Here I'm going to do two different kinds of searches. One in the censuses as they have a unique feature called "global search" and on in the emigrants lists. The person I picked on random and I have no connection to the family so please don't ask me if I have any information about them if they happen to be connected to you.
Assuming that you have read the information about what the database contain elsewhere on these pages, I'll skip that.
Example 1 Your info: Christian Christopherson born 1901 and mother Karen immigrated to Canada 1904. Christian Had another older brother named Lawrence in Canada. And since he was older he had to be born in Norway also.
The first thing to is to use the database selector to navigate to the emigrants databases.
From there select those bases that have information after 1900.
And then just start the search in any of the ports as you do not know if the left from Oslo or Bergen or any other origin.
I started in Oslo since I lived there once. :-)
And I met a snag at once. Se the page about emigrants from Oslo here and click the back button when you've read the info.
So I chose 1867-1930 database since that contained most info about emigrants in 1904.
And the first I did was to choose "sex" and "starting on" and "m"
That effectively halved the persons to search through. Se picture below
I now only have 145 861 persons to browse through. Still to many. :-)
Then I chose the year equals 1904. I should have used 1903-1904 since they could have left Norway late in 1903 and arrived Canada in 1904. But I knew from the arrival date that they left Norway in 1904.
I am now down to 6545 persons and getting there. (wherever that is)
I then used "Given name" and "contain" and used the wildcard ? and * together with "rist" which should give me any name with that in it. Whether he had another first name too or not.
And got down to 406 persons. This is going fast.
I then chose search his last name since this is after 1900 and it was quite usual to give the children a last name in such registrations. But I could have chosen age 2-6 to be certain to find him if he was registered there.
So I used "Last name" and "contain" and the term "rist" again. This time without wildcards.
And now we are real close! Only 29 persons fit the bill I made. This is possible to browse, but as the lazy person I am I go for the age as well. :-)
Ergo. Next step "Age" "equals" "2-5"
And presto!
We now have only 2 persons leaving Oslo in 1904 at that age and only one seems to be the right age and the right last name. so I click on the link in blue to the left.
And what do you know? He had a mother named Karen. This look like the right family. And there is a brother named Lorentz Klaus which is very close to Lawrence in pronunciation. And all of the family except Hjalmar Kristian ( who by the way ha an additional name an different spelling than in Canada. But I am certain that this is the correct family. Because we have many variables that fit together. (Birth date, mothers name, date of departure, destination and finally the name of the brother) This is too many hits to be coincidence.
And this gives us enough information to do a search in the1900 census of Sandefjord which was the place they lived when they lived in Norway.
To be continued...
