Could you please refer me to a handout or webpage that describes how to fill out a family group shee

Rich Nordhagen

Could you please refer me to a handout or webpage that describes how to fill out a family group sheet for Norwegian ancestors?

I am interested in trying to resolve a couple of things. For places of birth, marriages, deaths, what is the preferred naming convention. If they lived on a farm is it Farm, Parish, County, Norway and do you just put Parish, County, Norway if you don't have enough information. And why do you add the farm if the christening or marriage was done at the Parish? And then if they live in a City like Oslo or Kristiania, how do you do the name? is it Parish, Oslo, Oslo, Norway? Or whatever it was prior to being renamed Oslo.

 

The other is concerning names. I have ancestors that emigrated from Norway to the US. My parent's started their genealogy. So I have a names like Ole Johansen Nordhagen and Johanne Johansen Olstad but when I look at the parish records their names are Ole Johansen and Johanne Johansdatter? They took on these last names (probably farm names) when they came over. How do you fill out a family group sheet? Do I rename these people and put their Norwegian names? or do I leave their American names?

Thanks for any information on this.

Tanner Blair Tolman

So there isn’t any one way of doing things. That being said, we have a class called Best Practices in Family Tree for Nordic ancestors that may help explain some of this issues: https://www.familysearch.org/ask/learningViewer/577

 

In addition to that, here is my personal preference on some of the issues you brought up:

 

 

For the christening, marriage, and burial, I exclude the farm name because those events happened at the parish church like you mentioned but I do include them for the birth and death because they likely were born and died at home.

 

Concerning farm names, often you see the name of the farm included with their name in Norwegian parish records and it happens much more frequently there than in Denmark or Sweden. Legally it wasn’t part of their name but it was included enough anyways that it can still be helpful for genealogists.

 

I like to include the farm name as a suffix to their name. Other people strongly disagree.

 

Finally, there is a book called “Mastering Genealogical Documentation” by Tom Jones that you could read if you wanted to pursue this topic in more depth. The main thing is you want to be clear and consistent so another person can follow your logic.

 

 

Gordon Collett

To add a couple of my preferences, it is good to include which parish church the christening, marriage, or burial took place at if known. That can help other researchers find other records.

 

For example, up until about 1862, Stord parish contained two sub-parishes each with a church, Stord Kirke and Fitjar Kirke. I would enter an event that occurred at Stord Kirke as "Stord Kirke, Stord, Hordaland, Norway."

 

Some people always include a sub-parish if there is one, some people never do. But you should never drop the parish and put just the sub-parish, that would be like including a county and dropping the state name in the US.

 

For example:

Tveita, Tysnes, Hordaland, Norway

Tveita, Onarheim, Tysnes Hordaland, Norway

are both fine as these are:

Farm, parish, county, country

Farm, sub-parish, parish, county, country

 

But Tveita, Onarheim, Hordaland, Norway leaves out the parish of Tysnes which is just too big of a division to ignore.

 

Those of us that strongly maintain that the farm name is a vitally important part of their full name and critical for proper identification and to avoid confusion and incorrect merges of people with similar names, always include the farm name for people that had one. I have found through experience that all the Family Tree find, hint, and possible duplicate routines work best if entered as, for example:

 

Vitals:

First Name: Jon Olsson - Last Name: Brandvik

 

Other Information - Alternate Name:

First Name: Jon - Last Name: Olsson

 

The data entry takes a few extra seconds but lets everything in the programming work very well. Since the find, hints, and possible duplicates routines ignore the suffix field, putting the farm name in suffix field does not give those routines all the information they need to not miss records and hints that do include the farm name.

 

On great feature in Family Tree is that you can include as many alternate names as needed so you can have birth names, names used if the family moved, names the person used in the United States, married names, etc. You many find that the farm name your relatives adopted in the US as surnames were not their farm name at birth but you can include all the names needed to fully describe them.