Valdres

The bygdelag for this district

A bygdelag is a North American association of descendants from one Norwegian district. They hold annual gatherings called stevne, keep genealogists who know the local records, and are almost always the fastest route to someone who has already traced a farm near your own.

The umbrella body for all the lags is the Norwegian-American Bygdelagenes Fellesraad, founded in 1916. If you are not sure which district your family came from, the Fellesraad site is organised by Norwegian region and is the right place to start.

Getting there

• From Oslo, the E16 through Fagernes, roughly three hours by car, or the Valdresekspressen coach along the same route.
• There is no passenger railway. The Valdresbanen closed to regular passenger traffic, and the coach is the practical public option.
• The valley continues northwest over the Filefjell pass toward Lærdal and the Sognefjord, which makes Valdres a natural first or last stop on a wider western itinerary.

When to go

June to September for the valley farms and the high seter country. The Valdresflye mountain road over toward Jotunheimen is a seasonal road and one of the finest drives in the country when it is open.

Where the records are

• Regional archive in Hamar, covering the former Hedmark and Oppland counties.
• Valdres Samband’s own genealogy database is the first place to look for this district, ahead of the public sources.
• Digitalarkivet holds the parish registers, and the Valdres bygdebøker are held by the kommune libraries.
• The national archive was renamed Nasjonalarkivet on 1 January 2026; older guides call it Arkivverket or Riksarkivet, and the regional repositories are still signposted as statsarkiv.

Worth knowing

• Valdres has six surviving stave churches, more than any comparable district: Hedalen, Reinli, Hegge, Lomen, Høre and Øye. Nineteen once stood in the valley.
• This is the district where the descendant organisations are strongest, and a Valdres family is more likely than most to find that the research has already been done.
• The valley is a working agricultural landscape at altitude, and the summer farms above the treeline are still in use.

Common questions

Which bygdelag covers Valdres?

Valdres Samband, founded in Minneapolis in 1899. It was the first Norwegian bygdelag in America and remains the largest. Members get access to a genealogy database of over 210,000 people.

How many stave churches are there in Valdres?

Six survive: Hedalen, Reinli, Hegge, Lomen, Høre and Øye. Nineteen once stood in the valley, so this is the densest concentration of surviving stave churches in Norway.

How do I get to Valdres?

By car on the E16 through Fagernes, roughly three hours from Oslo, or on the Valdresekspressen coach along the same route. There is no passenger railway; the Valdresbanen closed to regular traffic.

Has my Valdres family already been researched?

Quite possibly. Valdres Samband has been organised since 1899, longer than any other bygdelag, and its genealogy database holds over 210,000 people alongside a digitised archive of the organisation’s own publications.

When is the Valdresflye road open?

Summer only, typically June to September depending on the winter. It is one of the finest drives in Norway when open and closed by snow when not.

Read next

The longer pieces behind this page. The playbook is where to start if you have not yet pinned the farm your family left.

• Trace Your Norwegian Roots: A Curator's Playbook for Your Trip

  In the spring of 1882 a 22-year-old farmhand named Knut Olsen Bjørge left a small farm in Hjartdal in upper Telemark, took the wagon road down to the Skien rail line, the train to Bergen, and the steamer Angelo to Hull and on to Quebec. Six weeks later he stepped off a Mississippi River train at Red Wing, Minnesota, and walked the last hour to his uncle's farm near Vang Lutheran in Holden Township, Goodhue County. He never went back. He is one of about 800,000 Norwegians who left for North America between 1825 and 1925, and he is the reason about 4.5 million Americans today carry a Norwegian surname or a Norwegian grandmother in the family Bible. The farm he left, registered as gnr 47 bnr 3 in the Hjartdal property book, still has the original storehouse standing. The parish church where he was confirmed in 1876 still holds a service every other Sunday. Knut's descendants have known the family came from "somewhere near Heddal" for four generations. The work of this article is the work of turning that sentence into an address, and then into a trip.

• Norwegian Heritage by Region: Telemark, Hardanger, Sogn and the Other Four

  Once the bygdebok work is done and the kommune is pinned, the next question is what your ancestral region actually looks and travels like in 2026. About seven Norwegian regions sent roughly 70% of the 800,000 emigrants who left for North America between 1825 and 1925: Sogn, Hardanger, Telemark, Nordfjord, Voss, Trøndelag and Sørlandet. The remaining 30% came from everywhere else, but if your great-grandfather appears in a Digitalarkivet emigration record, the odds are about two in three that the village you are trying to visit is in one of those seven. This article is the regional companion to <a href="/field-guide/trace-your-norwegian-roots-curators-playbook/">the curator's playbook for tracing Norwegian roots</a>. The playbook tells you how to find your bygd. This one tells you what to do when you get there, region by region.

• After the helmet

  A long, considered field guide to what Viking-era and medieval Norse heritage actually looks like in Norway today, once you set aside the souvenir shops and the costume cliches.

Terms worth knowing before you write to a Norwegian archive or kommune: Bygdebok, Emigrasjon, Vesterheim, Seter.