Advertisement Well, actually, it’s about your ancestors — those brave Norwegians who first set plows to the hills and valleys surrounding La Crosse.
Deb Nelson Gourley knows that history well. She has published the English-language version of “History of the Norwegian Settlements” through her company, Astri My Astri Publishing. The book is a translation of a book written nearly a century ago by Hjalmar Rued Holand about the early Norwegian settlers in the Coulee Region.
In a translated foreword, Holand marveled at the tenacity and vigor of those Norwegian settlers who “were able to transform a wilderness into a smiling garden and a temporary New Norway. ... It is a saga of toil without surrender and a saga of struggle without defeat.”
Gourley is a long-time genealogy fan who turned her passion for her own ancestry into a publishing business. She realized she had to do something with her database of information when her two teenagers told her she needed a wider audience for her genealogy passion than her family.
“We don’t want that database,” they told her. “It was like somebody took a frying pan and hit me over the head. They said, ‘You tell us these stories but nothing is written down. Write it down so it’s something useful for people.’”
So that’s what Gourley did, and it became her first book, “Astri My Astri” — 16 stories of Norwegian heritage that mostly started out as feature stories in the Fillmore County Journal.
“You can’t just write them for your first and second cousins,” her boss told her.
“I took these boxes and file cabinets and databases and turned them into something useful,” Gourley said. “I took my hobby and turned it into a career.”
That hobby began at age 8, when she stopped her family from carting an immigrant trunk to the burn pile. She saw the year 1812 on it and thought that was cool, so she asked if she could keep it. Decades later, while studying in Norway, she figured out the trunk had belonged to her great-great-great-grandmother.
Her passion for all things Norwegian culminated with the publishing of “History of the Norwegian Settlements.” It was a manuscript she used for years in her own genealogy research. But she was reading it in the original Norwegian. Now that it’s been translated into English, Gourley said, it can help others trace their roots more easily.
“It’s the bible of Norwegian immigration. I jumped at the opportunity to publish that. I want to talk about that book because it has a lot of local interest.”
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