I have many ancestors from Norway but I find many Denmark records with the same names and years, are
Answers
-
Denmark controlled Norway from 1397-1815. However, that does not mean that you should be finding your Norwegian ancestors in the Danish parish records, unless you have good reason to believe that they immigrated. Many people in both countries had the same names so you should not accept Danish hints just because they are for people that happen to have the same names and years of birth.
0 -
Great advise was shared by Tanner. Be very careful about the identical names you see and record hints in Scandinavia.
0 -
I assume you are referring to hints and possible duplicates that appear in the Research Helps section of an individual's detail page and pedigree views in Family Tree.
You must be very cautious with these for Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. If your Family Tree individual has limited or incomplete you will occasionally get extremely poor hints and possible duplicates appearing. Always check the original records and thoroughly evaluate hints and possible duplicates by looking at all the information about the person, any spouse, all children, and any parents before accepting a hint or duplicate.
You will be pretty safe in always assuming that if you have a situation such as the person you are researching living in Norway and a hint giving a residence in Denmark or Sweden that these are never the same person.
You will also stay out of trouble if you assume that the vast majority of the time if you have a person living in one province in Norway, such as Hordaland, and a hint is for a person of the same name and birth year living in a different province such as Buskerud or Nord-Trøndelag, these are never the same person.
You need to also be aware that if you have a hint showing a residence in a different parish in the same county, that most of the time these will be two different people.
In fact, if you see a hint or possible duplicate for a person which has the same name and same birth year in the same parish, you really need to check the original record and make sure they were not born on two different farms and are actually two different people, particularly if the record just gives a christening date. In small communities where the priest just came to town once a month, you could have multiple Jon Andersens all christened on the same day in the same parish.
The Kalmar Union had Denmark, Sweden and Norway under one monarch from 1397 to 1523, The union between Denmark and Norway was from 1524 until 1814 when Norway declared its independence and signed its constitution on May 17, 1814, which lasted until August 1814 when the country entered a union with Sweden that lasted until October 26, 1905, when Sweden recognized Norway as an independent country and Norway elected and put in place the first king of their own since 1397. The earliest parish birth records started in Norway were in 1623 but it did not start being a general practice to keep such records until the 1720s. Each parish kept its own records and as far as I'm aware all the early records stayed right there in the parish, they were never sent anywhere, not even to any central repository in Norway (until the Norwegian archives system was established and started collecting them for safe keeping), and definitely were never sent to Denmark or Sweden..
0 -
@Kristy Haffner Gordon has explained this topic very well. Follow his instructions and you'll avoid serious errors.
0 -
Thank you all for the great feedback! This definitely clears things up for me.
0