{"id":16202,"date":"2021-12-29T19:30:34","date_gmt":"2021-12-30T00:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=16202"},"modified":"2021-12-29T19:30:34","modified_gmt":"2021-12-30T00:30:34","slug":"the-saga-of-ola-not-my-ancestor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=16202","title":{"rendered":"The Saga of Ola, not my ancestor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Barbary pirates with their European slaves.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So Christmas is done, <\/strong>and winter, as it always does, snuck in while we were distracted. Winter is no less annoying before Christmas day, but it always seems like part of the festival. As if God is setting up His holiday department store window display. But then the holiday ends (I know it goes on till Epiphany, and I electrify my tree accordingly. But you know what I mean) and winter remains, like Styrofoam peanuts from the box Christmas came in. We didn\u2019t get a white covering until Dec. 26, but the snow is here to stay now (I believe) and I have the snow shoveling muscle aches to prove it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was able to gather with family (not the whole family, but some, which beats last year), and we had a low-key but pleasant holiday. As part of my duties as Weird Old Uncle at the celebration, I shared a story I\u2019d gotten in a letter from a distant cousin in Norway. He\u2019s been doing some research on family history, and he found a story worthy of Hollywood. I paraphrase it for you below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a warm summer day around the year 1800, a young man named Ola was watching his father\u2019s cows on a hillside with a good view of the sea near Ogna, in southern Rogaland. He noticed a square-rigged ship becalmed offshore. On a whim, he left the cows behind, walked to shore, appropriated a boat, and rowed out to the ship. He then signed on to the crew. He left his lunch bag hanging from one of the cows\u2019 horns, so his family would know he\u2019d left voluntarily. (They also noticed a boat was missing.) He later wrote his parents from Amsterdam. As a merchant sailor, he sailed with his ship to the Mediterranean, where they were attacked and captured by Libyan pirates. They were taken to Tripoli as slaves. One dark night, along with a French boy, he escaped. They swam in the sea for a while, then went ashore, walking and running the 2,200 kilometer distance (something under 1,400 miles) to Alexandria, Egypt, eating whatever they could scrounge. They stowed away (I think that\u2019s the meaning) on a ship to Istanbul. From there it was an 1,800 kilometer (a little over a thousand miles) walk back to Amsterdam. Ola went into the shipping transport business. When Napoleon blockaded European ports to British shipping, rates for cross-channel commerce skyrocketed, and Ola made a fortune in that business (smuggling, I guess you\u2019d call it). He married a British woman and settled down in Bergen as the owner of a shipping company once the war was over. Around 1830 he went home to Ogna to visit his family. He gave his siblings, two sisters and a brother, what amounted to a small fortune at the time, enough to build a nice little house.<\/p>

Some years later, his nephew Helge received a letter from him marked, \u201cDo not open until my death.\u201d After a few more years another letter arrived without any instructions outside. This document itemized his property. Ola had no children of his own, and he was concerned that his wife might conceal some of it when the estate was divided. Finally, in 1843, a letter came announcing Ola\u2019s death. Helge the nephew then opened the first letter. It said that he and his sister had each been left $100,000. But they had to do a sort of treasure hunt to collect the money. The letter said the money was buried in two small pots concealed under flat stones beneath the kitchen floor of Ola\u2019s house in Bergen. Being honest people, they went first to the Bergen police for permission, and then dug the floor up, found the flat stones, and discovered the pots, each with the amount of money promised. Helge also hired a lawyer in Bergen, to look after their interests until Ola\u2019s widow died. In the end they got half the estate, worth about $600,000 in modern money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I was quite excited to read this story, and wrote back to my cousin to ask if this adventure came from my side of the family. Sadly, no. All he could find about my side was that one of my ancestors was involved with the Moravian religious movement even before the Haugean revivals (which I\u2019ve written about here often ), and that another was the last person to die of leprosy in Randaberg parish (near Stavanger).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My family history, so far as I’ve been able to learn it, has been relentlessly unromantic. But I still reckon I\u2019m descended from Erling Skjalgsson. Prove me wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So Christmas is done, and winter, as it always does, snuck in while we were distracted. Winter is no less annoying before Christmas day, but it always seems like part of the festival. As if God is setting up His holiday department store window display. But then the holiday ends (I know it goes on … Continue reading The Saga of Ola, not my ancestor<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[3995,504,2047,3370],"class_list":["post-16202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-barbary-pirates","tag-christmas","tag-norway","tag-winter"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16205,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16202\/revisions\/16205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}