A new and exciting development to the Archives Center will be an Audio library! We have a video with audio already available, two in fact. They can be accessed as soon as we post them to the Archives page.

Another way to say it is: "If you don't know where you have been, you don't know where you are going!"

Have you ever wondered what motivated our ancestors to leave Norway and travel across the Atlantic in a sailed ship, then travel by train to Iowa?

Britta was the valiant Matriarch of the Olsons or Stadems or Stadeims or Stadheims of the Old Country who produced our particular line. (I am so glad they dropped Olson, aren't you?--THAT TRIBE HAS ENOUGH PEOPLE IN IT!).

Mother to all of us, a true Matriarch, she was the mother of Sjur and Knud, who had the old Viking spunk living in them and emigrated to America. We have devoted an entire tribute to her. I am not sure there are any extant photos or drawings of her--which is too bad, but who knows what priceless pictures were destroyed when a cyclone obliterated Sjur and Oline's house when it was under construction. All they saved from that disaster was a single family photograph. But what they have to teach us could fill volumes. All we have is a website, to do this great work of translation. I hope you have patience as we unfold the things they have bequeathed us in their golden legacy. It isn't fashionable, yet it is so timely it could save us and teach us how to survive as Christians in the coming world famine and the collapse of the present order.--Ed.

As Grandpa repeatedly testified in one way or another, his wife was the real spiritual powerhouse and pillar of the Stadem household, not himself. But do you know the basic facts about her, that they weren't promising at all, in fact, were almost guaranteed to keep her down and cause her life to be of no real significance? That she had great handicaps to overcome even at a very young age is revealed in this short biographical sketch: