On Christmas Day in 2001, Nord Brue found himself home alone. His wife was away helping her mother through knee-replacement surgery, his three children were scattered in different directions, one of them climbing a mountain in Peru and the house was unusually quiet.
With some unexpected time on his hands, Nord decided to do something he had never really learned to do: search the internet. Then an email from Ancestry.com landed in his inbox.
He clicked it.
Twenty-five years later, Nord is still an Ancestry subscriber, but that one small moment of curiosity led to something much bigger. It introduced him to a man born more than two centuries earlier: Nils Trulsen Bru, his three-times-great-grandfather.
What Nord eventually uncovered was far more than a family tree filled with names and dates. Nils’s life included romance, war, political conflict, courtroom drama, and a stubborn determination to stand up for ordinary people. After decades of research, that story became Nord’s newly published book, To My Beloved Norwegian Countrymen.
Sometimes the Dead Call Out to You
Biographer Richard Holmes once wrote that sometimes the dead call out to us “like owls in the night.” For Nord, one of those voices belonged to Nils.
Nils was born in Norway in 1776, a year Nord likes to put into perspective for his grandchildren. That same year, the Declaration of Independence was written in America and Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in Scotland. Nord likes to ask his grandchildren which of those three events was the most important.
Their answer is always the same: Nils’s birth.
From their point of view, of course, they are right. Without Nils, none of them would be here.
That simple observation gets at what makes genealogy so powerful. History can seem distant until you realize that your own existence depended on ordinary people surviving wars, illnesses, accidents, heartbreaks, bad luck, and good luck.
And Nils had plenty of all of it.
A Love Story, a War, and Two Trials
The more Nord researched Nils’s life, the more it started to resemble a novel.
As a young man, Nils lost the woman he loved, Christy, to another man. After getting into trouble with his local priest, he left his community for roughly a year and a half. Then word arrived that Christy’s husband had died, apparently while fishing. Nils returned home, married Christy, and took over the farm.
Their peaceful beginning did not last long. Within months, war reached Norway as the country was drawn into the Napoleonic conflicts.
Nils eventually emerged as a leader among the local farmer-fishermen, at times helping coordinate enormous fishing operations involving hundreds of boats and as many as 2,000 fishermen. He also began challenging local authorities, especially over the fishing tithe, a tax imposed on the fishermen.
That resistance eventually led to his arrest and two trials involving charges serious enough to threaten both his life and his honor. He was acquitted both times.
Nord still enjoys one especially human detail from the court record: one of the men involved in deciding Nils’s fate happened to be his Uncle Peter. In another remarkable twist, the court not only cleared Nils but fined the prosecutor for overcharging him.
But Nils was not finished challenging the establishment.
“To My Beloved Norwegian Countrymen”
Nils eventually turned his attention toward politics. He wrote and distributed a broadside urging ordinary Norwegians to elect more farmers to the Storting, Norway’s parliament.
The document was not especially fiery. It was thoughtful and earnest, and it ended with the words that would eventually give Nord’s book its title:
To my beloved Norwegian countrymen, for their consideration.
The authorities were less enthusiastic. They worried about the possibility of a broader peasant uprising and resisted Nils’s political ambitions.
The voters had other ideas.
They kept electing him, and after years of resistance, Nils was finally allowed to serve in parliament, where he remained involved in public life until his death.
For Nord, the deeper he went into the records, the clearer it became that this was not simply an interesting ancestor. This was a life worth writing about.
How Many People Exist Because of One Couple?
Nils and Christy eventually had 45 grandchildren, and two of their youngest children emigrated to the United States in the mid-19th century, settling in Story County, Iowa.
That raised a fascinating question for Nord: how many people living today might descend from them?
He used AI to help model the possibilities, factoring in generations, historical survival rates, and changing family sizes. The estimate surprised even him: approximately 16,000 people living in the United States today may be direct descendants of Nils Trulsen Bru.
It is an estimate, not a genealogical head count, but it gives a remarkable sense of scale.
If Nils had not survived his trials, if Christy’s first husband had not died, if one of their children had made a different choice, or if those two children had never crossed the Atlantic, thousands of lives might look completely different — or might never have existed at all.
That is one of the strange and moving things about genealogy. We tend to look at a family tree as though it were inevitable, one generation neatly following another. It wasn’t. Our being here at all often depended on a long series of accidents, decisions, close calls, and coincidences.
When Research Becomes a Book
By the time Nord began writing, he had accumulated an extraordinary amount of material. Norwegian historical records can be remarkably detailed, and he found court proceedings, political records, family documents, and even an inventory of the clothing Nils owned when he died.
For a researcher, that abundance is wonderful. For a writer, it creates another problem: what do you leave out?
Nord discovered one of the hardest lessons of nonfiction writing. Finding information is only half the work. The other half is deciding what belongs in the book and what does not.
There were people, events, and historical threads he found fascinating that ultimately had to be shortened or removed. Writers often call this “killing your darlings,” and Nord had plenty of darlings to kill. But he understood that the purpose was not to include every interesting fact he had uncovered. The purpose was to tell Nils’s story.
Getting Into the Mind of Someone Who Lived 200 Years Ago
Nord also wanted to understand more than what Nils did. He wanted to understand why.
“When you write a biography, you live with somebody for the whole period of time,” Nord explained. “You have to get into their head.”
That led him beyond dates and documents and into Nils’s personality, values, and culture. Nord even explored Nils through modern personality frameworks and came to see him as someone deeply guided by principle and difficult to move once those principles were challenged.
He also looked at the Scandinavian concept of Janteloven, the cultural idea that no individual should consider himself superior to everyone else. Nord saw an important flip side to that idea as well: if you do not believe you are better than anyone else, you also do not have to believe anyone else is better than you.
That helps explain the confidence of an ordinary farmer-fisherman who was willing to challenge magistrates, prosecutors, and the political establishment.
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Happy Writing,
Charlie Levin, Publisher & Founder
