Olaf Aslaksen
Olaf Aslaksen was born on 29 August 1869 at Tvedestrand and baptized in Holt church three weeks later, on 19 September, the legitimate son of Jens Aslaksen, handelsborger, and Petrea Halvordine born Simonsen. Tvedestrand was a made town rather than an old one. It had been a harbour for two farms' boats in 1600 and was granted the standing of a ladested in 1836 and of a town municipality on the first day of 1838, and the reason was the licence: the charter existed so that timber and iron could be shipped out of the harbour on behalf of Naes Jernverk, the ironworks in Holt parish that ran longer than any other in Norway. His father sold exactly that. In the 1865 census Jens is a traelasthandler, a timber merchant, and by Olaf's baptism he is a licensed burgher merchant of the town.
The son went to sea instead. He appears in the Norwegian naval enrolment rolls at Holmestrand, in the miscellaneous roll for 1870 to 1890, main roll number 1147, with his birth date recorded correctly. That is a state registration of a working seaman, not a family story, and it is the last certain Norwegian paper about him until 1905.
Where he went is written in his children. The eldest, a daughter, was born in the Falkland Islands about 1896, which puts him at Stanley by the middle of the 1890s and means he had married Louisa Malvina Hardy, a Stanley girl, out there. Stanley in those years was the ship-repair port of the Southern Ocean, the only place within reach of Cape Horn that could mend a hull or treat an injured crew. A second daughter was born in Argentina about 1898. Then the family settled at Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan, and three more children were born in Chile: Elizabeth in June 1899, John about 1901, and Ethel in January 1903, whose birth is registered by name at Magallanes in the Chilean civil register.
In 1903 the family left South America. On 10 February 1905 Olaf sailed from Kristiania on the Montebello, the Wilson Line steamer to Hull, on a ticket for New York. The police protocol gives him as thirty-five, married, a skibsfører, a ship's master, with his home in South America. His permission to travel was noted as his skipper's certificate. His brother David, twenty, a merchant's clerk of Botne, went with him on the same ticket. A son was born in Norway about 1905, so Louisa and the children had come to Norway too. They are not in the Kristiania emigrant lists of 1905 or 1906, and their crossing is still open. A daughter was born at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1906. That was the end of the moving. Eight months after Olaf sailed, his parents followed him to Ohio. The census of 1910 finds the whole household in the sixth ward of Cleveland with eight children in it, and the enumerator's birthplace column reads Falkland Islands, Argentina, Chile, Chile, Chile, Norway, Ohio, Ohio.
By about 1915 they were out at Avon Lake on the Lake Erie shore, where the family appears in the censuses of 1920, 1930 and 1940, where four more children were born, and where in 1917 they buried an infant son who lived twenty-nine days. He was still head of that house in 1940, when his infant grandson Alan was enumerated under his roof. He died on 7 September 1954 and is buried at Bay Village, one town up the same shore. His gravestone gives his birth as 18 April 1869; the Holt church book and his own Social Security application both say 29 August, and the stone is simply wrong.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Olaf Aslaksen (1869-1954)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/olaf-aslaksen-1869-1954-0740c3.