Kragerø is a town in Norway, to the south of Oslo, where my great-great-grandfather was born. It’s a good story – Rudolf Andersen was apparently 12 when he joined the merchant fleet, became a sailor and left Kragerø to see the world.
The town librarian very generously helped me find some details about him. The town records reveal that some years later, he absconded when his ship was in Canada. This is where the records in the town reached a dead end. There was about a 7 or 8 year gap before he resurfaced again, arriving in Melbourne (if I recall, in the 1880s), where he lived in the Berwick region (then called Harkaway), which had a German/Lutheran population.
Below are some photos from when I visited there in February 2000. It was a cold day in winter, and there were very few people around. The town is now a picturesque seaside resort town, and I think that the artist Edvard Munch lived and worked there for a while.
