These pages are adapted from presentations at the Holtan Tweeten Reunion July, 2026. Written by Phil Holtan
Let’s start with a simple question: pause If Norway is so beautiful…why would anyone leave it?
Our story begins in a remote valley in Upper Telemark, Norway, near the small town of Mo.
In 1840, a baby girl was born there. Her name, copied from the church book recording her birth,
tells her story: Margit Tarjeisdatter Nordgarden. We will learn that she was the mother of all the Holtans. Her names were
- Margit- named in a very traditional manner, for her paternal grandmother, Margit
- Tarjeisdatter — daughter of Tarjei , and
- Nordgarden — the farm where she lived, their address or farm name. 3 names.
And her older sister Sigrid, mother of all Tweetens, born 13 years earlier in 1827, had two of the 
same names, Sigrid Tarjeisdatter Nordgarden. Both were born to Tarjei Nordgarden, lensman, or sheriff, in Mo.
That’s how names worked then. They told you who you were—and where you belonged.
And that’s important.
Because in Norway at that time—your future depended on where and to whom you were born.
What Was Norway Like?
Upper Telemark was beautiful. Mountains. Valleys. Trees and lakes. Isolated farms. But it was also hard. Very hard.
Most people were farmers. But land was limited. And except in a very few places, it was rocky, steeply sloped, and not very fertile. And here, high in the mountains, high on the globe where seasons are short even though the summer days are long, grain was very hard to grow. Mostly, it was grass, and a few potatoes and garden vegetables.
And by the mid-1800s—there were too many people and not enough land.
Families were large, and since the smallpox vaccinations, the good news that more children survived was also bad news, bad news for their prospects as farmers.
Because farms could not be divided forever. Usually, only one child—often the oldest son— would inherit the farm.
The rest? Had to figure out something else.
At the bottom of society were people called husmenn. Tenant farmers. Cotters. Sharecroppers. They didn’t even own land. They worked for others—just to survive.
And that’s where Hans’ family was. Hans was a neighbor boy to Margit, and Hans came from a very poor family. His father Halvor was a husmann, and even among husmenn, it seems he was very, very poor.
They moved from farm to farm—never stable, never secure. As we learned more about this family, we discovered by looking at their baptism and other church records, and the last “farm names” they received at birth, that their 10 children were born on 9 different farms. The children’s names are in the upper right of the map below. As you can see, there are many familiar names on the map.
See the lines that point to the farms where they were born. For some reasons, we’re not exactly sure, they had to move, constantly. We also know that of the 10 children, only 7 lived to be more than 3 years old, and we think even fewer survived to adulthood. You see that Gunild, the mother of all the Loviks in Iowa, was the next oldest sibling to Hans.
They moved a lot. That is so hard for a farmer. Phil’s grandpa Elmer Holtan moved to 3 different rental farms, and it took the life out of him. Dirty, weedy, run-down farms and houses. All those moves probably show that even among husmenn, Hans’ family was the poorest of the poor.
Margit and Sigrid’s family was different. Their father was the lensmann—something like the sheriff, the leading man of the district. They had land. Status. Stability. Their mother Else was a Mandt, even more status, even today. They were famous artists, sculptors, and especially silversmiths. They were educated and respected. They were buried in places of honor by the Eidsborg Stave Church. Not that they were so rich. No one had that much land or wealth, but they were certainly at the other end of the social scale, even if that scale was pretty flat in Mo.
And then something unexpected happened. Hans and Margit fell in love. (pause). Who knows where they met and their love sparked? I think it might have been on the seter, up on the mountain summer farms where the young people moved the cows and goats. The young boys herded the animals and harvested the hay of the lush grass of the mountain meadows, and the young girls milked the cows and made the butter and cheese. It was a rather unsupervised place for young people to meet, and if there were romance novels in Norway at the time, the seter was a pretty sexy place. The mountain meadows of these farms met at the mountain top, and I think Hans and Margit fell in love there.
This was not an equal match. Different class. Different future.
And according to family stories at least—her family strongly disapproved. But the young couple were determined, and Margit was pregnant, and so, a month before the birth, they married anyway. In 1858. She was 19. He was 24.
And for a few years, they tried to build a life in Norway. They had two sons, Halvor and Tarjei, named
in the traditional manner after the two grandfathers. They worked hard. Their sons were baptized as they lived on different farms. But there was one big problem: They had no land themselves. And no path to get it.
Margit’s older sister Sigrid, mother of Tweetens, also married below her status, but at least Jorgen had a stake in a small farm at Lofthus.
We don’t know the reason for sure, maybe her parents also disapproved of their unequal marriage, but instead of farming that small farm, they sold it, took his share of the sale, worked as servants and hired man for a few years on neighboring farms, and then they moved far away. At least in those days, it was. Maybe 2-3 days travel, to the warmer and more fertile valley of Nissedal. There they bought a small farm named Tveitane, a name their family still carries. Tweeten. It means a small meadow or a clearing in the forest, but in the plural, “clearings”, and maybe, on a hillside. Dah, that’s all Upper Telemark has, little clearings on the hillside.
