I’ve always been interested in maps. While working on a geography minor in school, I discovered GIS (Geographic Information Systems) which is essentially the science of creating, storing, managing and manipulating spatial data – in short, creating digital maps. I was taking those courses simultaneously with my genealogy courses and was troubled by how hard it was to find and use historical maps for genealogical research, particularly in Norway. On my first week of school we were given a print gazetteer of parishes along with very basic maps with no parish boundaries. I didn’t find the maps particularly useful and wanted to find a way to do things more efficiently. I often wondered things like, “what exactly is a parish? Does it have boundaries? How big are they? How are they organized?” I knew that a better understanding of the parish would help me in my research, so I’ve been interested in learning the geography of Norway’s parishes ever since.

After graduating, I began a master’s degree at Arizona State University, studying GIS. In the second half of my studies, I decided I wanted to specialize in Web cartography. After giving it some thought, I decided to create a web mapping application that allows people to easily search and view parish boundaries and farm locations in Norway. So that’s what I did! I obtained the data, did my research and created http://norwayparishes.com. It has evolved some since I first published it to the web, and I hope to continue to develop it to make it even more useful.

I searched in the search tool to the left, and after a few seconds, the little yellow square showed where you can see “Kløfta” on the map (Kløfta is the closest town to where my mother grew up).