Help Understanding a Birth Place in Norway
I have a question about my 2x great-grandpa’s birthplace in Norway.
On his Naturalization papers (1922) he states he was born 1880 in Kongsvinger, Norway.
A cousin in Norway who is a lot more familiar with the family stated he was born and baptized in Austmarka. And went to school there.
I think the church record says he was born in Vinger, Hedmark?
https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:683Z-LNWV
So, which is the correct one? If I were to write where he was born as specific as possible with this information, how would that look?
Would it be: Austmarka, Vinger, Hedmark, Norway?
If I’m understanding this, Vinger turned into Kongsvinger? If that correct, what’s with Austmarka? When I look on google maps, it goes to somewhere on the west. I know the Austmarka our cousin refers to is next to Lake Møkkeren.
I’m a bit lost when trying to understand places in Norway and the correct format of writing them. If anyone knows of a good video or website that explains it, shoot it my way.
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Your cousin is correct. If you look at the original record for your ancestor, Sigvard, you will see written in under the dates of the birth and christening, 13 April and 13 June, the parish where the birth and christening actually took place - "Østmarken (aka Austmarka)". In addition, the farm both the parents live on is "Gylterud" (which is also listed as a place in Østmarken/Austmarka. See this page in the FamilySearch Wiki: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Austmarka_%28%C3%98stmark%29_Parish%2C_Hedmark%2C_Norway_Genealogy ).
I am attaching an image with the parish name (Østmarken) and the farm name (Gylterud) highlighted:
Vinger and Østmark/Austmarka are both part of the Vinger Prestegjeld/District (see this article on Norway Prestegjeld: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Norwegian_Prestegjeld ) but the birth actually took place in Østmark/Austmarka on Gylterud farm.
If this was my family, I would put the place-of-birth as (starting with the smallest place and the going to the largest-ie farm > parish > county > country) Gylterud, Østmark (or Austmarka), Hedmark, Norway.
You could write the birth place as "Gylterud, Østmark (or Austmarka), Vinger, Hedmark, Norway" as long as people understand that Vinger, in this instance, is the "prestegjeld/district" and not the parish. The simplest and least confusing thing would be to just leave the Vinger out.
If you look at the Hedmark County map in the FamilySearch Wiki, you will see the parishes of Vinger and Østmark (in brown near the southern tip the county). See that map here: https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Hedmark_County%2C_Norway_Genealogy .
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Couple of things about place names to start with. First off names change and boundaries change and you often need to study a bit of history to figure out what is going on with the names. Secondly, where someone says they are from depends a lot on the situation. If I'm from Podunk, Utah, just outside of Salt Lake City, and I'm off somewhere and someone asks me where I'm from, do I say Podunk, a tiny place they will have never heard of, or Salt Lake City because it's close enough, or Utah because that's all the person is interested in, or the Rocky Mountain West? So when people or records report where someone is from, it might or might not be very precise.
To start learning about place names, google has very good articles about every past and present municipality in Norway. Here is the one for Vinger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinger_%28municipality%29 . To quote it:
The prestegjeld of Vinger was established as a municipality on 1 January 1838… On 7 February 1855, the town of Kongsvinger (population: 472) was separated from Vinger municipality to become a separate urban municipality….
In 1864, the southern part of the municipality … was separated from Vinger to form the new municipality of Eidskog. … On 1 January 1876 a part of Vinger adjacent to the town of Kongsvinger containing 209 inhabitants was transferred to Kongsvinger…. On 1 January 1964, the municipality of Vinger was merged with the neighboring municipality of Brandval and the town of Kongsvinger which created a new Kongsvinger Municipality…
Pre-1838 there were no municipalities, just large parishes (prestegjeld) which were ecclesiastical divisions. It was in 1838 that these were given civil jurisdictions as municipalities. In all cases I have seen, the new municipalities had identical boundaries to the parishes. The parishes, but not the municipalities, were divided into one or more sub-parishes called sogn. Each sogn would have a church. Vinger parish containted Vinger, Austmarka, and Eidskog sub-parishes.
