Coming Full Circle: Return to our Norwegian Roots
At Åkeren, the family farm at Nore Askeland outside Bergen, the history Jonny had researched had a setting we could walk through: a house on a foundation of local stone, older outbuildings, and land where generations of Pam's family had lived before their paths divided between Norway and America. Jonny, Kari, and cousin Thor were with us. We had come in September 2026 to meet relatives and visit the place that connected their family to ours.
More than fifty years earlier, Pam had lost her mother, Margaret, who died suddenly of heart disease in February 1971. Pam was seventeen. She left home shortly thereafter and went on to Alaska, where her life of adventure included work as a cook and deckhand on crab boats all during the 1970s. Margaret's Norwegian family was part of the life she came from; the years that followed took Pam far beyond Arlington, Washington, where the Norwegian emigres of her family had settled.
Coming to Norway on this trip was a return through her mother's family, not a return to the life they had shared. Meeting relatives could not give Pam back her mother. What we found in Norway was something different: cousins with their own memories, Jonny's account of the generations before us, and a farm that remained a place in people's lives rather than only a name in the family record.
The way to Åkeren had opened through our daughter, Mia. Nearly three years before our visit, she had noticed a small casting announcement in a Seattle newspaper and decided to answer it, without knowing that her own Norwegian adventure would eventually bring her mother here.
A Casting Call in the City Section
On a Sunday in January 2024, Mia found a small notice in the Ballard Weekly newsletter announcing auditions for Alt for Norge, or All for Norway, a popular reality TV show that airs in Norway. The last local interviews for the cast of Season 11 were set for the following Wednesday.
The casting company wanted interesting and dynamic Americans of Norwegian ancestry who had not visited Norway as adults, and who could spend up to six weeks there in May and June. Mia taught social studies at Maritime High School in the Highline district. Taking that much time away seemed scarcely possible, but so did being selected. She auditioned for the experience.
The Sabo Line
Norway was already present in our family through Pam's maternal relatives. After Margaret died, her mother, Ida, helped support the family. Pam's father soon remarried Sharon who had two pre-teenaged children. Soon after Pam set out on her own. Ida died in 1984, three years before Mia was born.
The records preserve the changes that came with migration. Inez Lilleoren's family history explains that two of Johannes and Ingeborg Lilleoren's children, Ella and Ivar, chose Johnson in America; Ole, Johan, and Andrew chose Lilleoren, believing there were already too many Olsons and Johnsons. Ella married Ingebrit Sabo in Arlington. Their daughter Ida was Pam's grandmother.
Ida's younger sister, Bertha, became a family lifeline for Pam and Mia's surrogate grandmother. For five or six summers, she and her husband, Ron Jensen, escaped the Phoenix heat by coming to stay in an apartment in our Seattle home. Those summers, and the wider Sabo family around Seattle (including Margaret's half-siblings Anita Goodman and Keith Goodman), gave Mia a connection to Norway long before the television program.
Mia was chosen as one of ten participants, listed as Noemia “Mia” Mlekarov of Seattle, with roots in Vik i Sogn (Warner Bros. Discovery Norway). Being selected meant arranging leave from teaching and making plans with her husband for their two children, then ten and eight.
In an early episode, she met her cousin Lillian Askeland and traveled with her to Vik (Alt for Norge, Episode 3). Lillian's branch had moved to Bergen around the time the American relatives were settling near Seattle. At the shoreline, Mia learned that Anders and his wife had raised their children in a small house on land they did not own, and that the Sabo name connected them to the larger farm, Sæbø (Episode 3, 4:59–5:48). “It's really special to know where your name comes from,” she said (Episode 3, 5:48–6:14).
Lillian had made her career as a country singer and had also taught music (Lillian Askeland). When Pam and I later met her, she told us about recording in Nashville and touring the United States. She and Mia shared both teaching and a love of singing.
In her autobiography, Jeg ville bare synge, “I Just Wanted to Sing,” Lillian recalls a childhood filled with accordion, guitar, harmonica, and family singing.
Mia stayed through ten of the season's twelve episodes. Another contestant won, but the connection with Lillian remained, and another cousin would soon write.
