Sigrid Torkelsdotter Fatland

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Sigrid Torkelsdotter Fatland: From the Sandsfjord to Setesdal

Born at Fatland in Ryfylke

Sigrid Torkelsdotter was born in 1580 in Sand, in Rogaland, Norway, the daughter of Torkel Torgersen Vanvik and Anna Knutsdatter Vanvik. By 1582 her parents were living at Fatland, in Sand in Ryfylke, and that farm name became her own: she is remembered as Sigrid Torkelsdotter Fatland. In the Norway of her day, a person was identified by a father's name and a farm.[1][2] "Torkelsdotter" told anyone who heard it whose daughter she was, and "Fatland" told them where she belonged.

Both of her parents had been born in Sauda, the neighboring district at the head of its own fjord a short way north of Sand. Her mother's family name, Vanvik, came from her maternal grandmother's side: Gunilla Navarsdatter was born and died at Vanvik in Suldal. Sigrid therefore came into a world bounded by a small cluster of fjord and valley communities: Sauda, Suldal and Sand. Families in that corner of Ryfylke had married among themselves and worked the same steep shorelines for generations. Her mother was about twenty when Sigrid was born. Torkel was roughly ten years older.

For ten years Sigrid was the only child in the family. Her sister, Ingrid Torkelsdatter Fattland, was born in 1590. By the time Ingrid arrived, Sigrid was old enough to be real help in the house. On a western Norwegian farm, a girl of ten would already have been minding a baby, carrying water and wood, and learning the steady round of milking, spinning and cooking that would fill most of her adult life.

Girlhood on the Sandsfjord

Sand sits where the Suldalslågen, one of western Norway's great salmon rivers, empties into the Sandsfjord.[3][4] Farms there clung to narrow strips of good soil between water and mountain.[5][6] Households lived from a mix of small grain fields, livestock, fishing and the forest.[5][7] In summer the animals were driven up to mountain pastures, and much of the dairying fell to women and girls.[8][9][10] Butter and cheese made in those weeks fed the family through the long winter.[8][9][11]

The wider world reached Ryfylke by sea.[12][13] Through the 1500s and into the 1600s, Scottish and Dutch ships worked the western fjords, loading timber and paying for it with grain, cloth, salt and coin.[12][14][15] The trade brought foreign sailors and new goods into communities like Sand.[12][13][15] It also gave ordinary farm families a source of cash that their grandparents had rarely known. Sigrid was born into a kingdom ruled from Copenhagen.[16][17] Norway had been bound to the Danish crown, and to the Lutheran church that crown imposed in 1537, for more than forty years before her birth.[18][19] Sunday sermons, the catechism she would have learned as a child, and the written language of officials were all Danish, even as her family spoke the western Norwegian of the fjords at home. Christian IV, who would reign through most of her adult life, was still a boy when she was small.[20][21] He came of age as king in 1596, when Sigrid was a young woman of sixteen.[20][21]

A Father Lost, a First Child Born

Torkel Torgersen Vanvik died in Sand in 1599, when Sigrid was 18 or 19. The death of a father on a Norwegian farm was more than a private grief. It raised immediate questions about who would work the land, how the property would be divided, and what would become of a widow and two daughters, one of them only nine. Her mother, Anna, is recorded with two husbands in all. Remarriage after a spouse's death was ordinary and often necessary in rural Norway.[22] A farm needed both a man's and a woman's labor to survive,[23][24] and the pattern would echo in Sigrid's own life.

In 1600, the year after her father's death, Sigrid's first child was born: a daughter, Karen Nielsdatter, whose father was Niels Pedersen Persson. Sigrid was 19 or 20. Niels had been born the same year as Sigrid, 1580, in Valle in Aust-Agder. Valle lay on the far side of the mountain plateau that separates the inland valleys of Agder from the fjords of Ryfylke.[25][26][27] Old paths across those heights were used for generations to drive cattle and carry trade goods down to the western fjords.[28][29][30] Such links between the two districts are the likeliest way a young man of Valle and a farm daughter of Sand came to know one another, though how they actually met is not known. Karen grew to a long life and died in 1683, fourteen years after her mother.

Two Husbands, Twelve Children

Sigrid was married twice, to Niels Pedersen Persson and to Jens Mogensen, and twelve children are recorded to her, six sons and six daughters, born between 1600 and 1630. Seven are listed with Niels as their father, from Karen in 1600 to a second Karen in 1620. Five are listed with Jens, from 1621 to 1630. The natural reading of that sequence is that Sigrid's first marriage ended around 1620 and she soon remarried. Niels Pedersen's own record, however, carries his life on until 1653 in Åker, in Hol, Buskerud, far to the northeast. The two pictures cannot both be exactly right, and the order and timing of her two marriages remain unsettled.

After Karen, the children with Niels came in a close run: Peder Nilsen in 1613, Anne in 1614, Torkel in 1616, Johanne in 1617, Kristi in 1618, and Karen in 1620. Anne, Johanne and Kristi carried the surname Prestegarden. "Prestegarden" means the parsonage farm, the farm that supported a parish priest. The name suggests that at least part of this household's life was lived on, or closely tied to, such a farm.

