Welcome to John Laird’s Family History Web Site.
I have been researching my family history for over thirty years.
When I was in high school, my grandparents returned from one of their regular trips back to the Upper Midwest, and told me that they discovered that one of the younger of fifteen children of my grandfather’s immigrant Norwegian grandparents - was alive and living in rural Minnesota. I corresponded with him in what turned out to be the last months of his life. He provided insight into that Norwegian-American family history and ancestry, and had written his own brief family history.
I got distracted by college and a career - and packed away that first work in a box. Prior to a foreign trip a quarter century later, a colleague gave me the Ole Rolvaag book “Giants in the Earth” to read during my travels. I realized that the story in that book was similar to that of my own immigrant family. I resumed my research, and I have never looked back.
I was lucky to have written my grandparents and others that first time around - because by the time I got back to it, they were all gone. I regret not asking them more about family stories of their grandparents. I give commencement speeches now, and I have added a section on making sure you interview the parents and grandparents watching the graduation - as they will not be here forever.
I have collected thousands of family photos (such as the one above of the Rev. John Ofstedahl and family ca 1909 - my grandfather Carl Ofstedahl is the young man in the upper left) and have done three oral history interviews with my mother, aunt, and my mother’s cousin. I have taken annual trips to the Salt Lake City genealogy library and gotten the family story back to Denmark, Norway, England, and Germany - as well as the founding of both Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut, the settlement of frontiers, and locations across the United States.
I have managed to take a few trips to ancestral areas - Norway and Denmark - as well as Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, and North and South Dakota. I have photos and some records I copied during those visits.
I have collected many family letters - some dating back to the 1880’s. I have cracked some “brick walls'“ of who might be our ancestors generations ago. But, as I mention in the column to the right, I also am stuck at other “brick walls” and posting about them might help bring more researchers into the conversation.
I have been lucky to connect with many relatives who have contributed photos, stories, and other things. I collected the stories and histories left by others and with my own unique research, have tried to weave one narrative of our family history across generations.
This genealogy website is designed to make sure that work is accessible to family members and other researchers - and lives past me. The overwhelming majority of the photos and documents are mine or in the public domain. I have worked hard to make sure it’s OK to post various items. If there are any where I stretched this in some way, please let me know and I will correct the situation.
Shown below is my mother Dorothy Ofstedahl Laird (right), her sister Lois Ofstedahl Grupp, and her brother Norval Ofstedahl, taken ca 1945.
I want you to enjoy the research I have done - and add or correct - to work together to take it to the next level.
I have organized this website by my family surnames. They are listed above and linked to different pages throughout the website. In some, it will be the photos, letters, and documents that tell the story of that family. In others, there will be text about the research that takes us to some of the farthest reaches of the family.
As I take this page public in December 2020, it is a work in progress. I started with my Ofstedahl family and the Lavik photograph collection - and hope that my posting all 319 Lavik images, others might help in identifying some of the unidentified ones that are over one hundred years old.
I obtained a few 1860’s tintype photos of the Clawsons - half are identified and half are not - and have posted them in the hopes of enlisting help in identifying the rest. I authored articles on the tintypes and I have posted one of the articles. I also authored an article for a national genealogy magazine on the family of our Revolutionary War ancestor Jeremiah Carpenter, which was incorrectly described in a 1976 book and was adopted as correct all over the internet.
As with any family history research, there are “brick walls” - the puzzles about the ancestry of direct ancestors generations back. For me, it includes the ancestors of Joshua Sanks in colonial Maryland, Nathaniel Kinney in colonial Maryland and Pennsylvania, George Sargent also in early Maryland, Garrett Clawson in colonial Pennsylvania, and more. The Sanks ancestry question is posted here - the first of the ”brick wall” research projects that will show up on this site, in the hopes that I might work with others on the same problem. I have research papers on the others, but they are not ready to post here.
Now that the framework is established and the site is up, I hope to add regularly with information on other family lines. Candidates for future work are our Danish ancestry, the Clawson family of my grandmother, the early Maryland ancestry of our Sanks, Sargent, and Kinney ancestors, and the Nashes and inter-related families - who settled in New Haven in the 1630’s and moved through different frontiers until my Mom’s grandfather homesteaded in Dakota Territory during the “boom” of the 1880’s.
I encourage questions, corrections, or additional information. My spouse always asks me about my family history research, “Aren’t you done yet?” You are never done, there is always more to learn, and therefore, more to tell. For example, I have an early page of Ofstedahl postcards, and I am sure there are others out there that people have. I did a page on my grandfather and his brothers in World War I - and I am sure there is more information out there to add.
Shown above is a letter from my great-grandfather James Nash to my great-grandmother Ida Kate (Christensen) Nash in 1897 - when he was County Treasurer in Charles Mix County, South Dakota. The letter was from Wheeler - the county seat - where my grandmother Josephine Phoebe Nash was born the next year. Wheeler was later inundated by the Fort Randall Dam on the Missouri River and no longer exists.
The photo at the bottom of the page is the image side of a postcard of a street scene in Nysted on the island of Lolland in Denmark. When Ida Kate Christensen (Nash) was four in 1872, her father, mother and five siblings left for America by ship - and a sixth sibling was born on the trip over. A seventh sibling - her oldest sister Marie - remained in Denmark. Marie married Otto Kruger. In this image, you can see the name “O. F. Kruger” on a shop in the center part of the image. That was the shop of Marie’s husband. The message side of this postcard invited Chris Christensen to Denmark for Marie and Otto’s 50th wedding anniversary in 1929.
I hope you enjoy this site, and I hope you have something to add!!