Sometimes things get confusing because the Norwegian words prestegjeld and sogn both translate to English as parish. Family Search therefore calls a prestegjeld a clerical district and a sogn a parish while the Norwegian Archives calls a prestegjeld a parish and a sogn a local parish.
For recording a place name, there isn't really a set standard. Some people use a four place system of:
Farm, Municipality, County, Country
Some use a five place:
Farm, Sogn, Municipality, County, Country,
You could even use a six place:
Farm, Sogn, Prestegjeld, Municipality, County, Country
In general it is best to use the place name as it was at the time of the event. This makes it possible to find records. A few rebels use the current place name.
Looking at the original of the record you posted, it shows that both his mother and father were living at Gylterud in Vinger. (The priest didn't cross the t. There is no place call Gyllerud in Vinger.) These are church records, so it gives the parish. This book, as you can tell by the citation, covers the entire parish or prestegjeld of Vinger. Sometimes that is all you get. However, in this case, if you look under the birth and christening date, you see Austmarka (spelled here Østmarken) so you do know which sub-parish he lived in and which church he was christened at.
Personally I would enter his information as:
- Birth: Gyllerud, Vinger, Hedmark, Norway (meaning Gyllerud farm, Vinger municipality)
- Christening Austmarka Kirke, Vinger, Hedmark, Norway. (meaning Austmarka Kirke, Vinger municipality)
I like to stick with the civil designations rather than ecclesiastical ones or mixing ecclesiastical and civil.
Here's information about the church: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austmarka_Church
Looking at the map, it appears Gylterud no longer exists as a named farm, but it was in this general area:
The original farm consisted of these sub-sections:
and your great-great-grandfather could have been born at any one of these sub-sections. You can see some of these names on the map. You can find these lists of property at https://www.dokpro.uio.no/cgi-bin/stad/matr50
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Sorry, I don't have a good reference for you. I just got all this from a couple of decades rooting in the records and searching in maps.
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To clarify just a bit more, here is what I mean by not liking to mix civil place names and ecclesiastical place names.
This is the full strictly civil place name:
Gylterud, Vinger, Hedmark, Norway
That is, Gylterud farm/gård, Vinger municipality/kommune, Hedmark county/fylke, Norway
This is the full strictly ecclesiastical place name:
Gylterud, Austmarka, Vinger, Vinger og Oda, Hamar, Norway.
Gylterud farm/gård, Austmarka local-parish/parish/sogn, Vinger parish/clerical-district/prestegjeld, Vinger og Odal deanery/prosti, Hamar diocese/bispedømme, Norway.
I don't object to people putting the sogn (aka local-parish aka parish) in the middle of the civil name and would not take it out, but many of the older parish registers cover the entire prestegjeld and do not tell which sogn a person was christened in and even if it does, it only tells you which church an event took place in but not whether the people involved lived in that sogn. Generally a prestegjeld only had one priest and he would rotate between churches each week. If you had to get your child christened, you would go to the church the priest was at that week, not necessarily your "home" church, that is the church in your sogn.
Since the municipality and prestegjeld (aka parish aka clerical district) nearly always have the same name at least until the mid 1900s, it is still very easy to find the parish records using the municipality name.
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This is all such great information! I will be able to go through it better all in a couple of day, but want to acknowledge these comments. I appreciate it!
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Here is a map where I have very roughly drawn in the situation in 1880.
The purple line is Vinger municipality. The hole in it is Kongsvinger municipality.
The green line is Austmarka sogn or sub-parish. The part surrounded by purple but not green is Vinger sogn or sub-parish. Together the two sogn make up Vinger prestegjeld or parish which had the same boundaries as Vinger municipality.
The yellow line is even more roughly the area of the original Gylterud farm.
Today Gylterud farm is divided into about fifty parcels. You can get an idea of the original area by looking at this search:
then replacing the /1 in the search box with /2, then /3, then /4, then /5. The location markers will move to show parcels starting with the number 1, then the number 2, and so on.
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Sorry, that link didn't work right. Try this one:
(I can't test the link until I post the comment)
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Sorry again. It insists on showing only one section. So do this instead. Click either of those above links and in the search box type 3401-65/1 then, as I said, replace the final 1 with 2 then 3 then 4 then 5 to see all the sections of the farm.
3401 is the community number for Kongsvinger. 65 is the farm number for Gylterud. The number following the / is the first part of the section number.
One more thing to keep in mind. Many places and features in Norway share the same name which can get confusing. If you search for Austmarka, Kongesvinger in the map, you get:
- Austmarka the village
- Austmarka the church
- Austmarka the street
- Austmarka the school
What you do not get is Austmarka the sub-parish because it is not a civil place designation and it is not a geographical feature.
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This is all very helpful. I’ve gone through it a few times and copied it all for more study, which I will need plenty of. I think It’s mostly getting used to differentiating what “level” everything is and the civil vs. ecclesiastical. I just want to be as accurate as possible. It’s definitely going to take some practice.
I appreciate the information about the priest rotation between churches. That’s definitely something I want to keep in mind.
When you say Gylterud is the farm he was born on, does that mean their personal farm? Or a type of community area? I mean, whenever someone has Gylterud behind their name, it means they are from that specific farm? Or the area?
Thank you for the map, visuals are very helpful for me. I’m not sure how you can see what the original Gylterud farm was, though.
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In Norway prior to about 1930 four different types of last names were used.
Patronymics in which a person's last name was derived from the father's name and changed every generation:
- Grandfather: Hans Jonsson
- Father: Anders Hansson
- Son: Helge Andersson
Fixed Patronymics which were derived from a direct paternal ancestor's first name but stayed the same every generation. Not typically used with a patronymic:
- Grandfather: Hans Jonsson (patronymic)
- Father: Anders Jonsen (fixed patronymic)
- Son: Helge Jonsen (fixed patronymic)
Farm names which were derived from a person's residence and changed whenever a person moved. These were used by farm owners and their families. Usually used along with a patronymic:
- Grandfather: Hans Jonsson Brødbøl
- Father: Anders Hansson Brødbøl until he got married and moved to Gylterud and became Anders Hansson Gylterud.
- Son: Helge Andersson Gylterud
Family Names which were adopted by a family at some point in history then never changed. Sometimes used with a patronymic:
- Grandfather: Hans Rustung
- Father: Anders Rustung
- Son: Helge Andersson Rustung
Part of researching a family is figuring out what kind of last name the various people in the family used and then recording them correctly. This is complicated by the fact that a person could have used different types of last names at different times of life. Fortunately Family Tree makes it very easy to record every name a person ever used.
Your record for Sigvard is an interesting example. You need to find out more about his parents. For Berthe Gylterud you need to figure out if she was the daughter of a farm owner of one of the sections of Gylterud and would have used that as a last name or was she household help from somewhere else and would have not used it. Same with this father. Was he the son of a different farm owner on a neighboring section of Gylterud? If so then Gylterud was a true last name. Since his parents were not married, it would be Berthe's status that would determine whether Sigvard was Sigvard Edwardson Gylterud or just Sigvard Edwardson.
An important point about Norwegian last names is that you do have to be careful about interpreting them. Just because Jens Hansson and Anders Hansson lived on the same farm and both had fathers named Hans, you cannot assume they were related at all. You have to prove that they had the same father. Likewise if Jens Gylterud and Anders Gylterud are listed next to each other on a census, you cannot assume they are related and have to determine who their parents were. (This is not all that different than in the US. You can't take two people by the name of Smith and claim they are related because they have the same last name.)
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Norgeskart is the official map of Norway created and maintained by the Norwegian government's division called Kartverket. That is where the various links I've used jump to. To repeat myself, Kongsvinger is community 3401. Gytelrud is farm 65. The original Gylterud farm, which was quite large has been divided through history into sections 1 to 50 (in 1950, there were only 28 as shown in the chart I posted above). Not all of the 50 still exist. For the ones that do, you can search for them in the map and by their distribution get a sense for the original area of the farm. You can watch me do this in the video posted here. In the last part of the video I show how see the area of any one section. Unfortunately, you cannot see the boundary of all the sections at once.
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