Tora Thurston: The History of a Norwegian Pioneer

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 Synopsis

“Tora Thurston’s odyssey had its origin in the autumn of 1838, in the long, narrow valley called Numedal. Here in the heart of Norway’s rugged southeastern mountains, the nineteen-year-old youth listened with rapt attention to the talk of a land across the sea, where freedom and opportunity was to be had for the taking. ‘America’ seemed to be on everyone’s lips that fall, men and women, young and old, farmers, loggers, laborers, craftsmen, and even clergymen.”

So begins the story of the young man then known as Thore Torstensen Aarvelta. Leaving his family behind, he booked passage on the Emilie, bound for New York Harbor, one of the first immigrant ships to sail from Norway to America. This was the vanguard of what was to become a massive Scandinavian migration in the decades to come. Not long after his arrival in the Norwegian colony at Fox River, Illinois, Tora converted to a new American religion, Mormonism, and then fled west with the pioneers after the murders of its leaders, Joseph and Hyrum Smith. This book was a culmination of ten years of research and writing. It is over 400 pages of fascinating history, not only of Tora, but of his three wives (a Yankee, a Dane and a Swede) and his nineteen children. It is bound in navy buckram, filled with photos and other illustrations, and contains custom-drawn color maps, indices and pedigree charts taking Tora’s lineage back to the 1600s and beyond. The book has met with critical acclaim, winning the Dallas Genealogical Society’s first prize for biography.

Buy the Book

Over 1,000 copies of Tora Thurston: The History of a Norwegian Pioneer have been sold; it is now a collector’s item. As of this date (12/16/2019) there are five used copies available on Amazon selling for prices ranging from $199.52 to $250.00 each. However, I have a few new books remaining, which I am selling at discounted price of $38.00 (plus $5.00 to cover shipping costs). You can send me the payment via Venmo (Morris-Thurston) or PayPal (PayPal.me/MThurston), or you can send a check to me at the address on the Contact page. Be sure to include your mailing address and I will send the book to you.

Author's Notes

Tora Thurston was my first book, and like most first things, it holds a special place in my heart. I had heard about my Norwegian great-great-grandfather before I was called to serve a Mormon mission to Norway in 1962, but I knew no more about him than any of my other pioneer ancestors. In fact, all I knew was contained in a four-page biographical sketch written by one of Tora's granddaughters after his death. How grateful I was for that information, sketchy as it was.

Tora, and most of his ancestors for generations before him, came from a long, narrow valley in central Norway called "Numedal," with a deep fresh-water fjord and mountains rising to abrupt and beautiful heights. There were no LDS Church members in all of Norway when he immigrated to America and there were still no members in Numedal when I was there.

I always wanted to visit the valley because I could see from looking at a detailed map that most of the farms on which these ancestors lived in the 1800s were still there in the mid-1900s. A few months before I was to return to America, a fortuitous event occurred. I was asked to serve as a "Traveling Elder," meaning my companion and I had access to one of the four Norwegian mission cars so we could travel to assignments in towns where other missionaries were stationed in order to boost their spirits and get a sense of how they were doing. One day we were in Larvik, a town about 80 miles south of Oslo. We needed to drive back to Oslo, and I could see, by consulting my map, that if we were to travel about 40 miles out of our way we could visit Numedal. This would be a technical violation of mission rules (side trips were discouraged), but I decided to go for it.

We arose earlier than usual that morning and I was able to make the detour and drive the entire length of Numedal and back again. It was a cold winter day; snow was on the ground. I did the best I could to locate my family farms as I drove past. It was exhilarating and I vowed someday to learn more about Tora Thurston and why he would leave such a beautiful place and all of his family at such a young age.

I returned to America, finished college, married, graduated from law school, began working as a lawyer at a high-pressure law firm. Our children arrived and I was busy keeping up with family, church and work obligations. I knew I would eventually return to Tora's story, however, and in the 1980s I did. I spent nights and weekends and vacations researching and writing. I would schedule business trips so that I could visit libraries that might have material relevant to my story. Dawn and I returned to Norway and spent more time pinpointing the places where Tora and his ancestors had lived. As I learned more I found that some of the information in my four-page sketch was wrong---not surprising considering how it came about. I also learned some astonishing information about Tora's life in pioneer Utah that I could never have guessed. During these years I also tried to learn as much as possible about Tora's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I eventually tracked down about 85% of Tora's descendants and found that they numbered more than seven thousand. In the days before the Internet, this was a prodigious undertaking involving many hundreds of letters.

So this is why this book will always have a special place in my heart. It was hard work but, compared to my legal cases, it was fun work. I was a novice historian, but I think my research and conclusions have held up well. I hope you are as excited about the stories I uncovered as I was.

-- Morris Thurston