Jonny's Message
When the season began airing on September 16, 2024, Jonny Askeland saw his sister Lillian and Mia together on screen (Warner Bros. Discovery Norway). He obtained Mia's contact information through the producers and wrote to her.
The youngest of four siblings, with Svein, Lillian, and Kari all older, Jonny had traced the family back four to five centuries. He and Mia exchanged what they knew; in 2025, she organized a Sabo reunion in Seattle to share her discoveries.
In the account he sent us, Jonny described traveling the world as a young sailor working in shipping and the oil industry. He later studied sociology and economics and spent twenty-three years as a newspaper key account manager. In retirement there were children and grandchildren, music, and his boat, which he took out to fish and collect crab and lobster.
Shared a Life on the Water
Seamanship and maritime training had helped some family members make their way up Sognefjord. Jonny describes Anders Askeland as a ship captain, placing work on the water alongside the farms in his history.
Pam's own working life had taken her to sea in Alaska. In 1973 she shipped out of Kodiak as a greenhorn cook on the F/v Marten, Jim Fisk's wooden power scow, for a crab season. She was fortunately no longer aboard when the Marten was wrecked off Spruce Cape in a February 1975 storm.
Later, out of Sand Point, she was ship's cook and deckhand on the crabber Cascade, where she learned to take wheel watches and maneuver the vessel on long passages so the other crew could catch up on sleep. She also crewed on Cascade salmon-tendering charters, buying fish in Bristol Bay and carrying them to the plant at Uganik on Kodiak Island.
Mia learned to sail young and holds mariner certifications for operating small motor vessels in Washington State. These were learned skills, not an inherited instinct. Beside the names and dates, they offered a connection I could recognize: practical knowledge that allowed each to make a life on the water.
Journey to Bergen, 2026
At the Family Farm
Åkeren, “The Field,” lay at Nore Askeland on Lindås, about thirty-one miles outside Bergen. Anders Andersson was born there in 1841. Jonny traces at least eight generations and considers it likely that the family farmed there in the early seventeenth century (Jonny's recorded account, 1:09–1:33).
Anders and his wife, Ingerid, moved to Vik and later America; Jonny gives 1902 for their emigration, a date still to be confirmed. Anders's older brother Nils built a house on a seaside plot at Askelandsøyna. Pam's branch led through Anders; the Norwegian cousins, Jonny explained, descended from Nils.
The farm had not remained continuously in family hands. After sales in the nineteenth century, it returned in 1949, when Nils's granddaughter Anny and her husband, Arne Thunes, bought it. The name “family farm” held departures as well as returns.
A neighbor whose family had acquired the lower section beside the fjord joined us with recollections of Askeland relatives he had known. People in our family record had been his neighbors. His memories brought them within a living person's acquaintance.
We were told the house was about a hundred years old, its local-stone foundation dating from the 1600s. It had no indoor plumbing; nearby outbuildings could shelter sheep. A couple in their thirties, with a four-year-old son, now owned it.
With Jonny, Kari, and Thor, the visit felt less like an excursion than a pilgrimage. Some in our gathering were in their later years. We could not take for granted that we would all come here together again.
Around Kari's Table
Our last evening was at Kari's home. Lillian came with her husband and had prepared a delicious traditional lamb dish and a delicous traditional dessert. Kari's eldest daughter, Jonny's wife, and his nineteen-year-old granddaughter, also named Mie, joined us. The family history continued in people younger than our own daughter. We were connected.
Early the next morning, we flew to Svolvær, arriving a day before we were to embark on Polaris for nine days in Lofoten with friends. Behind the names in the record were now people who could answer another question, write the next letter, or welcome us at a table.
The People We Return To
Mia answered the newspaper notice; Pam came to meet relatives from the family of the mother she lost at seventeen. That return does not resolve Margaret's absence. It adds the people we met at Åkeren and around Kari's table, and Lillian's hope that we will spend more time together.
We now have email addresses for the relatives we met, and all of them will hear from us when these posts appear. Jonny has talked of bringing some of his family to the United States, perhaps in 2027 or 2028. The goal is simply to keep in touch.
The origin story of the Sæbø, Askeland, and Sabo family is now well documented, and we hope it will be read on both sides of the Atlantic. For Pam and me, uncovering this piece of her family's origins was pure joy.
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