Yellowstone.

Torstein is an engineer. Anne Ma is a nurse. The pairing with Ray-the-engineer and Mary-the-nurse was noticed the first weekend in 1978 and has been a running family joke since.

Torstein was born and went to school in Øyer, the small parish fifteen minutes north of Lillehammer where his grandmother Berit was buried at the parish church. He still keeps a small cabin in the hills above the town and a higher one further up the mountain. Ray and Mary stayed at one of them on the 1993 trip; Dave and Sara reached the higher one on a separate visit.

Anne Ma is named here because the family tree would be incomplete without her. The family’s wish is to minimize attention to her present circumstances; the site observes the same restraint, and does not describe her current state or write about visits with her.

Torstein and Anne Ma have two children. Their daughter Ragnhild, named after Torstein’s mother — the Ragnhild who had taken Berit in when she came south from Narvik during the war — died young and is buried at the Øyer parish church alongside her grandmother. Their son Baard Olav was named after his grandfather Olav and his great-grandfather Baard Jensen at once. The single name Baard Olav threaded two generations of forebears forward.

Baard Olav and Grethe

Baard Olav Jensen is Torstein and Anne Ma’s son and the current Lillehammer-end host of the Norwegian-American relationship. He is an Anesthesiologist. He and Ray first met in 1993, when Baard Olav was a medical student in Bergen; Ray and Mary stayed two nights at his student apartment and were fed bacalao (salt-cod stew) by his then-fiancée.

That fiancée was Grethe Kleveland, who became Trygve’s mother and a Neurologist. The Baard-Olav-and-Grethe household carries the engineer-and-medical-professional pattern one further. The first generation was Ray and Torstein, both engineers. The second was Mary and Anne Ma, both nurses. The third is Dave on the American side — a Nurse Anesthetist who pairs with Baard Olav the Anesthesiologist — and Grethe, the Neurologist on top of all of it. The pattern is not deliberate.

Baard Olav and Grethe have three children. Their eldest is Sigrid Baardsdatter Kleveland, who lives in Lillehammer with her husband Christoffer and their children Jarl and Eir. Their middle is Torstein Jr., named for his grandfather. Their youngest is Trygve Baardson Kleveland, the third cousin of Christopher and Nathan and the member of this household who, with Marthe, joins the 2026 trip’s western leg.

Trygve, traveling

Trygve and his partner Marthe Ringstad join the Ungdommene (the Youngsters) at Oslo S for the Bergensbanen on Day 3 and travel the western leg with them — through Flåm and Stegastein and across the Nærøyfjord to Bergen — then back to Oslo, then north with the rest of the cohort to Lillehammer for Days 6 and 7 with the wider Jensen household, then onward on Day 8 to Croatia. Marthe is Norwegian; the connection on this trip is through Trygve. The two of them have been traveling together for several years. They flew to Kansas in 2025 for Nathan and Autumn’s wedding, where Kirsten delivered the family-history toast that became the project’s first heritage source.

Trygve’s line-position — Baard Olav’s son, Torstein’s grandson, Baard Jensen’s great-great-grandson, Christopher’s third cousin — is what placed him in the family. What he is on the trip is one of six, traveling with the rest of the western cohort by first name.

The Narvik branch

Three of Baard and Berit’s sons stayed in Narvik when their father left in 1908. The eldest, Jens, died of tuberculosis before his ticket from his father could be used. Olav Johan stayed and became Torstein’s father; he is the one who took his mother Berit in when the war made Narvik unsafe and Berit came south to Øyer. Albert Emil stayed in Narvik and had at least one daughter. Bjorne — the youngest, born after the 1904 family record — stayed in Narvik and married Christine, the woman Ray met as Aunt Christine in Narvik on the 1993 trip. Christine outlived Bjorne by many years and was the matriarch of the Narvik branch into the early 1990s.

Bjorne and Christine had three children: Torfinn, Turid, and Kari. Torfinn lived south of Oslo at a place called Aros with his wife Edna, and was Ray’s Oslo-end host on the 1993 trip. He has since passed; Edna lives in northern Norway now, up near the Lofoten Islands not far from Narvik. Turid had at least two children — Bjørig, born and raised in Sweden but Norwegian on her father’s side, and her younger brother Fredrick — both of whom guided Ray and Mary on the Narvik midnight-sun tour in 1993. Olai Ingabritson, Aunt Christine’s close friend, was the other host on that trip.

The 2026 trip doesn’t reach Narvik. It is six hundred kilometers north of Trondheim, beyond the trip’s scope. The Lillehammer end is what the trip touches in person; the Narvik end is what the family carries in memory.

The Lindseths — Horten

Marit and Ole Lindseth are Norwegian-American friends of Kirsten and Dave from their Concordia College years in Moorhead, Minnesota. The Lindseth children were exchange students in the United States when Kirsten and Dave were undergraduates, and the friendship took during those years and held across the decades that followed. The Lindseths moved back to Norway in adulthood and have lived in Horten ever since — a coastal town an hour and a half south of Oslo on the western shore of the Oslofjord. Their two children, Live (born about 1995) and Sindre (born about 1998), are close in age to Christopher and Nathan; the two families’ children grew up in parallel across two countries with periodic visits in each direction. Live and Sindre now both live in Oslo; Marit and Ole are still in Horten.

The Lindseths are personal context, not blood. The friendship is its own kind of family. On the 2026 trip, Day 1 belongs to them: Marit and Ole drive up from Horten to spend the day with the group, with Live and Sindre joining from Oslo. The day moves through Roseslottet, Ekeberg Sculpture Park, and Vigeland Park, in the rain or in the long northern light.

Sandra and Bjørn

A separate Oslo connection runs through Sandra Dvergastein, a friend of Live Lindseth who was an exchange student with Kirsten and Dave’s household from August 2013 to February 2014. Her father Bjørn Dvergastein visited the family at Christmas 2013. They know the family is coming and may join for a brief get-together on the first Monday in Oslo if schedules align.

Geography and bridge

The Norwegian-side relatives and friends the trip sees in person are clustered in two places. The Lindseths in Horten on the inner Oslofjord. The Jensen household in Lillehammer and Øyer on the Innlandet plateau. The Lindseths come up to Oslo on Days 1 and 2; the Jensen household receives the trip in Lillehammer on Days 5, 6, and 7. The Norwegian-side relatives not on the route — Edna up north near Lofoten, the Narvik descendants of Aunt Christine, any branch of Karen Anna Rolfseng’s line still in the Stjørdal valley — are part of the larger Norwegian family tree but are not part of the 2026 reunion.

The genealogical bridge between the Norwegian and American sides of the Jensen line runs through one shared couple, Baard Jensen and Berit Nikoline Andersdatter, and one shared decade, the 1970s, when the letter from Rochester reached Torfinn’s desk and the silence ended. Christopher and Trygve are third cousins; their shared ancestors are the couple who married in Bodin in 1896 and lived together in Narvik for twelve years before half the family crossed the Atlantic.

The Lindseth side has no such genealogical bridge. The connection is the four-decade Concordia friendship between two couples and the two pairs of children who grew up alongside each other across two countries.