Maybe it sounds strange, that a study concerning the Norwegian Lutheran Mission’s (NLM) educational work in China would lead me to the Midwest. The brief explanation for this is that Norwegians immigrated to the Midwest and then further took up missionary work in China. Some of the Norwegian-American missionaries became NLM’s closest companions in Central China. I hoped to find sources about the cooperation between the Norwegian American missionaries and the NLM at Luther Seminary. To my surprise, there was a huge collection of Norwegian written material present, and I found a lot of relevant sources.With the help of the librarians at Luther Seminary I was also able to track sources at different locations in Minnesota and I ended up visiting five other colleges to detect additional sources.
Time was short and weeks flew away, and at the end of my stay in Minnesota I was left with a feeling of gratitude for discovering a source material I did not know existed and for meeting experts on topics in my field of study.
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My next stop was Boston. Here, I would also be reunited with my family. My first stop in Boston was Harvard Divinity School. It was not the search for Norwegian American missionaries that led me to Boston, but the search for sources relating to protestant educational work in China. I was curious about how Norwegian Mission schools and other protestant schools cooperated. In Boston, I also connected with Professor Ellen Widmer from Wellesley College, who had agreed to serve as my host supervisor during my stay. As in St. Paul, it did not take long before I realised that I needed to visit additional archives. Therefore, I journey both to Yale in New Haven, and to Union Seminary in New York to detect more sources

It might seem as I spent my time alone digging through archive material for two months (which is not wrong), but I also got the opportunity to meet scholars at each location I visited. The combination of searching through sources and conversing with archivists and scholars was valuable, and it kept leading me to new archives and to new scholars. 
I would like to thank ATTR-research school and Birkeland Legacy for financial funding this trip and making this research stay into a reality. There are also several others that I want to thank, such as the international coordinators, scholars, and the librarians at Luther Seminary. In addition, Ellen Widmer,
together with the archivists at Harvard Divinity school, Yale Divinity School, and Burke Library. I am very grateful for your guidance and assistance during my stay.
Best regards Marte Nesse Lægreid
