Øystein Lasse Tynning

Søndre Valler is not a history I read my way into. It is the farm where we brought the cows home, where I sat on the tractor with my father and played in the hay, and where I had my own small patch of soil and grew my own vegetables. We climbed the apple trees in the avenue and gathered apples for my mother's apple cakes. To a boy it was the most exciting playground in the world. The apple trees were older than all of us. They were what remained of a horticultural school that stood at Valler from 1909, and of an avenue of tall-stemmed apple trees planted along the road up to the farm.

I thought it was an ordinary farm, and that my grandfather had been an ordinary farmer. Only recently did I learn that the apple trees were his work, and that the whole field had once been full of them. The trees we climbed were what remained of Valler Gartneri.

My grandfather bought Valler in 1928 and moved in the same year. He came from a farm in Brekke in Ytre Sogn that he was the heir to, and that his brother later took over.

To me, Valler was the family farm. To him, it was the place where he began again.

Long before I had children, I knew that if I had a son, he would be called Lasse Tynning.

That is where something shifts. For four hundred years the name had been passed down from father to son without anyone having to decide about it. In 2014 it was no longer something I inherited. It was something I chose.

And a name you choose is a name you ought to be able to tell the story behind.

My grandfather Lasse took a secret with him to the grave. There are photographs in the family that nobody can put names to any more. There are farms, letters and press cuttings that mean something only for as long as someone remembers why.

It is not dramatic. It happens in every family, quietly, over one or two generations.

This archive is an attempt to stop it happening to ours. I bring out photographs from the Vestland County Archive, read parish registers in the Norwegian Digital Archives, search old newspapers at the National Library, colourise portraits and turn what I find into podcasts. Not because our family is remarkable, but because it is ours.

Not everything on these pages is equally certain, and I try to say which is which.

Some of it is documented: deeds, censuses, parish registers and dated newspaper articles. Some of it is family lore, passed down and never checked. And some of it is guesswork, which I try to label as exactly that.

I would rather write that we do not know than fill the gap with something that sounds good. Stories that are too smooth tend to be too good to be true.

If you have photographs, letters, recordings or memories that belong here, I would like to see them. The same goes for corrections: names I have spelled wrong, dates that are off, faces I have not managed to identify.

Nothing is too small. A name on the back of a photograph can be the thing that solves a puzzle.

The plan in 1998 was to make enough money on a school party to afford a cruise. The cruise never happened. JCP happened instead, and after that more than a quarter of a century of building companies, teams and meeting places.

That may be the most family-like thing I have to offer. Nobody in this family ended up where they had intended. My grandfather left the farm he was meant to inherit. My grandmother Åshild was the eldest of thirteen at Haugland, a farm only one of them could inherit, and she became a teacher in Telemark. One of her brothers became a communist in the same municipality.

That is not why this site exists. But it may explain why the archive looks the way it does: schedules, sources, systems and a certain need to finish what I start.