By Rob Olason
In 2012, Icelandic Roots was the name of a blog Sunna Furstenau started to document her role as the Icelandic National League of North America International Visits Program guest speaker in Iceland. She traveled around Iceland making twelve presentations about the Icelandic settlements in North America. The blog was a way to share her experience of that journey and the people she met. When she returned to North America, she continued the blog, teaching people about Iceland, holidays, and special events.
When Icelandic Roots officially launched in 2013 as a research and educational non-profit focused on Icelandic genealogy, the founding volunteers were laser-focused on improving the genealogy database acquired from Halfdan Helgason. This effort was all-consuming and allowed little time for other pursuits in the organization.
Given the passage of time, more activities were added to the Icelandic Roots offerings. Online webinars, discussion groups, and educational training in genealogy and database usage began to appear. To promote these new opportunities to Icelandic Roots members and to spread the word about the new non-profit, announcements were created and sent by email, or posted in Icelandic club newsletters and the Logberg-Heimskringla. Sunna also continued utilizing the Icelandic Roots blog to share Icelandic information including articles about items of interest to the Western Icelandic community: stories about the sagas, or Icelandic pioneer settlers and communities, or an event taking place in Iceland in the present day.
With the passage of even more time, these periodic announcements began to take the shape of a newsletter, and the articles became so numerous and offered such an array of information that they gave readers a unique opportunity to gain a great deal of knowledge about Iceland without the need to enroll in the School of Icelandic Knowledge.
After a decade of publishing articles in the Icelandic Roots blog/newsletter, Rætur Fréttir/Roots News, volunteers began to pour over the collection of nearly seven hundred articles to assemble the best collection of those articles to tell the story of Iceland, Icelanders, and their Icelandic roots.
Becky Byerly-Adams spent hundreds of hours honing down the collection to create Icelandic Roots' latest publication, Stories, Sagas, and Captivating Tales. This publication is destined to be essential reading for anyone interested in learning about Iceland and the Icelandic diaspora who found a new home in North America.
The stories in this collection bring voices from the past to a new audience in the chapter titled “Emigration Diaries.” We learn what despair it was to see one’s homeland disappear in the ocean from the account of Guðmundur Stefánsson’s 1873 passage to North America. Another account by Olafur Bjornsson, who left Iceland at six years of age, was written late in life. He included the unexpected image of witnessing Queen Victoria riding in a magnificent carriage in Glasgow as the group of Icelanders were waiting in that city to board the steamship Phoenician, bound for Quebec.
Unique voices fill eleven chapters and cover topics ranging from emigration, famous ancestors, folktales, history of Iceland to holidays and celebrations, pioneer stories, sagas, and even chapters featuring favorite articles and the story of the first ten years of Icelandic Roots.
In all these four hundred-plus pages it is easy to feel the passion and care the many writers put into their research and writing on subjects dear to their hearts. Opening the book to any random page will lead the reader onto many unique journeys into a very Icelandic realm, and hours of pleasurable exploration.
“Stories, Sagas, and Captivating Tales-The First Decade of Icelandic Roots,” can be ordered online at: theyuleboys.com. If you are attending the 2024 Deuce of August in Mountain, ND, or Íslendingadagurinn in Gimli, MB, visit the Icelandic Roots Genealogy Center where you can purchase the book in person.