In the autumn of 2019, in the midst of an infrequent
tidying-and-tossing session, I ran across a curious little document among the debris.
It's brittle and yellowed; no surprise. It details how Albertine Sofie, aged 11 and perhaps a quarter, received her vaccination against smallpox in March of 1870. Duly signed for by Doctor Heiberg.
Said Albertine Sofie Jenssen, née Svendsen, was my great grandmother, and the paper was the reason I begun looking into the family tree. More stuff popped out - for example a letter from a priest in England detailing the death and burial of my great grandfather at Durham in 1917.