The Tynning farm in Brekke
Nine lives rooted in the same farm
Isak Lasseson Tynning (1875–1960) and Brita Larsdatter Østerbø (1873–1965) had nine children. From the farm at Tynning the siblings spread to other parts of Norway, to Canada and to the United States. Here you can meet each of them and the families they created.
Two brothers · Canada and the USA
Two brothers, two paths into the world
Irgens and Sverre grew up on the same farm in Brekke, but life took them in different directions across the Atlantic. Irgens left for the Canadian prairie with Kari and the children in 1950. Sverre went to sea before the war, lived through years of broken contact with home and later made a family life in California.
In the 1920 census we find fifteen-year-old Irgens doing farm work at home on Tynning, while his little brother Sverre was four. Thirty years later both were part of a new, North American branch of the family — but their journeys were very different.
Irgens left as an established family man. Together with Kari and their three children he left Brekke in 1950, was supported by relatives in the first years and bought a farm near Kindersley in 1952. On the prairie the family built a new life, and their son Ansgar later became a notable community builder and mayor of Kyle.
Read Irgens' story
Sverre's path went first across the sea. As electrician and motorman he sailed through the war on five ships — from Sandefjord in 1939 to San Francisco in 1945 — and all his war service went out of Californian ports. In 1980 he was awarded the War Medal. After his years at sea California became home, with Gracielle and their sons Peter and Paul. Today the branch lives in Temecula, where both his son Peter and his grandson Ryan have backgrounds as pilots.
Read Sverre's storyThese are stories both of emigration and of connections kept alive: siblings, letters, photographs, visits and memories between Brekke, Saskatchewan and California.
