Isak Wilhelm Harjo

Photo memory

Do you have an interesting photograph from our recent or distant history that you would like to share with Finnmarken’s readers? Send it to Finnmarken, P.O. Box 616, 9811 Vadsø. Write down everything you know about where and when the picture was taken and who is in it. Remember to include a return address.

A family sorely tried

This photograph is actually more than a hundred years old. Its contributor, Anne-Lise Harjo, who now lives in Vadsø, tells us that it was taken as early as 1904–05.

She also tells us that it shows members of her own father’s family. Her father, Fredrik, who lived in Masjok, had not been born when the photograph was taken. Among those pictured is his brother Kristian, seated at the front. On the left sits her grandfather Ludvig Harjo, with her grandmother Anna Katrine. At the back, on the left, we see Isak Harjo and Andreas Harjo, while the girl on the right is Signe Margrethe Harjo. She married a man from Salangen in Troms and eventually had four children.

But life was not as easy for the others. Andreas and Isak both died of tuberculosis. They were only twenty-seven and twenty-eight years old.

The eldest brother, Bernhardt, who is not in the photograph, also died young, at only twenty-one, of the same disease. Andreas was married and left a wife and a daughter. Bernhardt and Isak were unmarried and died without children.

Anne-Lise Harjo believes the photograph must have been taken in Vadsø. She bases this on the fact that the family lived in Vadsø before moving to Masjok in Tana.

We have mentioned that many of the children in the family died very young. So did their father Ludvik, who died as early as 1908. At that time, the youngest son was only two years old. His wife eventually remarried, to Petter Barski from Østre Seida. They had a daughter together.

Of the people in the photograph, Signe and Kristian lived the longest. Anne-Lise’s father also died young, at only forty-seven, while his wife Anna was sixty-two when she died. She is remembered as an incredibly kind, warm and good woman.

Translation note: The newspaper’s photograph identifications and ages are retained as printed. Its final paragraph mixes generations: Anna Katrine was Ludvig’s wife; Fredrik’s wife was Gunvor. The family’s updated identifications remain in the biographies.