Gulbrand Krabol 1400 Family

Child
Bjørn Gulbrandsen	b. 1430 Krabøl, Vestre Gausdal, Oppland, Norway	d.	m. unknown

The records beyond this point are very sketchy and difficult to come by. Some of this history was laid out by a ships captain named Hans Kråbøl, in 1820-1824. The work was finally published in 1922. I'm pretty certain that the Kråbol farm was a property of the local nobility. Consequently many of the folks who lived on the land were serfs or perhaps even slaves. This up-land or Oppland area is rebounding area from the glaciers which was eventually becomes heavily forested and presently is one of the centers of forestry and goat cheese production in all of Norway.

Even though we have very little information on the family there were events in the early history of the area that caused the locals a great deal of difficulty.

"The Little Ice Age adversely affected Norwegian agriculture and fishery; many farms, entire villages were abandoned; famine (Great Famine 1315-1317), and the plague (1347-1348) drastically reduced the population, Norway suffering higher population losses than any other country in Europe on that occasion. Norwegian shipping similarily declined."
[World History of Norway, http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/scandinavia/xnorway.html]

"Two consecutive severe crop failures were more than what most agricultural communities could sustain. Not to mention that the harvest of 1316 was worse than that of 1315; in fact, crop yields in 1316 were the worst in several centuries. Data from the Winchester and Westminster manors show that wheat yields were 64.1 percent, 55.9 percent, and 87.5 percent, and that barley yields were 86.9 percent, 69.7 percent, and 80.2 percent of the average during the 150 year period from 1217 to 1410. Crop yields were lowest on 1316 during the period given above (24). England, specifically, never saw a similar subsistence catastrophe in cereals during the whole of the Middle Ages (25).
Livestock had increasingly become headaches for farmers. The damp weather disabled the appropriate harvest of hay and thus the livestock were left outside to forage during the winter to find the food on themselves. These animals which were already malnutritioned, staggered in the cold weather and many died in the cold. Sheep were especially severely hit by the cold (26). Epidemics were also constantly problems. Initially, cattle had been affected by rinderpest, and later on sheep would be affected by a parasitic worm called the liver fluke (27). Due to these reasons, flocks of Bolton Priory in northern England reported 913 out of 3000 animals left after the winter of 1316/1317 (28) was over and similar situations were reported throughout northern Europe. Some chroniclers called this phenomenon the "Great Dying of Beasts." [Kim. Early Years of the Little Ice Age in Northern Europe 1300-1500]

        Norway National Archives.
        records of LDS, International Genealogical Records, 1999-   familysearch.org
        Kim, Shin. Early Years of the Little Ice Age in Northern Europe. Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, International Program. 2007. http://www.zum.de/whkmla

Kråbøl, Hans. Slegter og Gaarder i Gausdal, 1820-1824 Publisher: Gudbrandsdal Historielag, G. F. Gunnersen, Lillehammer 1922

Note: An inventory that m.a. contains genealogies to owners of farms in Gausdal Municipality. Written down approximately 1820-1824. This book can almost be compared with a bygdebok for Gausdal. It was written by ship captain Hans Kraabøl in early 1800s, but was not published until 1922. The book covers usually 3-5 generations until about 1824. / Families on farms in Gausdal before 1824. Anne Hildrum, Fossum Berget 50, 0983 Oslo,

World History of Norway, http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/scandinavia/xnorway.html
Oppland records on GENI.com managed by Ingar Benjamin Nordby 2015