Your Stories: Connecting with Norwegian Relatives

Discovering your family history is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have. We always love to hear stories from our users about their journeys as they research their genealogy.

Kitty Cooper

In 2012, Kitty Cooper launched Kitty Cooper’s Blog to keep track of her family’s DNA tests as well as her genealogical research. Written for her relatives with simple step-by-step pictorial explanations, the blog soon became extremely popular for her articles on genetics and genealogy.

Kitty works as a web developer and runs her own small web development business. She first started programming computers while she was in high school. During her spare time, Kitty has created a number of tools for the genetic genealogy community, including tools for displaying pictures of whom their DNA is from, for showing overlapping segments, and grouping the DNA overlaps.

Her ancestry is half Norwegian and half Bavarian German, with her German side also being half Jewish and half Catholic and arriving in the U.S. in 1935. Her mother was born in Munich. On her father’s side, only one grandparent was born in the U.S. to Norwegian parents. All were immigrants to the east coast, although many relatives went on to Illinois and Minnesota.

Not only is Kitty a cum laude graduate from Harvard University, but she’s also a World Champion Bridge player. Born and raised in New York City, she now lives in Lakeside, California with her husband, Steve, and their dog, Navajo. They have over an acre and more than 20 fruit trees. With that much land and trees, it’s a good thing she counts gardening as another one of her hobbies.

Kitty and her dad

Although Kitty had always enjoyed family stories and history, genealogy didn’t become a serious pursuit until the funeral for her Aunt Marion in 1997, where she realized that many family stories had also died with her beloved aunt.

“I resolved not to let any more of them be forgotten and started collecting stories and family data from that day forward.”

Her second cousin was a genealogist and had charts and pedigrees showing the family’s descent from King Harald the Finehair of Norway. From then on, she was hooked.

Kitty joined Geni in 2011 and loved how intuitive it was. Some of the things she loves about Geni are the relationship path displays at the top of a profile and the ease of adding sources and photos to profiles.

Although not many of her close relatives are involved in her genealogy research, besides a nephew and the daughter of a first cousin, she has discovered many other distant cousins along the way.

 “[I’ve found] lots of new 3rd and further cousins in Norway so now I will have to visit, plus many other descendants of my German Jewish line, a number of whom I have since met.”

And through Geni, she’s found that King Harald the Finehair really is her 26th great grandfather. In fact, Geni’s relationship calculator has been a very useful tool.

“I am often able to use the GENI relationship calculator to find the relationship of a new Norwegian DNA relative.”

Jørgen Olesen Wold and Anna Knutsdatter Wold

One such example was for a 3rd cousin, Henrik, in Norway found through DNA. After testing his DNA with 23andMe, Henrik appeared as a close match to Kitty’s father. Finding Henrik on Geni, her initial path search showed Henrik as her 15th cousin once removed. However, knowing there had to be a closer relationship given their matching DNA, she looked through the tree until she spotted some familiar names, albeit with slight naming differences. Confident that Henrik’s Jørgen Olesen was the same as her Jørgen Olesen Wold, she merged the duplicate profiles. It turns out Henrik was a descendent of her second great grandparents, Jørgen Wold and Anna Knutsdatter!

If you haven’t visited already, check out Kitty’s blog for great articles on genetics and genealogy. And for those just beginning their research, Kitty has a few words of wisdom:

“Stay organized and keep track of your sources well even if they are ‘as told by Aunt Gertrude’ – I did not know to do that at first and later was quite sorry!”

Special thanks to Kitty for sharing her experiences with us!

Do you have a story to share? Let us know in the comments below or email us at community@geni.com.

All photos courtesy of Kitty Cooper.