KIRKEBAK
My matrilineal line hails from Ørland, Norway, wherin lies Austraat, a historical seat of power in Norwegian history. The Kirkebak family is shrouded in mystery, with its roots traced back to ancient Norwegian times. There is also speculation about a French connection back in the 1700s. My matrilineal line also includes the Eide family, whose origins in Norway come from around the year 1615, when my forefather, a priest from the royal priesthood in the Kingdom of Denmark, was exiled to Norway. He was a part of the ancient nobility of Denmark, a warrior class loyal to the King when war would unfold. In return for this loyalty of arms, he belonged to the “adel” or in this case the “ur-adel.” The family had a coat-of-arms, a lot of land, castles, and hereditary titles. All this was stripped when the priest married a woman who was accused of bigamy; she had married the priest while already being married to another man (who was dying). As a result the priest and his wife were exiled and sailed for Norway in the year 1615. He had also been in other controversies, having a public feud with a German royal duchy, accusing them of “lacking backbone.” When he arrived at Austraat, he had been defrocked, lost all his titles, all his land, and started a new life as a farmer. The Eide family has been in agriculture ever since. Interesting to note, all of Norway was converted to the Protestant faith from Austraat, where the priest had landed. Fru Inger Ottesdatter (Lady Ingerd of Austrått) played a significant political role in this, but the theological groundwork in the background is more obscure…
Austraat manor was historically one of the largest properties in Norwegian history, and all of Norway was ruled from Austraat during the Denmark-Norway union period. Read more about Austraat here.
During WWII the Kirkebak family sided with the allies and worked with British intelligence as part of the Norwegian resistance movements in Trøndelag. Many members of the family were taken captive by the Nazis and were sent to prison and also to concentration camps. More details can be found in the national archives, which have now been de-classified.
In more recent times the family has been involved in banking, agriculture, and politics.
My mother is the best woman i know in the whole wide world. She is a nurse and has helped countless patients. She is loving, caring, but also strict and demanding. She decided to specialize in later years and became a sexologist and founded the Danish Institute of Sexoloy.
TERJESEN
My patrilineal line hails from Arendal in the south of Norway. The story of the Terjesen family is full of love and tragedy. The family comes from weatlhy landowners and as was the custom of the day in the 1700s, it was common that two families would inter-marry to consolidate and grow their land acreage. One of my forefathers had therefore found a suitor for his daughter, my great-great-great-great grandmother. She on the other hand, had other plans. She had fallen in love with the stable boy. The father found out about this and cut her off completely from the family and the inheritance. She was the eldest daughter and was set to inherit a great fortune. Instead she chose love and became very very poor, shuffled off and away from society to a small plot of land which had no resources and which was not arable.
The stable boy, my forefather, and the daughter then conceived many children. Being extremely poor, my forefather had no other options but to transport timber. The legend says that he transported 3x as much timber as anyone else, in order to feed his children. This good work-ethic has echoed down the generations as the Terjesen’s are honest, hard-working people, who value love over money.
In the early 1900s there was a tragedy when a mother died in childbirth, giving birth to my great great grandfather. The father died shortly after the mother died. As a result there were 5 orphaned children. Because times were hard, they all immigrated to the United States of America. The eldest brothers went first, going to Minnesota. My great great grandfather followed suit some years later when he had turned 14 years old. When he arrived in New York at age 14, a Jewish family took pity upon the orphaned boy who had come all alone to New York. So they decided to take him in to their household, they reared him through school, presumably to learn English, and gifted him a Stradivarius violin. He eventually traveled onward to Minnesota to re-link with his brothers.
He must have gone back to Norway at some point because he had 5 children in Arendal when WWII broke out, and he was stuck in New York unable to travel back to Norway. He had been in New York to build the World Fair of 1939 with the theme “building a better world for tomorrow”.
My grandfather, one of the children left behind in Norway, was therefore raised by his mother alone during WWII. When he turned 18, in 1945, he enlisted in “Tysklandsbrigaden” the only ever Norwegian military contingent that ever went to Germany. They were sent to Germany to “occupy” after WWII had ended. He never spoke of what he saw there, but he was clearly troubled by it, ostensibly due to the horrors he must have witnessed.
My father has worked for the NPD (the norwegian peteoleum directorate), Statoil (now Equinor), DanOP (now DONG Energy) and Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia.