Some hobby

Category: Ramblings | Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 9:03 am

Norwegians are big about finding their roots. Almost every family has a hobby geneaologist digging about in old books and surfing the net to find as complete a family tree as one can. Why? I don't know, but it's fun.

Even though many really, really want to, it's hard to find lines dating further back than the 1600s. Before then, church books were poorly kept, and after that very many protocols have been lost along the way.

The State's archives are a treasure trove because they have managed to conserve the court protocols from the 1600s onwards. We didn't have a court in every town, and people often had to travel very far to get justice done. Property sales were also duly recorded. Of course these protocols won't include all kinds of facts, but one might find some nice tidbits.

Up until early 1900 people changed their surname if they moved from one place to another. It was common practice to use your home place's name as surname, a fact which can really make a geneaologist confused. The townies were an exception. They took their father's Christian name and added -sen which means son. As if that would make it any easier to find your ancestors.

Norway only had 440 000 people in 1665, and in 1822 we were one million, so the task of finding ones' kin should really not be too difficult providing someone with foresight already did the legwork and published a book about the small community where some of your relatives lived. But did they get their facts right? With people getting sick, dying in child birth, getting lost at sea or going away to war, re-marrying was a wide-spread practice. One man might have had three or four wives, and which one is the right one to record? And a newly widowed pregnant woman remarries, but who is the father of the child? Oops, somebody forgot to name her late husband.

The result of a several years-long search might be that one thread ends up around 1600, while another one stops in the early 1800s. One finds small holders, fishermen, traders, murderers and men of worth and status. They come from all over the country, even Sweden or Denmark. Your next-door neighbour might actually be a cousin 11 times removed. Nothing much is said about the women, of course, unless she did something extremely special. Maybe you've managed to pick up some useful knowledge along the way too.

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eileen wrote on Fri Nov 02, 2007 10:17 am:

Have you found out anything interesting about your own family Droopy?

My eldest son discovered that a relative (on my mothers side) was in the party that greeted Mary, Queen of Scots when she arrived in Linlithgow!!

Droopy wrote on Fri Nov 02, 2007 3:29 pm:

Nothing earth shaking. One got to go to see the King in Copenhagen bringing a petition. It's fun if there's a story, but mostly there is none.

Biita wrote on Fri Nov 02, 2007 7:26 pm:

My husband has done some research on his family, an the earliest is from 1620. In america the native americans on the reservations have a saying when they meet someone from the rez or a neighboring rez,, Who's your daddy's family,,, kind of reminds me of the same here with so little population.