Moorhead’s Les Bakke has been tracking his family’s footprints, on and off, for more than 30 years. “It started when my father died in the early 1980s,” he muses. “When your last parent passes away, it can kind of catch your attention.”
Adolph and Alice Bakke, who raised his family on a farm north of Thief River Falls, never talked much about the old days or their own immigrant parents, who’d come to Minnesota in the mid-1880s. “Dad would say, ‘Oh, why would you want to know that?’” the retired IT manager and hypercharged volunteer remembers. “It was like that in a lot of families around here.”
He was going through a box of his father’s papers when he came across a handwritten note on the back of a USDA flyer from the 1940s: “I, Peder J. Bakke, came to the United States in 1885, came to Alexandria in Dakota [sic] County, and then to Marshall County.”
That tallied with the little Les knew. Peder and his wife Agneta, both Norwegian immigrants, homesteaded there a few miles west of Newfolden. “She recognized it right away – ‘Oh, that’s Dad’s handwriting!’”
Soon he found that his grandmother, too, came to the U.S. as a teenage immigrant in 1887. He found the civil marriage record of Agneta Christiandtr and Peder, who may have known each other in the Old Country. The young couple, neither of whom spoke English, were married in Warren. “Afterwards, they walked home to the farm near Newfolden – all 17 miles,” Les adds. He knew Grandma only as an old lady who never mastered English.
That was the beginning. Les, then the manager of Moorhead State University’s Computer Center, took a first step that he now recommends to other Norwegian-American family sleuths. He went to Concordia College’s library, which at the time had the only genealogy resources in Fargo-Moorhead, and dug into the old books of Norwegian census records called “bygdabok” with records organized by places in the Old Country.
Those of Scandinavian ancestry have a special advantage in their research, he says, because records go back many centuries: “It’s all about invasions. Germany and much of central Europe have been a constant battlefield, and fighting destroys records. Norway hadn’t had an invasion since the year 1000 until the Nazis, and even they did not destroy the archives.”
He notes that all of his mother’s family, the Knitters and the Gasts, immigrated from Germany. He still considers himself Norwegian: “My little brother and I traded. Now I’m all Norwegian and he’s German.” Recent DNA testing, however, uncovered a surprise in their mother’s line. Results from ancestry.com and 23andme.com suggests that some of his sibling’s informally assumed full German-ness may actually trace back to Eastern Europe.
At Concordia, he looked up the village or district ofFåvang, the town his grandfather left behind, and found a trove of tidbits. “There was information on the Bakke family farm going back to the 1730s,” he reports. “The book noted it was ‘garden er kongen,’ or owned by the king. I found details like who lived there and how many cows and sheep they had, along with locations of Bakke Lower, where they spent the winters, and Bakke Upper, where they’d shepherd the livestock in summer.
“Now, that whetted my appetite,” he says. “I’ve pursued it ever since. It’s on and off, of course – but the great thing about history is that it never goes away.”
In 1986, Ruth Herring, one of the founders of Moorhead’s Heritage Education Commission (then affiliated with MSUM, now an independent organization) invited Les to share his expertise on computer-based ancestry research at the HEC’s annual September genealogy workshop. He’s continued to conduct periodic classes on database research ever since, most recently through Moorhead Community Ed at M State.
Les’s familiarity with computers gave him a head start building his own ancestry database, which now numbers 3,500 relatives he’s turned up himself plus 3,000 shared by a Norwegian relative engaged in a similar quest. Originally a history and then a mathematics major at what was then called Moorhead State College, he was thrilled by his first computer class … and that was that. He joined the Computer Center after graduating in 1972 and ended up heading it until his retirement in 2006. At that point, he joined the city of Moorhead as its IT director. He retired from that position, too, two years ago. Since then he has concentrated on volunteering with veterans groups and writing The Extra’s “Veteran’s Corner” column. He has served on the Moorhead Public Service board and currently volunteers at the Hjemkomst Center, Sons of Norway and Rourke Art Gallery.
Today family historians often begin with DNA analysis. Les’s interest, though, predates that cutting-edge tool. He began by sorting through all the scraps of information he and his known relatives could collect. He filled in the gaps by contacting distant relations as he found them, digging through county newspaper archives, locating county history books, and simply asking around. “Your old neighbors often know things – the kind of stuff your own family would never tell you,” he says, and smiles. “Some call it ‘gossip.’ It can shed a lot of light.”
Since his first forays into historical archives, he said, several newer sources have joined the Concordia collection of bygdaboks. “The University of North Dakota library has an outstanding collection,” he says. “There’s also the Institute for Regional Studies at NDSU and the Red River Valley Genealogical Society out at Bonanzaville.” He also mentions the state historical societies.
His best insights into how to uncover his family tree, he emphasizes, has been the Heritage Education Commission’s September workshops at Horizon Middle School, which have featured major lectures by experts from the LDS (Mormon) Church, the National Archives and other leading archives.
Every new clue still leads Les to find another. Besides the satisfaction of solving mysteries, what does he get from his many years of digging for family roots?
“The stories,” he grins. “I really enjoy telling all the stories.”