Life had already been hard for them. According to their traditions, every family wanted babies to name after their grandparents, the first son after father’s father, the second after mother’s father. The first daughter after father’s mother, then mother’s mother. Well, to have a girl-child to name after dad’s mom, Aasne, they birthed three Aasne’s, and one finally lived, Aasne, the mother of all Kinglands. And to get an Else, with a name like mom’s mom, they also birthed three Else’s, until one lived, who later was mother of many Sime’s in Mt. Valley Township.
And if things hadn’t been tough enough, life fell apart for this young Tveitane family. Two more babies died, probably in childbirth, and both received the ‘Kiss of God,” baptism in their home, at birth, whether they were still alive or not. Only 4 out of 11 children in this family survived to grow up. Like so many families in poverty in Upper Telemark, malnutrition weakened their immunity and so many babies died.
And just when it seemed they had already lost too much, Jorgen Tveitane, the father, died, and then even Sigrid, the mother died. All were buried in the Nissedal cemetery, near their new farm.
The little orphan family that survived had a new head of house Mikkel, only 18 years old. He lost the Tveitane farm, and had no choice but to move these orphan children back to grandpa and grandma Nordgarden’s farm in Mo. When Sigrid died, Bendick Tweeten was 13 years old, Elsie was 8, and Aasne, soon to be mother of all Kinglands, was 5. For the Tweeten children, life had turned very dark.
So now we come back to Hans and Margit and the question: Why leave?
There were many reasons. But they all come down to one thing: No future. No land to inherit. No way to move up. No security for their children. And if anything, the Tweeten orphans were in even worse shape.
At the same time, letters were arriving from America. These “America letters” told a different story:
Land was cheap. Opportunity was real. You could start over. One writer said: “Here, anyone willing to work can succeed.”
Whether or not that was fully true— people believed it. Especially if the letter came with cash inside, as they often did, or even better, a ticket to America.
And the idea spread. They called it: America Fever.
Even in remote Telemark—people began to think: Maybe we could go too.
For Hans and Margit—this wasn’t abstract. It was personal. They had two young sons. And no future to offer them. So, Margit and Hans made a 
decision that millions of immigrants have made: They chose to leave everything behind for the sake of their children.
Think about that. Leaving:
- your language
- your family
- your homeland
Possibly forever.
One Norwegian immigrant wrote: “It is not easy to leave… this is where the roots of your heart are planted.”
And yet—they went.
There are two more details that mattered for Margit and Hans. They almost surely had a specific invitation. Hans’ older brother Even had left Norway in 1846, 16 years earlier, probably sponsored by Gunnar Felland, a neighboring farmer who needed a hired man in America. Even and Marken had just moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota, to an area just opened up by a new treaty with native tribes. He invited them and promised them a place to live and work, and almost surely, he sent tickets. That helped, but it was only part of the decision.
He told them about opportunity. And most importantly—he helped them come and to be at home in America.
This is what we call chain migration. One person goes…then helps the next. And the next. That’s how communities moved. That’s how families moved.
And one other detail. Grandpa and grandma came with them. Hans’ parents, the husmann, had no future either, not in Norway. The way it worked in Norway, the oldest son got the farm and then took care of grandpa and grandma. But there was no farm to inherit, no one to care for them there. No future, except with these two sons, maybe more, who could care for them in America. So Halvor and Haege, ages 74 and 68, left as well, prepared for a very rough and dangerous voyage, at any age.
We have other families here at our Reunion- Tweetens, Kinglands, Loviks. Their voyage was still a generation away, when steamships would replace sailing ships, and when these younger nephews and nieces of Hans and Margit were coming of age. So about 15 years later, as part of that chain migration, and with the help of Margit and Hans, Bendick Tweeten, Aasne Tweeten, later to be called Kingland, Else Tweeten, later to be called Sime. These nephews and nieces of Margit came to America, and Hans and Margit helped them, as Even had helped them.
They left many family members back in Norway, but that is now 7 generations ago, and we have mostly lost touch with our family back there, but other relatives came to America too. Even Holtan’s family, as large as Margit and Hans’ would eventually be, was already here and growing. Two others of their brothers may also have come, Gjermund who took the last name Lee, for sure, and we will have a sidebar in the website to explore their stories.
But Hans had other family who came too. Look at the much later Mt. Valley map to see more about Hans’ nephew and niece. One sister of Hans, Gunhild, married into the Opkomdalen family in Mo, and one of her sons, Halvor, by then called Lovik, when he came of age, sought adventure and a future in America. His married sister Birgit, who was already married to Kittel, also came and many Torgersons and Kittleson’s are her descendants.
So why did they leave Norway? In that area of Telemark, almost 50% of the population left over the several decades of immigration.
Why? Not because it wasn’t beautiful. Not because they didn’t love it. They left because they had no future there. And because they believed their children could have one somewhere else. (pause)
That decision—to leave everything behind—is the reason we’re here today.
And in our next story… we’ll follow them on the hardest part of that journey: the voyage across the ocean. Thank you.