Most people probably have one or more relatives who emigrated to the USA. The fate of many of these emigrants has subsequently remained unknown to the remaining family in Norway.
They may have died without descendants, or perhaps there is a large American family in the USA that you don't know about. Either way, it can be both expensive and difficult to find out what happened to the person who emigrated.
Read also: Castle Garden immigrant reception center
The websites below may not do anything about the difficulty of finding the emigrant, but at least they don't charge to share the sources they have. Happy hunting!
1. The Federal Writer's Project
When the Great Depression hit the US after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment became a problem. One of the measures to employ the country's citizens was the Federal Writer's Project. Around 300 writers were paid to visit 24 states and interview nearly 3,000 people. The stories have since been digitized and indexed. Maybe you'll get lucky and find your «lost» American traveler. Go to the site and search for your relative's surname in the top right-hand corner.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-project/
2. NARA
«The National Archives and Records Administration, also known as NARA, is the USA's answer to the National Archives. This is where archival documents are secured, stored and digitized. The documents are also searchable online, completely free of charge. Some documents are scanned and can be read online, while others are only displayed as an indication that the original is in NARA's archives.
3. FamilySearch
A fairly well-known resource among genealogists. FamilySearch is managed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as Mormons. It contains digitized family history material not only from the USA, but from a number of countries, including Norway. FamilySearch is often used as an alternative to paid services such as MyHeritage and Ancestry.
4. 1940 census
If you have an American letter in your possession or otherwise know the address of your emigrated relative, the 1940 census may be of interest. The census has not been transcribed, but it is divided by street, city, county and state. This makes it challenging to search with limited information. However, if you're used to reading the church records in the digital archive, just get out your coffee cup and prepare for a few hours of skimming for your relative's name.
https://1940census.archives.gov/
5. Elephind
The website aims to digitize all the newspapers in the world. They still have some way to go before that goal is reached, but a number of newspapers from the USA have been digitized and are searchable. Worth a try.
6. The Statue of Liberty - Ellis Island
If your relative arrived in the United States between 1892 and 1954, you may find him or her in the records of the Ellis Island Immigrant Reception Center. During the 62 years that it served as a gateway to the United States, 12 million immigrants made their way to the US via Ellis Island.
https://libertyellisfoundation.org/
7. Castle Garden
If your relative arrived in the US before 1892, the records of Caste Garden may be more exciting. Located at the tip of Manhattan, Castle Garden received immigrants between 1855 and 1890.
8. SUVCW National Graves Registration Project
SUVCW is a project to register where all veterans of the American Civil War are buried. The project is based on voluntary efforts and has been running since 1996. The website estimates that there were somewhere between 4.2 and 4.8 million veterans, but that many are buried in mass graves without documentation. For this reason, they consider it unrealistic to document all veterans, but they hope to collect the other documented veterans in this register.
http://www.suvcwdb.org/index.php?r=site/search
9. Find a grave
A website that allows volunteers to register gravestones from all over the world, although the USA, Canada and England are among the best represented countries.
10. Chronicling America
The Library of Congress is behind a newspaper service where you can search American newspapers from 1777 to 1963. Should you need information that appeared in a newspaper before 1789, they also have a catalog of American publications from 1690 to the present day.
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
11. DeadFred
A site that allows volunteers to submit old photographs where the people pictured are named. In this way, visitors can search for photographs of their relatives they may not have known existed. The site has one requirement: the photo must be from before 1960 and the person in the photo must have died. Perhaps not much chance of finding a relative here, but all the more fun if you're lucky.
12. The USGenWeb Project
The project consists of a group of volunteers who collect family history material on a website to offer it for free to you and me.
13. United States Census
The website Archive.org has collected a number of US censuses in microform format. They are of course scanned, but not transcribed. It is therefore a lot of work to search for relatives in these registers, but they are now available free of charge.
https://archive.org/details/us_census
14. Interment
The website gives you free access to over 6 million grave monument inscriptions and grave monument registers.
http://www.interment.net/us/index.htm
15. Whitepages
The phone book may be dead in paper format, but it still exists online. If you have a particular surname, you may find descendants of your relative here. What's special about this page is that it also indicates approximately how old the person you have looked up is.
