Befolkningsutvikling i masseutvandringens tid Trøndelag 1866–1914

Abstract

This article focuses on emigration as part of demographic development in the region of Trøndelag and in its municipalities in the period 1866–1914. We have created maps presenting comparable information for the municipalities taken from the population censuses. They visualise a complex development with great demographic varieties among the municipalities within a regional pattern characterised as regular and stable. Our main finding is that we can show interconnectivity between emigration and internal migration in a development where internal migration was the most extensive. The demographic background for mass emigration from Norway was the fall in death rates in a situation where the fertility rates remained stable. The result was large cohorts of youths where only some of them had prospects for sustainable livelihoods at their place of birth. Some of them had to move – to other places in Norway or to America as a continent that offered new openings. We see the mobile workforce of young people in search of livelihoods as a precondition for economic readjustment in a modernising process.