We came to Norway this year principally for a family reunion of my father's mother's...in Norwegian "farmors"...family. About 115 people from Norway, Mexico and the United States came We were all descendants of two brothers: Johan Edvard Werge and Thomas Werge. They were both sea captains in the last part of the 19th century. They were born, and their children were born, in the small village of Statehlle on a bay on the western side of the Oslo Fjord. During our reunion, we visited their homes which are still lived in by local residents, though thoroughly updated to modern Norsk standards.
The reunion was held at a small hotel complex on the rocky coast of the fjord. It was organized by several cousins, Arne and Kristin, who devised a set of activities and dinners that provided formal and informal opportunities for all these cousins of multiple generations to hang out and to be with one another to explore...well, who we were, who we are, who we are going to be. A massive chart stretched along one wall of a meeting room...defining the relationships between all of us and those who had gone before. One activity was posing for an official portrait...below some of us were getting ready.
But it was the open time and the informal activities, the picnics on the beach, the dinners, and the drinks on the back porch, that allowed us the space to understand how it fit together.
So we had time to understand how some of our parents' parents' parents' (depending on the generation we were now in) moved to new continents but kept certain traditions. Like naming children: my great grandfather was Thomas, my father was Thomas, my brother is Thomas, my son is Thomas. My father's younger brother, Halvor, died as a child in a fire in Jersey City around 1915, but here again I met a Halvor Werge, about 13 years old, and I imagine that they may have looked and smiled alike. And I could get caught up with my cousin Doris whom I last saw 50 years ago when she and my father's mother's brother and his family came to visit us in New Jersey.
Bethany Werge, 18, my grandniece (if there is such a relationship) had come wondering if there were going to be any people there her own age. There were. Norwegians seem to be held together more tightly by family ties than in the US where the generations tend of identify much more strongly with their age group.
The reunion leaves me with a profound sense of the passage of time...the movement of generations...not just the list of who begot whom...but the sense of history that we carry in our genes and often unknowing act out the past. And how the future is to unfold in the young people and the children who came to this moment in time. I find much to consider in terms of my own past, present and future...though my past now is much longer than my future...and how our lives extend far past our lives into those of others.
