1. Go to the Digital Museum website <https://digitaltmuseum.no>

Their English language page looks like this:

The search field may be used for names, places or topics. There are some photos of named individuals, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll find the specific individual you’re searching for.

But not finding an individual person doesn’t mean your visit to this site was in vain. How about searching for photos from the person’s home town or village, from the place where he/she worked, or other illustrations which may bring life to the story of your forebears.

2. Enter your search topic into the search field

As an example, we use the town Hamar, and get the following result:

3. Scroll down the page to see where the various photos are kept

Photos of Hamar are to be found in the Anno Museum, and in the Jernbanemuseet (railway museum), as well as in many other repositories:

4. Add other criteria to narrow your search

We have in our example clicked on Advanced search, the Anno museum collection, then added some information to the search field Licence. The licence shows which limitations the museum or archive has for public use of the photo. We entered PDM (public domain) which means that the photos are no longer bound by copyright restrictions.

If you have Swedish ancestry, it’s useful to know that there is a corresponding Digital Museum in Sweden. The search technique is the same.