The names themselves carry the family's history. Norwegian custom favored naming a first son for his father's father and a second son for his mother's father.[31][32] Peder, born in 1613, carried the name of Niels Pedersen's father, and Torkel, born in 1616, carried Sigrid's own father's name, seventeen years after his death. Anne, born in 1614, may likewise have been named for Sigrid's mother, Anna, who was still living.

With Jens Mogensen, Sigrid had Mogens in 1621, Erich and Lars both in 1625, another Lars in 1628, and Seigne in 1630. Mogens, the eldest, carried the name of Jens's own father, Mogens, in keeping with the same naming custom. Giving a later son the same name as an earlier one was common in Norway when the first child had died,[31][33] although the earlier Lars's fate is not known.[31]

Her mother, Anna Knutsdatter Vanvik, died in Sand in 1623, when Sigrid was 42 or 43. By then Sigrid was in the thick of raising a second family, with small children around her and a link to her own childhood at Fatland gone.

A Household Spanning Three Decades

Seigne Jensen, Sigrid's last child, was born in 1630, when her mother was 49 or 50. Bearing a child at that age, after some two dozen years of pregnancies and nursing, was a real physical risk in an age without any medical help beyond the experience of neighbor women and midwives. That Sigrid came through it, and lived nearly forty more years, says something about her constitution.

The span of her motherhood was remarkable. When Seigne was born, Karen, the eldest, was about thirty and old enough to have children of her own. Sigrid may well have been raising infants at the same time she was becoming a grandmother. In a household like hers, the older daughters would have taken over much of the care of the younger children, as Sigrid herself had done for Ingrid. The work of feeding a large family from a Norwegian farm, with butter and cheese, porridge and flatbread, salted fish and cured meat, wool spun and woven into clothing, would have passed from her hands into theirs over the years.

These were not quiet decades in the kingdom.[34][35] Christian IV drew Denmark-Norway into the Kalmar War with Sweden in 1611–1613 and into the Thirty Years' War in 1625–1629.[34][35][36] Both meant heavier taxes and calls for soldiers from Norwegian farms.[37] The 1600s also brought cold spells and crop failures to parts of northern Europe, notably in the 1620s and the famine-prone 1690s, though many seasons in between were milder, and a family of Sigrid's size would have felt the hard years keenly.

The Long Later Years

In 1653, when Sigrid was about 73, her sister Ingrid died, and the same year her son Peder died at about forty. Niels Pedersen Persson's death is also recorded in 1653. Losing a younger sister and a grown son within a single year was a heavy blow for a woman in her seventies. Ingrid was the one person left who had shared her childhood at Fatland, and Peder was the eldest son of her first marriage.

Sigrid lived long enough to see the kingdom itself transformed. In 1660, the year she turned eighty, Frederik III became absolute and hereditary monarch of Denmark-Norway, ending the nobility's old share in government.[38][39][40] The change came just after another round of war with Sweden, fought partly on Norwegian soil.[41][42] For a farm woman in her eighties these events were distant, but they reached even remote valleys through the tax collector and the parish pulpit. By then, a large share of the people she had known in her youth would have been gone. Living past eighty was uncommon in seventeenth-century Norway, and reaching ninety was rare.[43][44]

Death in Setesdal

Sigrid Torkelsdotter Fatland died in 1669 in Setesdal, Aust-Agder, Norway, at 88 or 89. She is also remembered in the Valle community tree, under the name Sigrid Torkjellsdatter Vanvik. Her death far from the Sandsfjord marks a life that crossed the mountains. It ended in the same inland county of Aust-Agder where Niels Pedersen had been born, on the other side of the heights from the fjord farm where she grew up. Setesdal was a long, narrow valley whose communities clung to old ways of dress, speech and building longer than almost anywhere in Norway.[45][46][47] An old woman dying there in 1669 would most likely have been surrounded by children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Most of her children outlived her. Karen, her firstborn, died in 1683; Anne in 1695; Kristi in 1703. Her son Lars, born in 1628, lived until 1729, dying at about 101.

Legacy

Sigrid's life began in the reign of a Danish king who had never seen Norway and ended under an absolute monarch. In between, she lived nearly ninety years on the fjords and in the valleys. She took her name from a farm on the Sandsfjord and her identity from a father who died before her first child was born, and she gave his name, Torkel, to a son.

Her motherhood stretched across thirty years and two marriages, from a daughter born when she was barely twenty to another born when she was nearly fifty. Her mother, too, is recorded with two husbands, and the pattern of a woman carrying a household through more than one marriage runs through both generations.

The most striking measure of her life is time. Sigrid was born in 1580, and her son Lars lived until 1729. Between the two of them, mother and son, their lives reached across a century and a half of Norwegian history, from the timber ships of the old Ryfylke trade to the eighteenth century.

In this biography: 24% sourced history · 51% our reasoning · 1% general background · 24% from your ancestor's records