Bertha Lien was born on a small farm near Decorah, IA, the sixth child of 14 born to Gullik Knutsen Lien (1815-1903) and Berit Knusdatter Austreim (1826-1904). Her parents had emigrated in 1850 from Vang, Valdres, Norway. Bertha attended public schools in the area and the local parish school. She later attended the Breckenridge Normal School at Decorah for two years and then taught school for one year in the district schools of Springfield township.

While attending school at the parsonage in Decorah, Ole Joris Norby may have worked at the Lien farm. After his graduation and a call to Dakota Territory, Ole left for Yankton County and sent for Bertha. Bertha got on the train, bringing all of her belongings in trunks, mostly clothes and a few quilts, and left Iowa to meet him. Once she arrived, they rode forty miles on Indian ponies, riding in grass over their heads, to the minister's house in Websterville, Dakota Territory, to be married on 14 Sep 1879. The day following the wedding they traveled on in a "single-seated" buggy drawn by two small Indian ponies to the pioneer settlement where they would live in Turner County.

As the years passed, she became reconciled to frontier conditons, but Bertha never wholly accepted the view of those who professed to see beauty in the prairie. She gained experience and greater assurance in her role as pastor's wife. Parish work was not then a highly organized system so her functions were largely those of an ever-ready hostess, Sunday School teacher, leader of the Ladies' Aid Society, parish visitor, friend and confidant. In 1893, she and Ole left the frontier to move closer to good schools for their four children, leaving one infant son buried in the cemetery at Sims, ND. They moved first to Chicago and then to Winchester, WI, before returning again to the west where O. J. served as minister in Havre, MT and Aberdeen, SD. In 1923 he retired and they moved to Minneapolis to be near their son, Joseph and his family.

Bertha's health had been poor with heart trouble for several years but her strong will had sustained her. In the end, her strength failed and Bertha died on 1 Aug 1929 at 71 years old. Her obituary states, "Her natural inclination and devotion to service made her an ideal pastor's wife and all with whom she came in contact remember her as the embodiment of the precepts which her husband taught from the pulpit. She was an ideal wife, a loving mother, and a true servant of the Master."

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