How do I find information about farm books for Norway? Wiki was not helpful
I have family from Norway and have heard about farm books as a source for genealogy information. I started listening to the learning course but it over an hour long and I found myself getting bored. I tried wiki as demonstrated in the learning course but the page came up different and all the links I found for farm books were too complicated to follow. I don't know if any of my relatives from Norway would be listed in a farm book or which farm book to look for if I could figure out how to find them.
Answers
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Here is a suggestion: Here in the Community, there is a Nordic Countries Genealogy Research group that you could join and ask for help about this. Scroll down a bit and look for the blue Join button on the right.
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The farm books are great resources. Generally they cover a single municipality so first you have to know where your family came from. The best ones start with first known owner of a farm and go through every owner of every parcel down to when the book was written. They are farm, not family, histories, but depending on the area of Norway, the same family could be on the farm for a couple of centuries. Usually, if a person moved onto or off of a farm, the author will mention where they went so you can bounce from farm to farm to follow the person.
They are a secondary, complied source and do have errors. Depending on the author, they can be very complete or sadly lacking in information.
A problem you might run into depending on where you live, is that they can be hard to find in the United States. The Family History Library in Salt Lake has a huge collection. A few colleges around the country have some. I've never found any that share them through interlibrary loan. The National Library of Norway, I would assume, has all of them. A very few are online for everyone. Many you can access if you have a Norwegian IP address.. Some you can purchase. Many are out of print.
Another challenge is that they are all in Norwegian.
Many of them have been indexed and the indexes are found on FamilySearch under Genealogies. But I've found those very hard to use without the actual book because the index does not tell you who the people actually are and the extended relationships between them the way the books do.
For some areas of Norway various people through the years have taken large swaths of their families from the farm history books and submitted these to FamilySearch so you will find them already in Family Tree, sometime two or three times.
So it's like everything else in family history, you have to start with what you know and work back from there.
Where is your family in Norway? What do you currently know about them? if you'd like to share some of that information or if any of them are already in Family Tree and you post their ID here, I could point you in the direction of which farm book you want to try to get ahold of. If they happen to be from Stord, I have that book.I also have a digital version of the four volume history of Bømlo.
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Thank you both for your help. There is one branch that I have some farm information on in my family tree. Here are a few ID's that I hope can get me started. M6K1-8W3, G8J5-SL8, 9X2N-JK4
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It sounds like you have had some great help from others on this site. Another place I love to go to find new ideas is the FamilySearch Blog. There are a few articles there on Norwegian Research. I hope you will find these interesting. https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/resources-norwegian-genealogy-research/. https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/bygdeboker-norwegian-research/. https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/norwegian-genealogy-research/. You could also schedule a free 20 minute consultation with a Norwegian genealogist at the Salt Lake Family History Center to get some more help on the Farm Books in Norway. https://go.oncehub.com/ResearchStrategySession Good Luck!
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@Michael Jendusa One more great place that gives added insight into the Norwegian Farm books is at the Family History Guide. This is a partner website with FamilySearch and has been approved by FamilySearch as a training resource. They have an activity there to help understand more about the Farm books. https://www.thefhguide.com/project-9-norway06.html
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M6K1-8W3 = Gullau Olsdatter - married in Borgund, Møre og Romsdal, three children christened there. Some people are using the surname Lokra which is most likely a farm name.
The FamilySearch Wiki: https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Borgund_Parish,_Møre_og_Romsdal,_Norway_Genealogy has a list of farm names which include Løken which might be a different spelling for Lokra and gives the bygebok for the area, which is Borgund og Giske by Ragnar Øvrelid, a four volume work. I don't see it open to the public on line so you would have to find it in a library somewhere.
G8J5-SL8 = Nils Olsson - born at Sæter in Møre og Romsdal. Sæter would be a farm in Møre og Romsdal. There are probably at least a dozen or more. It is a very common name so you will want to find out what community he was living in. That would be the bygdebok you want to start in. In fact, you would probably want to start with his grandchildren and work backwards. Which is see is Gullau above.
When you enter place names in the rural areas of Norway, it is very important to enter the farm, community and the parish because so many farms have the same name. Unfortunately the Places database is very incomplete so you usually need to enter the full name then standardize on just the community and county.
9X2N-JK4 = Gullov Olsdatter, Nils Olsson's wife. here, also, to work in the Bygdebok or farm histories, you will want to come forward a couple of generations to more easily make sure you have the right family and then work back through time.
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To continue a bit, are you familiar with the Norwegian Archive's Digitalarchive? It is located here: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/en/
They have all the church records scanned and many are searchable. They also have easy to use census records. I would start with your closest Norwegian Relative and work back from there. If you get all your post-1800 families cleaned up with full information, then it will be a lot easier to know exactly what farm book to be looking for.
A couple of years ago I put together a presentation on how to use the archives to find parish records. It is: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cERjSRfp7xlngsb9fBvLyFTt85TJIdpilvxKalR0ZW8/edit?usp=sharing
You can get to census records from the main page by clicking on More Searches:
To pick one record you have been working on, Gullik Hendrik Lokra MXDZ-D36, here is his family in the 1891 census: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/en/census/person/pf01052994040261
Here is is birth record: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/kb20070903620715 which shows he was born in Ålesund. So since he was born in a city and his kids were born in Bergen, he is not going to be in a Farm Book. He was christened at Borgund Church (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgund_Church).
So you can fix his birth place to be Ålesund, Borgund, Møre og Romsdal, Norway and his christening place to be Borgund Kirke, Borgund, Møre og Romsdal, Norway. You can also correct the spelling of his last name to be Løkra.
Have fun exploring these records!
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