The ancestral home of a Puget Island family is part of a national and world heritage area in Norway.

The house will be part of an area set aside to remember the area's history and the part which emigration played in it.

The house was the home of the Tover (Tåvær in Norwegian) family which emigrated to the United States in the early 20th Century. They and three other families from the same area, the Wika, Nepsund and Wegdahl families, all settled on Puget Island.

They came from the area around Vega, an archipelago on the coast of Norway's Helgeland province.

The area is part of a Norwegian national heritage area and has been included in a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage site.

"It is an important part of the history of the coast of Norway," said Vega resident Martin Johansen, on a stop in Cathlamet last Friday.

The area's population grew in the 19th Century with advances in medicine and medical care and a decline in infant mortality.

"They had 15 kids in the family, and the island wasn't big enough to support them," Johansen said. "What do you do? They emigrated."

Norway had the second highest percent of its population, after Ireland, emigrate to the US, said Johansen's wife, Rita.

The pair are part of a group of volunteers who gathered at the house earlier this year to begin refurbishing it. They dug around its base to repair the foundation.

They tore off worn siding and replaced it with new boards.

To replace the tin roof, they stripped birch bark off trees and put it face down as a liner. Then they cut and hauled sod by hand for two more layers, one face down and one face up.

"Because it was in a heritage site, there were many rules to follow," Martin said. "It had to be done the traditional way."

In the house was a corner post with the year 1793 inscribed on it.

"It will be a nice place to visit for recreation and a portrait of island life," Rita said.

In 1999, Rita published a bilingual book, "The Story of Norwegian Islanders in the Columbia River," with the stories of the emigrant families and how they fared in the US.

Now she and Martin are touring the area to gather more information about the emigrants for a website about emigration from Vega. They hope to have the website up and the house restored by the summer of 2011.

One task is to create a genealogy. A contact in the Portland area has listed 454 Tover family descendents. More work remains for the Wika, Nepsund and Wegdahl families.

"The Wika family gathered in Norway for a reunion a couple years ago, and there were so many they couldn't get them all in the frame when they tried to take a picture," Martin said.

Also in Cathlamet, they've spent hours in the courthouse examining property records and more hours visiting the descendents of the families still living in the area to catch up with the latest developments in their stories.

"It shows how we're all tied in together and the world isn't such a big place," they said.